For past year or so, I've been looking for the right dystopian novel to explain the general strangeness of the world we are living in today. The starting point, unsurprisingly, was Orwell's 1984, that perennial warning of the dangers of not thinking for ourselves. Like many, I first encountered the novel in high school, and recently returned to it, wondering what Oceania could tell us about where the world is currently heading.
I found the applicability of Winston's story to own time to be somewhat limited, however. The political control The Party wields in 1984 rests on absolute control of the information landscape: speaking a word against Big Brother is punished in the most severe manner; records are continuously written and re-written to support the government's official narrative. Violence and torture are part of the air the citizens that Oceania breathe. Maintaining a dictatorship is a never-ending, energy-consuming, exhausting task.
My next read on the subject was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The World State maintains control less with sticks and more with carrots. This has resonance with the world today: a life without pain or discomfort, of a ubiquitous drug to treat any negative feeling. There is little need for violence or torture when stepping outside of the strictures of society means giving up a life of ease. There is also little need to control information when people are purposefully designed to accept their place in society. In many cases, citizens are well aware that they have been engineered to like specific colors or people; yet they still accept their own biases uncritically.
This is, of course, a key shortcoming of Brave New World in describing our own times. Human genetic engineering remains science fiction, and the panic about it that accompanied rapid progress in the biological sciences around 2000 shows that people are unlikely to accept it. Perhaps more tellingly: "contentment" in the body politic today seems at an all-time low. While smartphones may seem like a kind of soma in that they are an escape from an ordinary discomfort available at any time and without side-effect, nobody is particularly happy about it.
And so I arrived at We. Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel was written in Russian in the early years of Lenin's regime, and Zamyatin had been a supporter of the revolution but had grown increasingly alarmed by what was replacing it. His novel was never published in its original language: it survives only because it was smuggled out of the country and later published in translation: in this form it likely inspired both Huxley and Orwell.
The One State in We survives not by controlling the news or by designing people, but by limiting the imagination so wholly that the people living it simply cannot conceive of any alternative. The citizens are aware that there were once other civilizations and other ways of life, but they are incapable of considering that their society cannot be in every way better than any possible alternative. One is of course reminded of Churchill: "Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." That may be true, as long as one limits themselves to considering the subset of forms that have actually been tried. The space of possible forms of government remains largely unexplored.
The citizens in We live literally in glass houses: fully visible to their neighbors at all times except for one hour of the day reserved for sex. The protagonist, D-503, is assigned to have sex with O-90, a woman he is continually convincing himself he has a certain fondness for, if no actual love. As in 1984, it is the promise of a passionate and loving sexual relationship that creates the first fissure between D-503 and the One State. Like Winston, D-503 doesn't lack for the fact of sex, but when he suddenly discovers a woman he truly desires, the joylessness of his current situations is thrown into relief. To want her is to want to escape the social bonds that have suddenly become too rigid. Indeed, to want anything is to have to imagine circumstances different from ones own.
Eventually, D-503's pursuit of I-330 leads him outside of the world he and all his compatriots inhabit. We learn that while their houses are a transparent glass, they are also shielded from the sky and sun by a tempered greenish glass, that causes even the sky and sun to be shielded from view.
The sun ... it was not like our sun, spread evenly over the mirrored surface of our pavements. There were living shards of light, ceaselessly leaping spots, which blinded you and sent your head spinning. And the trees- like candles soaring up to the very heavens, or spiders hunched on gnarled lets; like silent green fountains ...
Among all this twisting, stirring, rustling, some kind of hairy clump scurrying out from beneath me, I stood chained to the ground - it wasn't flat - it wasn't flat at all! It was sickeningly soft, yielding, alive, green and elastic.
I was deafened by it all, I choked - maybe that's the best word it. I just stood there with my arms in a death lock around some sort of swaying branch.
"It's okay, it's okay! This is just how it feels at first. It will pass. Buck up!"
This is, of course, a description of the world we live in, described back to us by a man who finds the sensations so overwhelming he might as well be having a bad drug experience. The One State limits the spaces of conception of reality, by limiting the consideration of the possible to the merely present.
I find We a more plausible future than either 1984 or Brave New World because it appears to show the logical end-point of the trajectory we are currently on. What is AI if not a way to limit the possible? Artificial "intelligence" carries an implicit claim: that the whole spectrum of thought can be reduced to tokens and weights. But even if that first claim is accepted, one must then accept a second claim: that the only useful expressions of language are those that can be predicted statistically: that the correct continuation of any line of argument is the most average.
Just for fun, I took all the words I've written so far and put them in to ChatGPT to see what it would say:
The danger, then, is not that AI will tell us what to think, or even that it will make us content with our lot, but that it will gradually narrow our sense of what is worth thinking in the first place. If every question has an answer, every problem a solution, and every sentence a most probable continuation, we may lose sight of the distinction between what is possible and what is merely likely. This is the great insight of We: a society need not forbid its citizens from imagining alternatives if it can make the very act of imagining them seem irrational, uncomfortable, or pointless. The One State's glass walls are not simply instruments of surveillance; they are the boundaries of a world beyond which its citizens have forgotten how to look. Our own walls are less visible, and we may even mistake them for windows onto a wider world. But the essential question remains the same: can we still imagine a world different from the one we inhabit, or have we begun to confuse the limits of our imagination with the limits of reality itself?
Which is, as we are all used to by now, a plausible ending to this essay.
And here is my actual conclusion: It isn't good enough. Words are merely an abstraction of thought. The internet has trained us to believe that the map is the terrain, and so a machine that understands maps feels like a god. One senses that We takes place far further in the future than 1984 or Brave New World, when generations have passed since the last time people experienced the landscapes outside their doors and inside their heads. Looking at what's happening to young people today I'm not sure it will take that long - unless the trajectory changes soon.