Orwell, the surveillance state and what's next

 I've just finished reading a book that illustrates the interesting parallels of two major figures in the 20th century, Winston Churchill and George Orwell.  The period of time they were alive and the kinds of change they experienced seems quite amazing now.  There are interesting similarities between the two - both were outsiders in their respective classes and friend groups.  Both were natural contrarians.  Both rose to big occasions but were not respected and often did not live up to their billing in normal, everyday life.  The book is called Churchill & Orwell, The fight for freedom, by Thomas Ricks.  After reading it, I'd highly recommend it.  While topically about history, the author does a good job pointing out what both Churchill and Orwell had to say about our situation today.

I stumbled across the book at my local library.  I did not need any encouragement to pick it up.  Churchill by himself is a great, and flawed character.  Orwell is somewhat of a personal hero for me - a guy who deeply believed in the truth, no obfuscation, fully willing to call out his own party, or those of another party when they were in the wrong.  And, more than willing to defend his beliefs, going to fight for the republicans in the Spanish Civil War and joining the Home Defense when the British would not let him join the British Army in World War II due to his health.  His later writings and books, including the paper Politics and the English Language, the books Animal Farm and 1984, are more popular than ever, which is interesting because both books were barely acknowledged when they were published.  If you've read the books but haven't read his paper on the English Language, I'd highly recommend you read the paper.  Go ahead, the link is above, and my blog isn't nearly as valuable as his paper is.  I'll be here once you are done.

If Orwell was right in his focus on the surveillance state and power being centralized in either the political classes (or, as in our environment today, the AI class), we should ask if he was prescient or lucky and if the ideas are timeless, and whether we should be paying more attention.  After all, another famous quote of his is:  To see what is at the end of one's nose needs a constant struggle.  In other words, we can be so preoccupied and busy that we miss what we should be paying attention to, and in this world of big lies and deep fakes, it can be hard to tell what the truth is, and whether or not the truth matters. 

Ricks argues that Orwell was right about the concentration of power as illustrated by the pigs in Animal Farm.  We can see this in the increasing alignment of corporate leaders, especially, strangely those from Silicon Valley and the Trump Administration.  One can remember only a decade or so ago when Silicon Valley was libertarian, did not want the government in its business and vice versa.  That was before Silicon Valley realized how lucrative government contracts can be.  

As entrepreneurs become government-preneurs (Musk comes to mind, but others such as Peter Thiel at Palantir are close behind) we need to be careful that we do not end up with state capture of a segment of the industry, which Eisenhower previously warned about (the military industrial complex).  As new procurement rules change in the Pentagon, which will favor the newer tech entrepreneurs, there is greater risk for industry capture and a tearing down of a wall of separation between industry and government.

Today, strangely, the UK is one of the most surveilled countries on the planet, something I have to believe that Orwell would find strange and off-putting.  I find it strange that the US is in second place on the list, second only to China.  This is an over-reaction to 9/11. After 9/11, in a desire to create more safety in the country, we sacrificed a number of liberties and opened the door to allow decisions and actions by the government in the name of security that we may never be able to reverse. I believe it was Franklin who said that people who give up a little liberty for safety will soon find they have neither liberty or safety.  And, we in the US and the Brits who spawned Orwell are allowing surveillance to take over in our countries without much conversation or complaint.  Perhaps we are all too busy allowing our social media platforms to gather data about us to care what the government is collecting.  After all, the social media platforms are probably far better at analyzing and monetizing what they collect.

What's different about Orwell's 1984 and our situation today is that at least some of the people in Orwell's novel rejected government control of information, the government's ability to change the past, its propaganda and its surveillance.  Today, we have a confluence of actors trying to surveil and gather information to use about us or against us, including the social media platforms, advertisers, the government and of course, criminals from both within the country and increasingly foreign criminals.  And yet we seem very unconcerned about how data is gathered, what data we offer willingly and how that data will be used.

I don't think that Orwell understood or recognized the value of the data that was being collected, because his model was of an oppressive state with limited commercial appeal.  If Orwell had met and talked with Turing, it might have been a different story.  We now have the means not only to gather data, but to analyze it, predict what might happen and even nudge individuals to take specific actions, not out of fear, but out of their perceived financial interest or other perceived benefits.  

