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Sci-Fi Stories That Predicted the Surveillance State
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Just to address one thing straight away: one of your favorite science fiction stories dealing, whether directly or indirectly, with surveillance is bound to be left off this list. And 1984's a given, so it's not here. At any rate, the following books deal in their own unique way with surveillance. Some address the surveillance head-on, while others speculate on inter-personal intelligence gathering, or consider the subject in more oblique ways. Still others distill surveillance down to its essence: as just one face of a much larger, all-encompassing system of control, that proceeds from the top of the pyramid down to its base."
All technology is used by those who are in power, or want power.
That surveillance is one of those powers isn't particularly new. People had networks of spies in ancient times.
The real question is the people in power. They will have this power, and they will use it; toward what end? And, what is their level of moral rectitude?
I don't think we can use rules, laws and regulations to keep them in line. They need to be good people.
Futurist Traditionalism
The book you want is Huxley's Brave New World. Instead of overlords controlling people through power and domination, people allow themselves to be controlled in exchange for the pleasantries of modern life - sex, entertainment, and other trivialities. As long as they get as much of those as they want, they don't give a damn what else is going on in society or who is controlling it. As the saying goes, you attract more flies with honey...
I'm also having an orgy with...
Friday definitely covered that too!
I always thought Star Trek had a little bit of surveillance society in it, because the computer was always listening for you to say "Computer" and give it a command. Mind you, the Enterprise *was* as close to a military ship as the ST society had in the original series, so I guess it might be understandable.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The electorate is stupid. They are easily manipulated. Just scream "Abortion!" or "Gun violence" or "Taxes" and you are on your way to political riches.
Terry Gilliam's interpretation of Orwell's 1984: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
Ben Elton is perhaps better known in Commonwealth countries as a TV comedian, but he writes a fine line of satire which frequently swerves into the SciFi realm and is almost always a form of social commentary.
Blind Faith is an interesting posit on where the current obsession with social media, coupled with government surveillance and the slide away from science to religion could do to a slightly futuristic society.
Well worth a read, and if you enjoy that, you may enjoy some of his older works, such as Stark, This Other Eden, or some of his more recent stuff (there's dozens).
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
What makes the fictional dystopias featuring surveillance states interesting isn't simply the fact that they conduct surveillance, but rather what they do with the information. In the fictional dystopias is it to engage in various sorts of general repression against the population, sometimes subtly, sometimes in a heavy handed and cruel fashion. How many of them involve actions by the state to genuinely protect the citizenry except in an Orwellian fashion? Moving from fiction to history and current events reveals that the difference between free societies using surveillance to protect themselves is in marked contrast to unfree societies. Nobody went to prison for 10 years at hard labor for simply calling George Bush, "Chimpy McHitler," while he was President, but plenty of people went to the Gulag for 10 years for telling a joke about Stalin, and far from all of the people sent to the Gulag survived. There may need to be refinement and more oversight over the activities of the intelligence services of Western governments, but getting it wrong will ultimately lead to harsh feedback of another sort.
Too true:(Listen for the joke at 1:40) Reagan tells Soviet jokes
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Greg Bear, Black List: A Thriller
The book you want is Huxley's Brave New World. Instead of overlords controlling people through power and domination, people allow themselves to be controlled in exchange for the pleasantries of modern life - sex, entertainment, and other trivialities. As long as they get as much of those as they want, they don't give a damn what else is going on in society or who is controlling it. As the saying goes, you attract more flies with honey...
Another good take is the role-playing game Paranoia - which made the surveillance state amusing (and insane) [1]. In addition to big brother, brave new world-ish mandatory uppers and downers combined with a Kafka-like maze of rules that can never all be respected - you are forced to betray, backstab, lie and cheat faster/better than the other players.
This, along with games like Diplomacy [2], should be mandatory for all 10y+ kids so they can become accustomed to shit that others will pull on them with more real-world painful consequences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)
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I'm disappointed that Harry Harrison's "Stainless Steel Rat" is not at the top of this list. Written in 1961, it's entire premise is about a thief that operates in a society with computer surveillance tracking everyones every move. Facial recognition, camera and car tracking, etc, etc. I've re-read this many times and it's almost frightening how close it is to reality. Even to the point of most of the populace being comfortable with the intrusion.
