{"id":60415,"date":"2015-06-29T12:00:17","date_gmt":"2015-06-29T11:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=60415"},"modified":"2015-06-29T11:48:40","modified_gmt":"2015-06-29T10:48:40","slug":"orwells-triumph-how-novels-tell-the-truth-of-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/06\/orwells-triumph-how-novels-tell-the-truth-of-surveillance\/","title":{"rendered":"Orwell\u2019s Triumph: How Novels Tell the Truth of Surveillance"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: John Moore\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

28 Jun 2015 – <\/em>When government agencies and private companies access and synthesize our data, they take on the power to novelize our lives. Their profiles of our behavior are semi-fictional stories, pieced together from the digital traces we leave as we go about our days. No matter how many articles we read about this process, grasping its significance is no easy thing. It turns out that to understand the weird experience of being the target of all this surveillance \u2014 how we are characters in semi-true narratives constructed by algorithms and data analysts \u2014 an actual novel can be the best medium.<\/p>\n

Book of Numbers<\/em>, released earlier this month, is the latest exhibit. Written by Joshua Cohen, the book has received enthusiastic notices from the New York Times<\/a><\/em> and other outlets as an ambitious \u201cInternet novel<\/a>,\u201d embedding the history of Silicon Valley in a dense narrative about a search engine called Tetration. Book of Numbers<\/em> was written mostly in the wake of the emergence of WikiLeaks and was finished as a trove of NSA documents from Edward Snowden was coming to light. Cohen even adjusted last-minute details to better match XKeyscore, a secret NSA computer system that collects massive amounts of email and web data; in Book of Numbers, <\/em>Tetration has a function secreted within it that automatically reports searches to the government. As Tetration\u2019s founder puts it, \u201cAll who read us are read.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ben Wizner of the ACLU, who is Cohen\u2019s friend and Snowden\u2019s lawyer, has praised the novel\u2019s depiction of the \u201csurveillance economy,\u201d as he puts it. \u201cThere\u2019s a frustration on the law and advocacy side about how abstract some of these issues can seem to the public,\u201d Wizner told the Times<\/em><\/a>. \u201cFor some people, the novelist\u2019s eye can show the power and the danger of these systems in ways that we can\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

I am also a friend of Cohen\u2019s, but I\u2019m not sure this novel will radicalize the masses. Here\u2019s a line from the book listing some of its vocabulary: \u201corthogony, heuristics, traverse vertices, exocortex, autonomia, transclusion<\/em>.\u201d This is not an especially difficult novel, but its ideal reader would already know a good deal about technology and surveillance, enough to enjoy seeing the details treated like playthings. Yet there are wonderful passages that capture the give-and-take at the heart of the information economy: \u201cEach time each user typed out a word and searched and clicked for what to find, the algy would be educated. We let the algy let its users educate themselves. So it would learn, so its users would be taught. \u2026 The more a thing was clicked, the more perfect that thing would be.\u201d<\/p>\n

We give our data to Google and Facebook freely, in exchange for ever-better information; the hidden cost is that we become complicit in our own surveillance. Two years ago, just days before the first of the Snowden NSA stories appeared in The Guardian<\/em>, Julian Assange reviewed<\/a> The New Digital Age<\/em>, co-written by Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt. The book celebrated the prospect of Silicon Valley joining forces with the military-industrial complex \u2014 and Assange accused the authors of having \u201cupdated and seamlessly implemented George Orwell\u2019s prophecy.\u201d Assange concluded, \u201cIf you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces \u2014 forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Orwell\u2019s \u201cIf you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face \u2014 forever\u201d is a fictional sentence. Most good novels are ambiguous, and 1984 <\/em>is a good novel \u2014 good enough to be quotable more than half a century on. The writer John Crowley has argued that 1984 <\/em>is no prophecy but a parable whose meaning conceals itself. \u201cHe loved Big Brother,\u201d it ends, and Crowley says that rather than being meant to be terrifying, this sentence \u201cis intended to be taken as absurd, as comic, as exhilarating in its impossibility.\u201d Humans won\u2019t tolerate totalitarian surveillance states forever.<\/p>\n

We can argue about this interpretation; indeed, we should. Argument about ambiguity, in particular the ambiguity native to surveillance itself, is what can make novels about surveillance politically useful, as well as aesthetically interesting. Unlike The New Digital Age<\/em>, Book of Numbers<\/em> is an allegory, one in which the novelist, his characters and the reader must navigate the thickets of technology and surveillance, all the complicated details we can barely hold in our heads at once.<\/p>\n

A simpler account of the surveillance economy was provided in 2013 by Dave Eggers in The Circle<\/em>, which has proved enormously popular. It\u2019s essentially a rewrite of 1984<\/em>, set at a tech company that has subsumed Facebook and Google, and is now in the process of making itself into our new global government. While Orwell\u2019s totalitarianism is militaristic, Eggers\u2019s is consensual, as the sharing economy intrudes, invited, into every empty space. Orwell\u2019s famous slogans, \u201cWAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH,\u201d are recast as \u201cSECRETS ARE LIES. SHARING IS CARING. PRIVACY IS THEFT.\u201d<\/p>\n

The protagonist is Mae, a new employee at Circle who slowly but inexorably opens herself to the company\u2019s vision of total openness. She encounters token opposition from her parents and an ex-boyfriend, who says things like \u201cYou and your ilk will live, willingly, joyfully, under constant surveillance, watching each other always, commenting on each other, voting and liking and disliking each other, smiling and frowning, and otherwise doing nothing much else.\u201d Unfortunately, Eggers\u2019s view of the surveillance economy is reductive: essentially, \u201cWake up, sheeple.\u201d It\u2019s useful agitprop for the imaginary reader who\u2019s never had mixed feelings about social media, but it\u2019s not a psychologically plausible novel.<\/p>\n

Even if contemporary surveillance novels aren\u2019t perfect, Snowden\u2019s leak of NSA documents has reaffirmed, in unexpected ways, the connections between fiction and surveillance. The codenames for NSA programs, which include Boundless Informant, Egotistical Giraffe and Stellar Wind, are as memorable as Charles Dickens\u2019s Ebenezer Scrooge, Uriah Heep and Bumble, or Thomas Pynchon\u2019s Benny Profane, Tyrone Slothrop and Oedipa Maas. With thousands or millions of programmers now writing a new world of code whose totality can be neither imagined nor comprehended, novels help us make sense of the chaos, including the most legendary ones.<\/p>\n

One of the 20th century\u2019s iconic novels of surveillance is Franz Kafka\u2019s The Trial<\/em>, in which the protagonist, Josef K., is mysteriously arrested. He must try to prove his innocence though he hasn\u2019t done anything \u201ctruly wrong\u201d and is not even sure what he\u2019s accused of. It might be the same with any of us \u2014 who hasn\u2019t left some digital trace that would embarrass them or worse, the existence of which they might not be aware of in the first place, or wish to have forgotten? And who hasn\u2019t adjusted their behavior \u2014 maybe for the better, but nevertheless \u2014 to correspond to new norms enforced by the digital panopticon?<\/p>\n

There remains much to write about surveillance, much to novelize. Following Kafka, I can imagine a great novel that would capture, moment by moment, what it feels like to live as if innocent in a world without privacy, a world in which the algorithms assume that we are all already guilty.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

Sam Frank<\/a> is a senior editor at Triple Canopy.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are characters in narratives constructed by algorithms. Joshua Cohen\u2019s new novel, Book of Numbers, explores the ambiguity of surveillance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60415\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}