Technologies of Freedom.

• Author: Huber, Peter W.

Published in early 1949, George Orwell's 1984 is the most important piece of political satire of our times. To this day, Orwell's one truly great book impels us to launch giant antitrust suits against companies like AT&T and IBM. Big Brother. The Thought Police. Newspeak. Doublethink. These are all Orwell's words, Orwell's ideas. In fact Orwell has added his own name to the English language: Orwellian--the word is filled with chilling power.

The future that Orwell describes in 1984 is a future of an evil machine controlled by an evil ministry. Orwell calls the machine "the telescreen"--a sort of two-way television set. Telescreens are bolted to every wall, they hang on every street corner, and in every living room, even in the toilets. There is no way to shut them off. The telescreen connects to a huge Ministry that towers over central London. The machine is evil because it serves as the eye and ear of the Ministry. And the Ministry is powerful because it is master of the machine. Indeed, Big Brother, the omniscient, omnipotent leader of the state, has never been seen in the flesh. He is nothing more than a face and a voice on the telescreen. And every minute of the day and night, Big Brother is watching...you.

Technology has taught us otherwise. If you want to transmit large amounts of information, to and from large numbers of people, efficiently, flexibly, and reliably, you must use many switches, many points of interconnection. Unless you disperse the power, the system just won't perform. Thus, the centralized mainframe computer is being broken apart and spread out into hundreds of desktop machines. The large, central telephone exchange is being replaced by distributed switches with multiple levels of...