Major themes underlining the BRAVE NEW 1984 project

Two terrifying novels haunted the 20th Century and continue to trouble us today: Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and Huxley’s Brave New World.  Every day, newspapers invoke their nightmarish visions, whether driven by Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ repression or Huxley’s consumer seduction and conditioning, to explain contemporary events.

In addition to being brilliant visionaries, Orwell and Huxley were both larger-than-life characters. BRAVE NEW 1984 mission is to bring them back to life and, with the aid of emblematic stories of the modern world, enlist their help in opening our own eyes to what’s happening now – or what may be just around the corner.

The speed with which new ‘Orwellian’ and ‘Huxleyan’ developments occur is dizzying, and yesterday’s research is constantly being superseded by today’s scientific, social and political news. We will therefore not make final decisions on the actual documentary stories until production funding is confirmed and we begin pre-production.  This is a work in progress, and only experimentation will yield the most effective result, a highly original and insightful film whose visual style matches the variety and cogency of its themes.

We know what kinds of stories we are looking for. Without trying to compete with the news, they will be cutting edge and have a futuristic feel and will deal with the key themes of Orwell’s and Huxley’s novels.


ORWELL’S THEMES

One important subject will be surveillance. The modern world abounds with snooping technologies which Orwell’s Big Brother could only have dreamed about. Use of spy cameras in modern-day Britain is now a chilling mirror image of Orwell's fictional world, created in the post-war Forties in a flat overlooking Canonbury Square in Islington, North London.

On the wall outside his former residence - flat number 27B - where Orwell lived until his death in 1950, an historical plaque commemorates the anti-authoritarian author.  And within 200 yards of the flat, there are 32 CCTV cameras, scanning every move.  According to the latest studies, Britain has a staggering 4.2 million CCTV cameras - one for every 14 people in the country - and 20 per cent of cameras globally. It has been calculated that each person is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily.

The British Royal Society of Engineers has sounded the alarm about the dangers of abuse inherent in such a situation, while the government's Information Commissioner Richard Thomas warns that excessive use of CCTV and other information-gathering technologies are ‘creating a climate of suspicion’.

International civil liberties organizations are speaking of the ‘death of privacy’ and noting that we are ourselves willingly contributing to these trends, notably by our use of the Internet. Giant communications conglomerates accumulate vast amounts of information on all aspects of our lives. Recent hearings of U.S. congressional intelligence committees have revealed that the now infamous U.S. Total Intelligence Awareness program (which was cancelled in 2003 only a year after it was created by the research and development agency of the Department of Defense) has in fact survived in all but name, finding new forms within the Homeland Security Department.

Government agencies can tap into corporate networks and centralize the data, not just in authoritarian regimes such as China’s (as when Google collaborates with the government there to suppress certain web sites) but also in western democracies. In the U.S., the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone  records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.  Qwest Communications reportedly lost contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after the company refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program which its executives thought might be illegal.
   
In China, there are now multi-million dollar projects to install thousands of security cameras in public places. Li Runsen, the powerful technology director of China’s ministry of public security, is best known for leading Project Golden Shield, China’s intensive effort to strengthen police control over the Internet. But just a few months ago, Mr. Li took an additional title:  director of China Security and Surveillance Technology, a fast-growing private company that installs and sometimes operates surveillance systems for Chinese police agencies, jails and banks. The company has just been approved for a listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

Military surveillance projects are even more futuristic and more fully Orwellian. The U.S. Defense Department is involved in efforts to establish “military omniscience” and “ubiquitous monitoring”.  One new concept is CTS, Combat Zones that See, based on computerized interaction between hundreds or even thousands of surveillance cameras. The goal, according to a recent Pentagon presentation to defense contractors, is to “track everything that moves” John Pike, director of Globalsecurity, a defense think tank, has this to say:  “Before, we said Big Brother's watching. But he really wasn't, because there was too much to watch. These new programs aim to provide these omnipresent cameras with a brain.”

Closely linked to the surveillance theme, and equally Orwellian, are matters of ‘extraordinary rendition’ and torture. The Maher Arar story has received ample coverage in the media, and has become an international scandal, but his is only one story of many, even in Canada.  According to the Ottawa Citizen (22.10.97), between 2001 and 2003 four Canadians -- Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin -- were imprisoned in Syria while under investigation by security agencies in this country.  “The cases of the three others raise troubling questions about what role Canadian officials may have played in the events that befell them,” said Justice Dennis O'Connor in his report into the case of Maher Arar. All four allege they were interrogated and tortured based on information that could only have originated with Canadian sources. In Mr. Almalki's case, it has already been established by a federal inquiry that the RCMP passed questions they wanted him to answer through Canadian diplomats to Syrian military intelligence.  Some critics have referred to this as a way of “outsourcing’ torture.”  Investigating some of these cases will be more original than doing another exposé of the evils of Guantanamo (though these and other forms of institutionalized torture in other countries will certainly form part of the context).

