by Peter Huber
by Peter Huber
Pal'-imp-sest' n. A written document, typically on parchment, that has been written upon several times, often with remnants of earlier, imperfectly erased writing still visible.
"...ambitious, strikingly original, and thoroughly provocative." -- Kirkus Reviews
Ever since George Orwell wrote 1984, his dystopian classic of a future society run by a totalitarian leader who ruled through the power of a strange new machine -- the telescreen -- our ideas about the power and menace of technology have come to resemble Orwell's bleak vision. The image of the telescreen as an instrument of state power used for surveillance and repression has survived in our literature and imagination even though the world had discovered, through the reality of the technological changes since 1984, that Orwell's predictions were profoundly and significantly wrong. Despite this, we have yet to fully understand the consequences of the changes we have experienced.
Peter Huber reveres Orwell, yet sees the reality of the communications revolution in a different light. A major participant in the momentous overhaul of the American telecommunications industry, Huber understands the tectonic shift that has transformed the communications landscape: the fragmentation of AT&T into a myriad of mixed media all seamlessly interconnected to innumerable, cheap, networked PCs--and "telescreens." The result has been a liberating multiplicity of choices in information, entertainment, sources of opinion, public forums, and products. Exactly the opposite of life in Orwell's feared Oceania.
If Orwell, a proponent of revolutions, could have seen this new technology and the new world in which it now exists, how would he then have judged the telescreen? Here is at least part of the answer. Shaped by Orwell's technotic vision, Peter Huber's ORWELL'S REVENGE is an audacious, informed exploration of Orwell's world, including an imaginative new conclusion for 1984 in which phreaks and hackers overthrow Big Brother's decrepit regime.
Peter Huber, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, is the author of Galileo's Revenge, and holds a Ph.D. in engineering from MIT and a law degree from Harvard.