Orwell That Ends Well

Rich Karlgaard from the March 1995 issue

Orwell's Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest, by Peter Huber, New York: The Free Press, 374 pages, $22.95

George Orwell: Since your day something has appeared called totalitarianism.

Jonathan Swift: A new thing?

Orwell: It isn't strictly new, it's merely been made practicable owing to modern weapons and modern methods of communication.

Orwell himself penned those lines (and read them aloud on his BBC wartime broadcast in 1942) in "Jonathan Swift: An Imaginary Interview." While Orwell's sentiments were his own, he cut and pasted together Swift's from the Irish-born satirist's estimable oeuvre. The result is a virtual dialogue between two of Great Britain's sharper minds, one remembered chiefly for Gulliver's Travels and "A Modest Proposal," the other best known for his 1948 anti-totalitarian novel, 1984.

Now Peter Huber, a Manhattan Institute fellow and Forbes columnist, has used the same technique to create Orwell's Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest. (A palimpsest, the back cover helpfully reminds the reader, is a document that has been written upon several times, "often with remnants of earlier, imperfectly erased writing still visible.") Unlike Orwell's, though, Huber's instruments of inventive plagiarism aren't scissors and glue, but more modern ones: a Hewlett-Packard flatbed scanner, Calera optical character recognition software, the XyWrite III+ word processing program, and a fast 486 PC.

First, Huber scanned 1984 and everything else by Orwell he could find into his computer: novels, essays, BBC broadcasts--all told, a whopping 9.5 megabytes of Orwellian thought. Then Huber went to work, constructing an imaginary conversation between himself and Orwell, deploying Orwell's own language and imagery.

The stunning result is two books, to be read simultaneously: a "novel" that stars a protagonist named Eric Blair (Orwell's real name) and picks up where 1984 leaves off, and a running criticism of the historical George Orwell's literary career and intellectual mindset.

The novel part is a fetching read. In it, Huber cleverly jujitsus Orwell's own words into startlingly different conclusions than they held in their original contexts. Black has indeed become white (but unlike in Orwell's dystopia, freedom is not slavery, nor ignorance strength). Instead, 1984's most memorable symbol of the all-pervasive state, the omnipresent telescreen, becomes an instrument of proletarian revival in Huber's hands. In Orwell's novel, the telescreen meant, "You had to live...in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and...every movement scrutinized." But in Huber's world, rather than inhibiting activity, the telescreen breathes life into the soul and the marketplace and eventually brings down the government and its ministries.

As author of The Geodesic Network and one of the country's top telecom experts, Huber knows his networks and computers--better than Orwell could have known in 1948, certainly, or even today, were Orwell alive. (Orwell was, not surprisingly, something of a Luddite.) Early on in Orwell's Revenge, we are informed that the dumb-terminal telescreen network of 1984 was replaced by a client-server network. Why? Imperial overreach. The Ministry of Truth had "demanded a system powerful enough to reach every room, to revise every record, to overwhelm every other form of communication." And so the old wires were "ripped out, vast bundles of them, tons and tons of useless copper, replaced by a few dozen of the new, orange-rubber rings."

For 10 years, the new network does the trick. The system is "robust," it is "fault tolerant," it operates "peer-to-peer." No single screen, no single cable can bring down the whole network if it fails. The network itself is almost annoyingly sim-ple. The cables run through the tunnels, with branches leading off into every apartment and office. Directly or indirectly, all points on the network are connected.

For Huber, of course, that interconnection is precisely the government's undoing. It isn't long before a few of the "phreaks"--the techno-wizards who turn the state's surveillance apparatus against itself--figure out the potential for decentralization inherent in the system. They begin altering the telescreens so as to shut off propaganda from the central ministries. That's step one. Better yet, they learn to exploit the peer-to-peer architecture to communicate among themselves. Result: Free thought and the marketplace are reborn.

Midway through the novel, Huber's Eric Blair stumbles into what was once the worst part of Airstrip One (i.e., London) only to find that it has become the best part of town. "Soon the air was filled with a hubbub of similar human exchange," writes Huber. "The passers-by were increasing in number, and instead of shuffling along, they strode firmly down the road....The street was so crowded that you could only with difficulty thread your way down the alley between the stalls. The stuff on the stalls glowed with fine lurid colors--hacked, crimson chunks of meat; piles of oranges and green and white broccoli, stiff, glassy-eyed rabbits; live eels looping in enamel troughs; plucked fowls hanging in rows, sticking out their breasts like guardsmen naked on parade. His spirits rose at the sight of all the activity. It was delightful--the noise, the bustle, the vitality. For a moment the sight of the street market persuaded him there was hope for England yet."

The government is powerless to stop these unintended consequences. No one in the ministries even knows how the network works anymore, since all the knowledgeable technicians have been long exterminated or shipped to labor camps. The government's own "experts" are stumble bums, and the portraits of them are among the book's funniest passages. At one point, for instance, Ministry official O'Brien (1984 readers will remember him as Winston Smith's torturer), asks a lackey about the surveillance installations:

"Burgess twitched, and his face drooped. 'Well, it has to do with the blue box, you see. After the screen's mounted, we use the box. This part's really complicated. But it's in the manual--all in the manual.'

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