Permanent War is another Orwellian theme which is certain to yield a story or two for the film.  Orwell’s blueprint of the constant search for an external enemy to justify repression at home, or the rewriting of history to justify changing alliances, has never seemed more true than under the George W. Bush administration in the United States. But the logic began before Mr. Bush became president, and will surely continue afterward, because it is based, as in Orwell’s vision, on several driving imperatives for powerful ruling elites:  maintaining fear, securing raw materials and creating massive and permanent outlets for armaments and securities industries.  From Blackwater and Halliburton, to Canadian arms manufacturers whose sales in 2006 placed them fourth on the list of international arms industries, the Mideast wars are a cornucopia to corporations. Recently, Naomi Klein has argued that this kind of war-making is part of  “shock capitalism” – a normative way of making money that’s come into its own.  It is amazing to reread the words of George Orwell today, because he predicted the same thing in 1949.

We intend to show both sides of this coin, too: don’t Islamist fundamentalists obey the same “shock and terror” logic ?  If U.S. foreign policy stays its course, we may look at what British author Tariq Ali has called the “clash of fundamentalisms” from an Orwellian perspective. But more likely we will look further a field, to the jingoism and repression accompanying the tensions between India and Pakistan, or perhaps even to the tensions between a small minority of war-waging Islamist forces and a peaceable and secularist Muslim population, world-wide.  The fault line that has emerged between these groups has been expressed in violent threats and actions against non-Islamist Muslims in many countries. Courageous and articulate, Tarek Fatah and his colleagues in the Muslim Canadian Congress have felt this threat, and their story, along with its international connections, is a chilling tale. Tarek Fatah’s new book, Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, to be published in March 2008, could provide an excellent departure point for the telling of this story.

HUXLEY’S THEMES

Our stories related to Huxley’s vision will touch on three of his most pressing concerns: genetic engineering, consumerism and conditioning. In these fields too,  every month brings news of ever more astonishing breakthroughs,  some frightening and some full of promise, frequently a combination of the two.

Genetic engineering, or synthetic biology as some are now calling it, has been one of the really huge stories of the last twenty-five years. Some forms of this experimental enterprise have been undertaken in order to cure disease or reverse infertility. In some areas there have been breakthroughs, though we have yet to see the big promises of genetic medicine fulfilled.  In the meantime, the mainstream media tell us much less about the numerous failures and the dangers of this panoply of genetic technologies.  In the plant and microbial kingdoms, we have already created organisms that pose a threat to the integrity of the natural ecology in genetically engineered corn, soy, cotton and other food crops. Increasingly, we are learning that ingesting such crops is also bad for our health. Yet despite evidence strong enough to invoke a ban according to the precautionary principle, these crops continue to be imposed on nations and farmers. An example of this could provide one of our stories.

In the animal and human kingdoms, what are the implications of patenting life itself? This is one of the projects of the most successful pioneer in the field of genomics, U.S. scientist Craig Venter.  In fact, Venter wants to patent the first form of man-made life, a synthetic bacterium made with DNA. Not good news, according to the ETC group, an internationally respected Canadian bioethics organization.  “These monopoly claims,” says ETC executive director Pat Mooney,  “signal the start of a high-stakes commercial race to synthesize and privatize synthetic life forms. For the first time, God has competition.”  Mooney adds: “Venter and his colleagues have breached a societal boundary, and the public hasn't even had a chance to debate the far-reaching social, ethical and environmental implications of synthetic life.”

Meanwhile pharmaceutical companies are seeking to create pigs and sheep with human genes for organs for transplantation, and in the world of cybernetics, others are seeking to bring about human/computer fusions.  All these efforts to change the nature of human life raise many troubling questions.  Montreal’s Louise Vandelac among a host of other experts, are sounding alarm bells about a near future when we will no longer know what is human and what isn’t.  She and others warn that we need to figure out what kind of physical harms, emotional and moral tumult and socio-economic consequences will certainly arise, and address these before they threaten our viability as a species and society.  Huxley would certainly have agreed with this perspective.

Here are some of the genotech stories we’re following:

Until recently it was said that the Beijing Olympics might be the last ones where genetically natural humans compete.  Looking at the development of under-the-radar genetic doping already underway would show that this may have been too optimistic.  