What should we think about this?

I think we should all be required to read Orwell's later writings, his essays and especially Animal Farm and 1984 and ask - how does our current political and economic situation parallel what Orwell was writing about?  Certainly, few of us are likely to disappear physically, as Orwell and Julia do in 1984, to be re-educated.  Instead, to a great degree, we risk becoming dependent on the state and on industry for what we should think, how we should think and more importantly, what we should buy and from whom.  

What can we do?

1. We need to revert to a tri-partite government of equal branches.  The unitary executive is too powerful, and Congress has ceded too much authority to the executive branch, especially at a time when the executive branch is willing to partner with an equally willing business community.  Congress has willingly given power to the executive branch, which has willingly taken it, and the risk is too much power in the hands of one individual.
2. We need to make clear to everyone the amazing amount of information that they give away every day and how that information is being used in both legal settings to sell to them and influence them, in illegal ways to steal from them, and in political settings where legislators are redistricting down to the household level based on the data, selecting their constituents.  Once people understand the true implications of how much data is collected and how it is being used, hopefully they'll act to defend their data and share as little as possible or at least find ways to monetize their own information.
3. We need to revert back to more individual privacy and responsibility, and away from so much surveillance.  We ended up here because of the attacks on 9/11 and created massive bureaucracies to keep us safe but gave up far too much liberty and privacy in my estimation.  
4. We need for our judicial system to move more quickly and effectively.  It is too often too easy for an elected official to execute an act that can only be overturned years later after many judicial reviews.  It would be helpful if judges were impartial - but that is probably a bridge too far and had better understanding of technical and financial implications of their decisions.  But today there is little risk for a senior member of the executive branch to take an action and expect it to be reversed while the individual is in office.  So, ask forgiveness later, not permission now.
5. While it remains a refrain of the good government types, and unlikely to be implemented until we fight a real or virtual civil war, we need far less animosity in our governance and more sensible middle solutions.  Partisanship is fine, until it becomes a blinkered adherence to ideas that do not work.  I'd like to see redistricting in all states, but that all districts were as evenly balanced between Republicans (if there is such a party any more) and Democrats, so that voters had to choose based on the person and the voters belief on who could get more done, rather than simply voting based on the letter next to their name.  A more balanced and less overtly partisan Congress would hopefully generate better legislation.
6. Finally, and this is a tough one, we need to pay for what we use.  The pay as you go system is an antique, now that Buy now and Pay later is in vogue and giving away data for access to "free" software is the norm.  But sooner or later we will run out of data to provide, and the folks who have our data will have all they can process.  Then, they'll have all the data and the ability to use it and will no longer need to provide their products and services for free.  We are living in a situation that cannot and will not continue.  Better to start paying for the services you really want and need at the time of service, rather than paying later or giving away a rapidly decreasing commodity of your data.  Of course, this does not take into account the last fool theory - there will always be others who will continue to provide their data for free, but I think we will reach a point where a significant portion of the really valuable data has been hoovered up, and then, only actual price increases will suffice.

Of course, I am a commentator, not a politician, so I would like to believe that we can change these things.  Politicians prefer slow change to fast change, and they prefer more control over less control, so it is unlikely that many of the points I've made will change unless or until we have catastrophic issues or a younger generation reacts against the merger of the AI sector, the defense sector and the government.  My generation lived under the Soviet threat long enough to believe defense spending was important (and it is), and the next generation experienced 9/11 and together we gave up privacy for security.  Now, we are giving up information for entertainment.  Ricks asks the question - was Aldous Huxley in Brave New World correct about the future or Orwell in 1984 and comes to the conclusion that both were correct.  Huxley believed that people would allow the government to control them in return for pleasure.  Just turns out that the social media platforms are doing that rather than the government.

We need to return to what Orwell wrote about - asking tough questions about our government, our data, how our politics work.  We need to start paying more attention, to see what's right in our faces.  That will require a lot of us to pay more attention to what's happening in the real world, and less time in the make-believe worlds of Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok and so on.  Orwell said it required a constant struggle.