{"id":420,"date":"2015-09-09T21:27:25","date_gmt":"2015-09-10T04:27:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/?p=420"},"modified":"2017-11-07T09:33:38","modified_gmt":"2017-11-07T16:33:38","slug":"share-information-save-the-world-some-thoughts-on-the-shockwave-rider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/?p=420","title":{"rendered":"Share information, save the world? Some thoughts on The Shockwave Rider<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I finally got around to reading John Brunner\u2019s prescient The Shockwave Rider<\/em> (1975), a sci-fi novel many credit for breaking ground on what would later become the cyberpunk genre. Inspired by Alvin Toffler\u2019s highly influential book Future Shock, <\/em>Brunner grapples with the consequences of an Internet-like connected society on the nature of identity, power, and most importantly, information itself. (It even contains an oblique reference to the Magnavox Odyssey videogame system of the early 1970s!)<\/p>\n

Much like Asimov\u2019s laws of robotics, Brunner attempts to harness technology\u2019s humanistic potential with positivistic propositions; his novel ends with two declarations for a net-connected, utopian-like information age:<\/p>\n

\u201c#1: That this is a rich\"Shockwave planet. Therefore poverty and hunger are unworthy of it, and since we can abolish them, we must.<\/p>\n

#2: That we are a civilized species. Therefore none shall henceforth gain illicit advantage by reason of the fact that we together know more than one of us can know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Share information, save the world: This is a very 1960s conclusion to a book that has otherwise only grown more persuasively contemporary for its pessimistic view of information control. If the computers we built to control information, in response to the industrial revolution, have perversely made society post-industrial, they have also made us personally post-control. The recent Pew survey<\/a> on digital privacy suggests that we have given up on controlling personal information as a society; we trade data about ourselves for the chance to share likes on Facebook. This is not an entirely trivial trade\u2014either in what we gain or lose\u2014but it has led to the consolidation of incredible data about ourselves in the hands of a few.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The solution in The Shockwave Rider<\/em> is to make all information public. Nickie Haflinger, the computer-savvy, identity-shifting hero of the novel, creates a computer worm (a term apparently coined by Brunner) to unveil the anti-humanistic secrets of 21st<\/sup> century America\u2019s power-hungry institutions (government, defense industries, large corporations, covert operations, etc.). The impetus to pull back the curtain certainly resonates with our current historical moment, in which whistleblowers and the media are revealing the depths of collusion between government and corporations post-9\/11 to spy on our every digital move and collect our data for future purposes unknown.<\/p>\n

The rather sanguine remedy celebrated by the novel, a kind of info-topia, as I\u2019ll call it\u2014where everyone can know everything\u2014harbors its own questions. Is complete transparency a safeguard against powerful entities that already have material and means, and lack only message? Is personal information \u201cprotected\u201d in an info-topia\u2019s presumed avalanche of equitably available data? Will the similarities and differences revealed in our shared data be used to bring us together in happy community or shared oppressiveness? Or will we be carved up, separated by quantified divergence, and discriminated against?<\/p>\n

In my one and only college economics class (mercifully), we were often told to \u201cignore advertising,\u201d because marketing mucked up the ability to draw conclusions about economic forces. Information, like economics, is perhaps also too intertwined with human motivations (e.g., ideology, politics, profit) to ever be purely divined and evaluated as a \u201cneutral\u201d or independent entity or force. I\u2019m not convinced our species could impartially handle such a substance, much less fashion an info-topia out of it; we would have to be gods to preserve its integrity, or to anticipate all the consequences (good and bad, intended and\u00a0not) of its application.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the fantasy of unfettered information does seem compelling\u2014both in the novel and in thinking about the damage government and corporate secrets have done in our current information age. But knowledge is also a burden, and dumping it safely can be an act of self-preservation. Characters in the novel often suffer from Toffler-like \u201coverload,\u201d and they turn to an intriguing organization\u2014a community, really\u2014known as \u201cHearing Aid\u201d for help. Staffed by the survivors of a catastrophic Bay Area earthquake who live off the fragmented grid of society, Hearing Aid simply listens to callers on its 24-hour hotline, which is insulated from the rest of the net\u2019s prying ears and eyes.<\/p>\n

Part psychological, part confessional, Hearing Aid is the info-agnostic loophole in the system, an entity that listens to information but never acts upon it in any way (although Hearing Aid violates its mission when its existence is threatened\u2014the very definition of an info-existential problem, I suppose). If the signal can\u2019t be stopped, to paraphrase an oft-quoted axiom from Joss Whedon\u2019s film Serenity<\/em>, perhaps it can be re-routed securely to a dead end.<\/p>\n

A final question to ponder: Once Nickie\u2019s worm rewrites the net to reveal its secrets, what becomes of Hearing Aid? Brunner doesn\u2019t take the novel that far. But the very idea of Hearing Aid speaks to the need for private thoughts and private conversations\u2014for personal information to remain personal\u2014no matter how benevolent a society\u2019s information culture may be. If speaking one\u2019s mind constitutes information worthy of protection from a prying, paranoid society, what of the mind itself in a share-everything info-topia? Coercion comes in many forms. Why aren\u2019t you sharing your knowledge? Are you anti-social? How can you resist the greater good? That\u2019s a different dystopian novel (see The Circle), one in which Brunner\u2019s two, well-meaning propositions slide from humanitarian benefit into mental conformity and social tyranny. At the opposite, extreme ends of information and privacy control, there is no place for the self to hide.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I finally got around to reading John Brunner\u2019s prescient The Shockwave Rider (1975), a sci-fi novel many credit for breaking ground on what would later become the cyberpunk genre. Inspired by Alvin Toffler\u2019s highly influential book Future Shock, Brunner grapples … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=420"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":439,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420\/revisions\/439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erraticplay.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}