What's up with this box everyone has to think inside of or outside of? Why does there have to be a box?
Stories (fiction) are notorious for worrying about being 'grounded' in some significant way. Reality, on the other hand, has a habit of turning up the most extraordinary events.
Take the NSA designed spy platform, the Xbox One. What writer would predict that millions of people would pay a fortune, of their own free will, to install a vastly inferior piece of hardware (the Sony PS4 has more than twice the gaming power than the Xbone) that in reality was designed to allow the State to have eyes and ears in their homes. What writer would predict that a society convinced their children are at greater risk from predators than at any time previously, would install an always on camera system in the children's bedroom, so NSA perverts who ALREADY boast of recording and sharing sexually-explicit phone calls made by Americans could secretly film their children.
No writer would dare to imagine the horrors inflicted by the NSA in full cooperation with Microsoft and Bill Gates, and expect readers to tolerate the story.
Now nerds should know the famous genre fiction. The one about the State testing kids, and murdering those who are too smart/curious. The one about police accosting a person out late at night taking a walk, and taking him to the loony bin when his explanation was "I like taking late night walks". Or how about the scene in "V for Vendetta" when two police thugs attempt to assault an innocent young woman, which was played out EXACTLY as shown a few months later in London, because the young woman involved dared to be out alone with a camera (the two 'special' police goons that accosted her were exonerated despite video evidence).
But the actions of the depraved psychopath Bill Gates would break the credibility of fiction. Gates has created a database system (in conjunction with Rupert "Goebbels" Murdoch and various organisations in the US with long histories of involvement in eugenics) to track and monitor every child in West controlled nations. Gates' system is currently being rolled out in schools all across the USA, with New York being the current major test-bed. Gates actually has willing teachers paid fees for spying on children and their families and entering EXTRA information gained this way into his database. What is completely amazing is that Gates has ensured the data he gathers is of special interest to would-be child-abusers, enabling the 'best' victims to be located- victims with all the 'ideal' characteristics (Gates even monitors a child's sexual development and mental maturity) cross referenced with those parts of the USA where police action against abusers is least effective.
What action have the sheeple parents carried out against Bill Gates' despicable evil? None whatsoever- I'll bet the vast majority of you sheeple here have never heard of this project. This despite the fact that Gates is one of the planet's most outspoken eugenicists, with a long history of promoting pro-war propaganda.
From the Washington Post- QUOTE
Privacy concerns are growing among parents, educators and some state officials about a Gates Foundation-funded project that is storing an unprecedented amount of personal information about millions of students in a $100 million database that cannot guarantee complete security.
END QUOTE
Ever see the owners of Slashdot promoting awareness of this project? Hahahahahahaha- yeah, right. By the way, that part about security? The database is actually designed to give access to third parties (like would-be child rapists) who pay a small fee. Can you imagine a database created to give people access to knowledge about banks and their security systems, including times of major cash movements? You would immediately say "isn't such a database simply a resource for bank-robbers" and you would be correct.
Gates can extract and store the most personnel data about YOUR kids, and you are supposed to sit back and take it, listening to the filthy shills who reassure you that "obviously no bad guy will ever exploit the system". Are you REALLY that stu
Because no "defense contractor" would ever orchestrate and execute 9/11 and blame it on a bunch of muslim terrorists.
all-encompassing system of control, that proceeds from the top of the pyramid down to its base
I feel this statement unduly absolves us as a society from blame for our own surveillance state -- as if we hadn't clamored for safety, as if we hadn't spouted off about having nothing to hide, as if we hadn't secretly distrusted anyone using encryption, anonymous account, or trying to live "off the grid", as if we hadn't openly derided the boys who cried wolf about the coming panopticon. Do you think something of this magnitude is simply ordered from "the top"? We asked for this. The only thing you can complain about is that the people we elected (and those they appointed or hired) to do our bidding, in an effort to more completely obey us, didn't tell us what they were doing. It's like hiring a hitman and having him tell you it's better that you not know the details of the hit you've paid for.
I don't think this is a pyramid. This is an hourglass, or a pinched torus -- we all sit on top of the government, down to a single point of control; which then sits on top of an expanding mass of surveillance state that sits in/on/around all of us. Unless of course you buy into the idea that our elections are rigged, that it's all been run by a cabal for decades/centuries/millenia, etc.
