New Technology and Informatics in a Free Society

• Autore: Antonio Enrique Pérez Luño
• Pagine: 41-50

Page 41

@1. "1984" in 1984; The organisation of society in the "telematic" era.

A timely coincidence has determined that the editors of the journal ´Informatica e Dirittoª's decision to commemorate its 10th anniversary with a special monograph edition on "The Law and the New Technologies", coincides with a year full of significance for the analysis of the effects of technology in contemporary society,

1984 is a date inextricably linked with the name of George Orwell, 1984 is, of course, the title of the novel, published in 1949, a little before his death, which is probably one of his best works. The novel is, as we know, one of the clearest warnings about the dangers to free coexistence that could result from a perverted course of technological development. Hence, 1984 from the historical viewpoint-of 1984 invites us to take stock of our situation and decide whether the realities of our experience confirm or deny Orwell's somber predictions about the cost to society of technological progress,

Considered in its essential elements, I consider that 1984 is a triple prediction: the phenomenon of war as a necessary tool to consolidate international relations on the basis of equilibrium from terror; the use of technological methods to ensure social control and the submission of the individual in the grip of totalitarian societies; and the manipulation of history as a means of wiping out individual and collective signs of identity in order to complete the absolute alienation of human beings and devalue personality. To this threefold anxiety correspond the informing principles of the political system presided over by Big Brother, that Orwell synthesises into three great slogans: "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength"¹.

Orwell's story has as its nerve centre the obsessive preoccupation about the circumstances that can lead humanity to implacable forms of totalitarianism. Among them, the relation between the authoritarian involution of politicalPage 42 power and Inequality occupies an important place. George Orwell makes an accurate conjecture - incorporating in it a network of theoretical argument that has a well-known antecedent In Rousseau - that there exists a perfect equation between poverty and ignorance, and despotism.

"If leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privlleged minority had no function, and they would sweep It away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on the basis of poverty and Ignorance"².

In Orwell's pessimistic prediction, humanity Is found caught in a continual warlike conflict, that, beforehand, cannot have either winners or losers, between tyrannical governments. that, above their apparent Ideological antagonism, share the basic understanding that war is their best excuse for preventing the material and cultural progress of their peoples and, as a consequence, their emancipation. The motto: "War is Peace" implies the sinister truth that armed conflict Is an excellent Instrument for ensuring the totalitarian status quo, that Is, a perfect peaceful order based on domination.

The maxim: "Ignorance is Strength", also reflects the profound historical truth that the Ignorance of the people has always been the strength of despots and tyrants. Hence the Kantian motto sapere aude makes great sense, that is, man's capacity to avail himself of his own Intellect as the liberating message of the Aufklarung as opposed to cultural and political Immaturity. George Orwell places special emphasis oil the phenomenon of altering the historical memory as a means of distorting the past according to present expediency. In this way, ignorance of their history turns Individuals, subjected to the totalitarian system Imagined by Orwell, Into people without an Identity, devoid of any criterion for criticism or judgement. Cut off from all contact with the outside world and with the past, subject to this tyrannical power, "[he] Is like a man In Interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which way Is up and which Is down". Because of this, "the rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be"³.

Alongside these propositions, among whose principles there Is a close and profound continuity, the slogan, "Freedom Is Slavery", completes the triad. By means of this motto, the ambivalent nature of technology Is established, which, even if it Is the way towards the Utopia of freedom from human physical effort, It threatens to turn Into an implacable enslaving Instrument, depending on the uses to which It Is put and the hands that control It,

Orwell's treatise about the future of a technological society that Is politically totalitarian could not be more dismal, In this kind of society "even techno-Page 43logical progress only happens when Its products can In some way be used for the diminution of human liberty"⁴. In this context, the Intellectual and the scientist are obliged to give up their critical function and submit unconditionally to the guidelines of power. The man of science Is .turned Into a kind of mixture of psychologist and policeman, who meticulously studies the meaning of facial expressions, gestures and Inflections In tone of voice, the effects of drugs that make one tell the truth, shock therapy, hypnosis and physical torture. In any case, his abilities...