{"id":71,"date":"2015-01-25T07:34:26","date_gmt":"2015-01-25T12:34:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/?p=71"},"modified":"2015-01-25T07:34:26","modified_gmt":"2015-01-25T12:34:26","slug":"1984-vs-pkd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/2015\/01\/25\/1984-vs-pkd\/","title":{"rendered":"1984 vs. PKD"},"content":{"rendered":"

Noah Berlatsky thinks we ought to stop comparing the NSA to\u00a01984<\/em> and start comparing it to Philip K. Dick<\/a>, suggesting that understanding the surveillance state through the lens of Orwell neglects the ways the impact of that surveillance power hits some more than others:<\/p>\n

\u00a0Using Orwell to understand NSA spying, then, ends up functioning as a distortion by metaphor. It suggests that all of us are equally targeted, and that the problem is that all of us are equally targeted\u2014that middle-class non-marginal people are going to be stomped by Big Brother. The truth, though, is that the NSA data will likely be used primarily, as it always has been, against the androids and the Zhangs\u2014which is why we need to try to find a metaphor that addresses not just liberty, but justice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Berlatsky also opens with the data\/narrative binary I’ve been floating occasionally in class:<\/p>\n

As any intelligence operative knows, isolated facts don’t tell you much. If some random person mentions a bomb somewhere on the Internet, is that a threat? A joke? A mistake?\u00a0 To understand data you need a context and a narrative. You need to be able to put it in a story.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Berlatsky’s piece very usefully gets to part of why this surveillance culture<\/em> stuff (and not just the material\/technological\/political facts of surveillance itself) matters so much. \u00a0For one thing, our myopic focus on Orwell as the Grand Explainer of the Surveillance State starkly delimits how journalists talk about surveillance; a fascinating PEN American Center analysis<\/a> of journalistic writeups of the 2013 NSA spying scandal found that 1984<\/em> was literally the only literary analogy journalists ever\u00a0used in that context. \u00a0This affects the way we think about surveillance in some very specific ways:<\/p>\n

Examining the work of 105 authors and 60 news outlets over two months, PEN found that journalists most often used metaphors of collecting (9.31 percent), but other approaches included nautical metaphors\u00a0 (tentacles, trawling, leviathan), war metaphors (blitz, invade), and metaphors of authoritarianism (totalitarian, police state, Nazi.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

In fairness, PKD is not the only alternative to Orwell in terms of parsing the surveillance state through fiction. \u00a0Others have suggested<\/a>, for instance, that Kafka (the one who’s not enrolled in ENGL262) is a more apt lens than Orwell. \u00a0Berlatsky also mentions Maureen McHugh’s rightly praised\u00a0China Mountain Zhang<\/em><\/a> as a model, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who might be interested.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Noah Berlatsky thinks we ought to stop comparing the NSA to\u00a01984 and start comparing it to Philip K. Dick, suggesting that understanding the surveillance state through the lens of Orwell neglects the ways the impact of that surveillance power hits some more than others: \u00a0Using Orwell to understand NSA spying, then, ends up functioning as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72,"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions\/72"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noendofneon.net\/surveillance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}