But I think it's much simpler to accept that we did this to ourselves. It doesn't take a roomful of geniuses working secretly, it just takes a nation of average Joe's being themselves. Design by committee, of millions.
...is another classic that belongs on the list.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
I think often of the original Running Man story by Stephen King(as Richard Bachman)and wish someone would have the balls/resources to do a 100% accurate(if slightly updated for the times)interpretation, right down to the punch-in-the-face ending.
George Lucas's Directorial Debut film 1971
by John Brunner, predates cyberpunk by half a decade and features strong themes of government secrecy and surveillance.
just a ghost in the machine.
From a more economics-based standpoint(specifically, what happens when there are no real "jobs" left), I would have to say "Player Piano" by Kurt Vonnegut. Now of course there is the obviously dated references to computers with so many vacuum tubes that they fill a cave, and alas engineers ARENT the richest people on the planet but there is some great social commentary in there re: what to do when technology and society has rendered most people useless.
In the book, 99% of young men are basically given 2 options: join the army or join a meaningless public works organization....this is eerily similar to today's economy. Having spent time on a military base as a contractor, I can say that most of these guys would have been working at a factory if they had been born 50 years ago, but as most of those jobs have dried up they ended up in the Army. I know people in the US like to go all hero worship on these people, but lets face facts: For most of them, it's their only ticket to anything that even closely resembles a middle class lifestyle. They either aren't cut out for post-secondary education or cannot afford it, and since we don't have any other place for them(much like in the story), we stick them in the army...... The "reeks and wrecks" are the public works people, not quite as big in the US as they are elsewhere(for instance, Japan), but they are still there.
If you have time, definitely check it out, I've just scratched the surface of how correct Vonnegut was in predicting what happens when people stop being "useful" to society.
Monstar L
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_My_Tears,_The_Policeman_Said
also features a sort of 1% -99% societal split
The novel is set in a dystopian future United States following a Second Civil War which led to the collapse of the nation's democratic institutions. The National Guard ("nats") and US police force ("pols") reestablished social order through instituting a dictatorship, with a "Director" at the apex, and police marshals and generals as operational commanders in the field. Resistance to the regime is largely confined to university campuses, where radicalized former university students eke out a desperate existence in subterranean kibbutzim. Recreational drug use is widespread, and the age of consent has been lowered to twelve. Most commuting is undertaken by personal aircraft, allowing great distances to be covered in little time.
John Brunner's -'The sheep look up' is another excellent dystopian (though not all that surveillance-oriented) novel
-I'm just sayin'
Computer: I hereby report rsborg as a mutant. The evidence is the use of footnotes and subversive words such as amusing [1]
[1] Clone 2: I hereby report AC clone 1 as a subversive for using the word "amusing"
The Slow Glass stories, by Bob Shaw.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160399/
imposters was kind of interesting, but murky
-I'm just sayin'
Given that Orwell got so very much right about the future, why exclude 1984 from the list? Just to make an interesting discussion that would have been largely already well-hashed-out otherwise?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Nice post
It is sooo funny, but actually no one sci-fi author managed to predict the level of surveillance at which we are in this moment. Even in 1984 you could actually go and hide somewhere, or even leave the country, but here and now, there is nowhere to go, on the earth, literally.
Did knocking over that strawman make you feel like a big tough guy?
All-seeing, all-knowing God that doesn't really pay attention to what his creations are getting up to until he decides to check in and finds them doing various things that they shouldn't be doing (eating forbidden fruit, worshipping other gods, Jonah hiding out so he doesn't have to spread the word like he was specifically ordered to, etc.). It could be made into a sitcom, and that would be the basic premise of every single episode.
One (actually a set of three stories) is Lacey and His Friends by David Drake
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacey_and_His_Friends
I was much more surprised to read, in an out-of-print '80s novel written by a lesser-known SF author, about drone operators remotely carrying out surgical strikes halfway across the planet, all while being denied any credit or commendation because the traditional military community doesn't consider them "pilots."
Russia's at the same state now, if you criticize Putin you end up in jail on a trumped up charge or commit suicide or end up dead abroad. Words are enough.
