Money is just one example among many. Almost everything that now belongs to Big Brother can be returned to the market. Lighthouses for ships? With advanced communication ships can be tracked and guided privately. Air-traffic control for planes? Planes, like pedestrians, can avoid colliding on their own, if they can see far enough ahead and communicate fast enough among themselves. Pollution of the air and water? This too is ultimately a failure of private dialogue and negotiation, as to who is willing to pay how much for air, water, or land. Prisons for criminals? The most pathologically violent will still need to be confined, but most asocial citizens can simply be ostracized, or tracked by means of electronic collars, credit reports, or private references.
The rule of law will be reborn spontaneously in a telescreened society. Law is created by consensus. Consensus is created by communication. The telescreen, the most perfect communicator, is also the most perfect police force. Not because the wires lead to a Ministry, but because free and honest people will always take up the hue and cry against brigands and thieves when the alarm is sounded. Our ancestors relied on branding and mutilation–crude records of past transgression, crude promises of future ostracism. An advanced network can brand people too, but with infinitely finer calibration and far less cruelty.
The telescreen will bring about the greatest liberation in the most important marketplace of all, the marketplace of ideas. In the age of the telescreen, men's thoughts will be freer than even the utopian dreamers of yesterday ever imagined was possible.
In the best days of the old capitalists, freedom of the press still belonged only to the few who owned one. The telescreen will give voice to the average man, the man who has never before owned a printing press or a broadcast station. It will mobilize public opinion, giving every man a stake in free speech itself. Once large numbers of people have their own, private interests in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. By giving people the power to speak freely, the telescreen will also give them the right. No law, no Thought Police, will be able to change that.
The telescreen will resurrect memory too, and expand it indefinitely. The Party thought that history could be obliterated in a telescreened society; in fact history will be more accurately preserved, memory will be more constantly and widely refreshed, than ever before in history. Any document of importance, any title or deed, any record of science or business, any poem or book, any newspaper or photograph, can now be replicated any number of times and distributed to any number of people, creating new memories far faster than any Ministry can alter or incinerate them. Every act of communication creates a new memory, if only inside another human skull.
Ignorance–or at least rigid, class ignorance that endures generation after generation–cannot survive the telescreen. Not simply because wealth creates leisure, and leisure creates literacy; as often as not, leisure in fact creates passive ignorance. Ignorance will collide with the telescreen itself. People will now educate themselves and their children, if they wish to. The Party may continue to own the public schools–the buildings themselves–but the telescreen can create a school out of any pair of desks. The great universities, the great libraries, will no longer be in places; they will reside in cyberspace, securely out of reach of the Party torches and bonfires. Heresy can no longer be eradicated by fire. Heresy is now fire itself, pulses of light in a network of glass.
The telescreen creates the one freedom that matters in the realm of free expression: the freedom to choose. When men lived as crowded as ants, they quarreled endlessly about who could make noise and who was entitled to quiet, who could watch and who had a right to close his curtains against prying eyes. The telescreen gives man eyes and ears that can see at any distance, so that thoughts and words and gestures can inhabit infinitely spacious parks. It frees his senses and so frees his intellect and his conscious mind. It gives him the power to hear, see, and speak, to be heard and seen, in the company of his own choosing. Now men can create new assemblies, new congregations, new cities whenever they need them, in the capacious light beams of the network and the airwaves of the stratosphere.
The network is boundlessly public but also as private as the womb. The owner of the telescreen designates who may receive his transmissions. He designates which signals he wishes to receive. He can broadcast to the world from his bedroom or reserve his great novel for the enjoyment of a few choice friends. He can screen out all racists, sexists, pornographers, drug peddlers, or others whose messages he finds hateful. Distance was once privacy but also isolation, peace but also loneliness. The network erases distance or creates it, precisely as directed by the owner of each telescreen. The network is the true master of distance: It can maintain distance as easily as it can cross it. The power is in the individual's hands, and his alone.
In the days of the old capitalists, the press, the film industry, radio, and television were all stagnant oligopolies, dumping the same mind-numbing rubbish into every home. The owners of those media pitched their programs at what the great mass of people share in common– their prurience, their neurotic fears– and relied on crude polling to estimate how many people were attracted by sex and violence to endure advertisements for sugared cereal and laundry soap. All of this will now disappear. Every hobby and pastime–cage birds, fretwork, carpentry, bees, carrier pigeons, home conjuring, philately, chess–will have at least one telescreen channel devoted to it, and often several. Gardening and livestock keeping will have at least a score between them.
Then there will be the sporting channels, the radio channels, the children's comics, the large range of channels devoted to the movies and all more or less exploiting women's legs, the various trade channels, the women's soap-opera channels, the needlework channels, and countless others. These dime-store novels of the telescreen will exist because there is a definite demand for them, and they will reflect the minds of their viewers as a great national network cannot possibly do. Ours will become, once again, a nation of flower lovers and stamp collectors, pigeon fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon snippers, darts players, and crossword puzzle fans. The days of mindless broadcast to the mindless masses are at an end.
Amid all this freedom there will still be prurience, violence, necrophilic reveries, and the disgusting art of Salvador Dali. Yet in the universe of the telescreen, speech in public spaces no longer needs to be regulated. Public spaces–or at least the ones of any importance–are no longer surrounded by walls or gates. Bulletin boards, auditoriums, theaters, schools, stadiums, squares, subway walls–electronic replacements for all the traditional public forums–can be created upon demand. The network gives the pamphleteer and soapbox orator not just a place in Speaker's Corner but the whole of Hyde Park.
There is room for the pacifist, the communist, the anarchist, the Jehovah's Witness, and the Legion of Christian Reformers, who have declared Hitler to be Jesus Christ. Temperance reformers, Trotskyists, the Catholic Evidence Society, Freethinkers, vegetarians, Mormons, the Salvation Army, and any number of plain lunatics: All will be able to speak out over the network, all will receive a good-humored hearing from anyone who chooses to listen. The network will be Alsatia, where no opinions are outlawed. There has never been any place like it before in the physical world.
The network will supply room enough for every sight and sound, every thought and expression that any human mind would ever wish to communicate. It will make possible a wildness of spirit, where young minds can wander in adventurous, responsible, ungenteel ways. It will contain not innocence but a sort of native gaiety, a buoyant, carefree feeling, filled with confidence in the future and an unquenchable sense of freedom and opportunity. It will be capitalist civilization at its best. It will be the new frontier, and also the last frontier, for it extends as far as any human mind may wish to range. People will assemble in any numbers, at any distance, in groups that are infinitely variable. People will be able to cry "fire" whenever they wish: The theater will no longer be crowded.
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