The controversy about the pros and cons of genetically modified foods has been raging globally for more than twenty years.  Strangely, the progress towards the creation of ‘designer babies’ – i.e. genetically modified humans, created in vitro and modified at the embryonic stage -- has been the subject of much less public debate.  In part, this is because the work is being carried out in closed hospital and clinical laboratories around the world, and currently affects a very small fraction of the population, so the alarms of critics resound with far fewer numbers of people. However, the massive use of reprogenetic technologies in China to achieve sex-selection or twin births within the context of the “one child” policy clearly presages the possibility of much more far-reaching interventions spreading on a huge scale, interventions that could, through consumer choice (the wealthy purchasing ‘genetic advantages’) or through state coercion, in effect create the privileged and exploited bio-classes envisioned in Brave New World.

At Advanced Cell Technologies, near Boston, Massachusetts, Doctors Robert Lanza and Young Chung have been busy emptying human eggs of their original genetic content, replacing them with the nuclei of an adult human and thereby creating a cloned pre-embryo.  The pre-embryos’ ever-dividing cells will be used as a reservoir for therapeutic purposes, but the same technology could be used to make human clones – Great Britain has just recently opened the door to this.  In 2007 epithelial (skin-like) cells were used to create stem cells, possibly averting the controversial need for embryonic cells.  Though Ian Wilmut (Dolly the sheep’s techno-daddy) has  renounced efforts to clone mammals, the cloning genie is out of the bottle, and we need to know whether his gifts will be benign or treacherous.

Reproductive technologies are essential in furthering human attempts to create life artificially. In Rome, only a few blocks from the Vatican, Dr. Severino Antinori, an international IVF record breaker, runs his own fertility clinic.  Over the last fifteen years, he has made some sensational experiments, effectively pushing back the age limits of natural reproduction.  In 1988, he helped a 53-year-old woman give birth by implanting one of her eggs, fertilized with the sperm of her boyfriend, in the womb of her daughter.  In 1992, he helped a fifty-seven year-old British woman give birth to twins.  And recently, Dr. Antinori claimed that three women had been implanted with cloned embryos, but has yet to show the resulting cloned babies.

At Juntendou University, Tokyo, Dr. Yosinori Kuwabara and his colleagues are working hard on the construction of an artificial uterus.  In the 1990’s, they built one in which they succeeded in gestating a goat fetus.  They are working with a clear acrylic tank filled with amniotic acid and outfitted with machines that jointly perform the task of a placenta - pumping in blood, oxygen and nutrients and cleaning out wastes.

Critics of these technologies point both to the immediate possibilities of physical damage - IVF children are at much greater risk for certain serious problems, for example - and to the longer terms risks, physical, economic, moral and societal. But the breadth of the work shows how much support these reprogenetic technologies have.  Among the most outspoken and forthright supporter of human genetic engineering and cloning is Princeton philosopher Lee Silver.  In his book, Remaking Eden, and in numerous speeches and articles, he predicts approvingly that eventually, Brave New World-like, the wealthy will abandon live conception and gestation so they can buy the new technologies to ‘enhance’ their fetuses. Over time, their children will grow ‘gen-rich’, turning into a new bio-class very similar to Huxley's Alphas or Betas. The poor will have no choice but to continue as ‘gen-poor’, un-enhanced and potentially deprived, like Huxley’s  Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons.

Closely related to genetically engineered babies, and likely to merge with them, are cybernetic technologies.  In the most amazing ways, high-tech tools, implanted or attached to the human body, are bringing biology and technology together to repair, replace and augment human ability. The fields of neuroscience, biomechanics, robotics, mathematics, computer science, materials science and tissue engineering all play a role in the effort to use machines to help patients who have lost some control over their bodies, whether through accident or disease.  The MIT Biomechanics Lab is now building leg exoskeletons, which are robotic structures that run in parallel to the human limb.  Says Director Rodney Brooks:  “Imagine a future where instead of a bicycle rack, you go to a leg rack, and strap on these fancy pants and you'll be able to run anywhere your legs can take you, but without breathing hard. We will be putting more and more robotic technology inside us. What’s a robot, what’s us, is starting to get a bit messy.” The integration between the human brain and machines – a favorite theme of science fiction, often inspired by Orwell and Huxley - may not be far off.