Barrett Brown (who made the mistake of reporting 'anonymous' leaks and upsetting a defense contractor). His charge is grade A fabricated crap.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/21/barrett-brown-persecution-anonymous
(Wikileaks and Glenn were targetted for smear campaigns.)
Wanna see a video of undercover cops trying to plant drugs on 'protestors', there's lots and lots of those, DuckDuck for them. Seems to be an easy bust.
Do people get killed for speech by America? Sure, usually by drone strike, then Fox calls them 'vile propagandists', without seeing the irony.
Aaron of course was on trumped up charges and killed himself. Guantanamo is force feeding prisoners who just want a trial. Those are genuine suicides/attempts, Putin's tend to be thrown off a building, but nobody is really sure how many.
It's comforting to believe you have surveillance without the negative effect, but you really don't. Soviet Russia was mostly just people going about their business of beer and circus.
I'm totally confused my your comment. I didn't write the novel, I just contributed my take on the topic. I'm not sure why you feel the need to make such a statement. Did someone run over your puppy?
What's up with this box everyone has to think inside of or outside of? Why does there have to be a box?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooter_(film) for the staged suicide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartan_(film) power elite and a "boating accident"
The original UK http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Cards_(UK_TV_series)
then http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Play_the_King for the simple pleasure of cataloging the political competitors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_Darkness (1985) for the display of a hardened, air gapped computer network and the need for real physical access vs the amazing ability to just 'hack' from suburbia.
The gov understanding of protest movements.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The light of other days.
(Arthur C. Clarke, Stephen Baxter)
Privacy? No such thing! For ANYBODY!
Not even the rich and powerful can hide the smallest thing.
Here, let me help.
From the wiki "The character is a quick-witted con man with a strong sense of morality, and was the protagonist of twelve novels."
What the angry racist A/C was sayin' was... the boyz in the hood has no "morality" because no more white people are around, so the author has no clue.
Better?
A bit of a preview for the future: Rainbow's End.
Oh, here, you can read some of the ideas and thoughts from this presentation he made.
It doesn't only seem plausible at this point, it seems practically guaranteed to arise.
"Guantanamo bay has never even held a total of 1,000 people as prisoners. Al Qaida teaches its members to lie and carry on the jihad by any means possible. Gitmo guards often attacked by detaineesed by detainees "
Classic demonetization strategy, you could argue these points at their trials, but apparently the *real* evidence isn't strong enough to stand trial, or even be revealed to the general public. So if the real evidence can't stand scruitiny, neither can your claims.
"Anwar al-Awlaki wasn't targeted due to making speeches" yes he was, he was described as a vile propagandist.
You are saying " terrorist recruiter", so what you're saying is he made speeches? "trainer" and gave talks. "leader" and orders. Word games I think. You can argue these at the trial, but there is no trial.
Soviet rule was definitely *not* benigh, that's the point. You don't have the 'nice kind' of mass surveillance because there's no such thing.
Spies don't live in reality. Programmers do.
Of course 1984 shouldn't be on the list, as it is not science fiction. It imagines a political dystopia, and does not go into details about the technology. In fact, apart from the "telescreens", the technology depicted in the story is crude and primitive compared to the real 1980s. 1984 is about the use of the /political/ power of a one-party state to achieve total control over people's lives.
I have another name: Stanislaw Lem), probably mostly unknown in US. And two of his novels, Eden and, to a lesser extent, Observation on the Spot
Quoting wikipedia about Eden: 'An indistinct image emerges of doublers' Orwellian information-controlled civilization that is almost self-regulating, with a special kind of system of government—one that officially does not exist and is thus impossible to destroy. The society is controlled through a fictitious advanced branch of information science Lem dubs procrustics, based on the control and stratification of information flows within the society. It is used for molding groups within a society and ultimately a society as a whole to behave as designed by secret hidden rulers. One example described in the novel is the above mentioned settlement, kind of a "concentration camp" without any guards, designed so that the prisoners stay inside apparently of their own "free" will.'
Please note this was written in 1959.
I have another name, Stanislaw Lem, with two his novels, Eden and, to a lesser extent, Observation on the Spot"
An extract from Eden:
'An indistinct image emerges of doublers' Orwellian information-controlled civilization that is almost self-regulating, with a special kind of system of government—one that officially does not exist and is thus impossible to destroy. The society is controlled through a fictitious advanced branch of information science Lem dubs procrustics, based on the control and stratification of information flows within the society. It is used for molding groups within a society and ultimately a society as a whole to behave as designed by secret hidden rulers. One example described in the novel is the above mentioned settlement, kind of a "concentration camp" without any guards, designed so that the prisoners stay inside apparently of their own "free" will.'
Please, note this was written in 1959.
This Perfect Day by Ira Levin
"Christ, Marx, Wood and Wei led us to this perfect day"
From wiki- The world is managed by a central computer called UniComp which has been programmed to keep every single human on the surface of the earth in check. People are continually drugged by means of monthly treatments (delivered via transdermal spray or jet injector) so that they will remain satisfied and cooperative "Family members". They are told where to live, when to eat, whom to marry, when to reproduce, and for which job they will be trained. Everyone is assigned a counselor who acts somewhat like a mentor, confessor, and parole agent; violations against 'brothers' and 'sisters' by themselves and others are expected to be reported at a weekly confession.
I thought Harry Harrison's "Homeworld" would also have been a good candidate to make the list as well...
Seems you missed a post in between. He was not responding to you.
I think it was one of the Kornblurth-Pohl novel from the 50s, maybe The Space Merchants but ir depicted a future where every minute of the day from any flat surface one was bombarded by ads which addressed you by name. That the ads knew who you were and tailored themselves to your preferences speaks of a vast surveillance state, only one run by corporations. The scary thing is that 50 years later this is exactly what we have with our every internet browsing being mined for better ad placement. The NSA wouldn't be able to harvest nearly as much data as they can if the Internet hadn't already collected that data to sell to advertisers.
Except that they aren't POWs. That would require that they be treated as per the Geneva convention (which they are not). They have none of the rights of civilian criminals (i.e. habeas corpus) AND none of the rights of military POWs.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
As this is "current", not sure it qualifies but has completed its second season this year.
I mentioned to a friend last week, "Person of Interest" is my favorite TV show. I'm only worried whether there will be another season. Also whether they will get too involved in character's personal interactions and the main computer rather than the original "fix the victim" plotline. Since many shows with good plot devices end up this way.
There was an episode this season near the end, the computer was dumping its own O/S binary to paper and it hired employees to get re-keyed by hand every night before a reboot. Classic computer humor.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
I don't do "sci-fi", that referring to a) mostly monster movies, or b) things so dumbed down as to be worthless....
And 3/4s of the posts here from gun nuts, as though the Second Amendment was going to save them (to paraphrase a quote from someone I used to know, "so, you're telling me that D-Day was unnecessary, since the Wehrmacht was sure to fall to the mighty French Resistance shortly").
Anyway, how 'bout relevant fiction: what comes to mind are things like Walter Jon Williams Hardwired, or Gibson's Neuromancer, or several by Bruce Sterling.
mark, who actually reads
The First Circle was a book by Solzhenytsin about, well, the Soviet surveillance state and the prisoner-engineers that helped build it.
An SF story written in the '50's, if memory serves - unfortunately, memory serves no further - detailed the transformation of the United States into a totalitarian state by the simple method of having Congress pass new laws taking away Constitutional rights, having them signed into effect by the President, and then having the Supreme Court declare these new laws to be "Constitutional" and declare any conflicting old laws to be "un-Constitutional" or otherwise no longer valid.
...how their society came to be dystopian in the first place?
A good warning message would convey the idea of "this is what the world ended up like because of [public apathy][people's gullibility][creeping decay][whatever]".
If they don't do that then their message is reduced to "big nasties are making people's lives hell".
This is a genuine question. I haven't read any of the mentioned books.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
The world is managed by [...] the Vatican ... People are continually ... told where to live, when to eat, whom to marry, when to reproduce... Everyone is assigned a counselor who acts somewhat like a mentor, confessor, and parole agent; violations against 'brothers' and 'sisters' by themselves and others are expected to be reported at a weekly confession.
I'm totally confused my your comment. I didn't write the novel, I just contributed my take on the topic. I'm not sure why you feel the need to make such a statement. Did someone run over your puppy?
WTF? You just attacked the guy who made your point for you.