Augmenting human capabilities may sound positive, but one of the main forces driving these developments is the U.S. military. Its strategists are looking for ways to carry on wars like the one in Iraq without paying the price in American lives. What could be better for that purpose than an army of robots and cyborgs with inexhaustible energy?  Some of the most famous and frightening science fiction works - from Blade Runner to The Matrix - have asked us to consider very, very carefully what these new creatures will be like.  As our servomechanisms, will they be capable of independent moral judgment and emotional attachments?  How will they act towards other humans, with benign or aggressive intent?

Hand in hand with genetic manipulation, Huxley foresaw various forms of social conditioning so powerful we might more accurately describe it as brainwashing. In fact, his vision seems more fresh and apt now than it did 75 years ago when he wrote Brave New World. Today, billboards along highways can automatically scan the airwaves to determine what incoming drivers are listening to and select appropriate ads to display. Multitudes of search engines and ‘cookies’ make it possible for internet businesses to tailor their advertising to the supposed needs of individual users.  Meanwhile, rich and powerful corporations able to subsidize such research are using medical technologies such as MRIs to experiment with modifying brain responses to commercial messages – and, indeed, to political messages, which are increasingly treated by wealthy political parties as commercial advertising.  It is only a matter of time, unless these technologies are regulated, before they are used by commercial forces to manipulate children, bringing us to the full expression of Huxley’s  ‘hypnopaedia’.

ORWELL/HUXLEY FUSION

Indeed, having firmly established the two authors’ main visions, a number of our stories will feature contemporary situations where Orwell’s and Huxley’s themes are present and fused into one complex reality. For, as our stories will clearly show, both men foresaw key aspects of contemporary reality which were not mutually exclusive, but now intertwine, reinforce and complement one another.

Technologically speaking, there are so many example of this fusion. One significant trend is the use of RFIDs (radio frequency identification devices) for simultaneous social/political surveillance and commercial targeting of consumers and messages. Another is the capability of security agencies or corporations to ‘data mine’ the users of search engines and interactive web networks such as Facebook.  Addicted to consumption and screen culture, as vividly imagined by Huxley, we are willingly providing huge amounts of information about our interests and habits, making ourselves easy victims of Orwellian surveillance schemes.

Another very troubling example of this hybrid reality is the burgeoning of a huge “militainment” sector.  For more than fifteen years now, the U.S. army, Silicon Valley and Hollywood have joined hands to produce multi-purpose simulated combat scenarios. These are used both to train soldiers for combat in the military and to attract – and condition – young video game players, helping to recruit to the military and to make killing an acceptable and event pleasurable exercise. These simulation products are helping to blur the lines between entertaining games and real-life killings, claim knowledgeable critics like former US Army Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman. He is a West Point psychology professor, chair of the Department of Military Science at Arkansas State University and author of several books.

But one must also acknowledge the fact that Huxley (at least in his earlier works) and Orwell, considered the most prescient of all novelists, missed out on the biggest story of our times, the environmental crisis that now challenges us at every level and in every place on this planet.  They did clearly identify many of the trends that have led to or aggravated the crisis, such as war, commercialism, over-consumption and the lack of caution in applying scientific advances – indeed, these are challenges we must meet as a species today if we are to successfully heal our biosphere and find answers to a twin crisis of environment and livelihood.  So in recognition both of the authors’ failure on this score, and of the overwhelming and primary nature of the environmental crisis, a lot of our stories and examples will have an environmental dimension, integrating this overarching problem into the fabric of the film from beginning to end.

If they were alive today, Orwell and Huxley would feel vindicated for many of the ‘dystopian’ trends they foresaw.  Doubtless they would feel deficient for having missed the big environmental story and as frightened as most of us about our abilities, as a species, to pull out of this crisis successfully.  At the same time, they might well be surprised – and delighted -- to see the amount of resistance to these trends, all over the world.  Huxley called for caution, for vigilance and for a greater awareness of the potential totalitarian power of scientific and technological innovation. Orwell called for a mobilization of the common people against power and privilege sustained by brute repression and elite omnipotence. These concerns are echoed in many civil society movements today.

And so we will give them – the Orwell and Huxley characters that is – some stories of resistance to consider. A struggle against a destructive pipe line project in Ecuador, for example, raises issues of science and technology, environmental impact, civil liberties and the possibility of affecting change though political action. We have a host of others to choose from, many related to the “example” stories we will choose.

Looking at how the visions of Orwell and Huxley have or have not come true in today’s world is in no way an academic exercise. These two authors were passionately concerned about the direction of world affairs, and their concerns were complementary and brilliantly accurate. Imagining what they would have to say to a thought-provoking  series of present day stories is a refreshing and persuasive way to think about solutions to the problems that afflict our world today.