It's hard to believe [the names of several electronic surveillance firms] are real, but they seem to be. Life is a dystopic novel?
.................
The other day, I began re-reading John Brunner's "Shockwave Rider".
The novel was written in the long ago world of the 1970s. According to historians, women and men proudly sported hairy crotches and amiably chatted about something called "the jet set" (often at the same time) during that exotic decade.
"Shockwave Rider" tells the story of Nick Haflinger, an early 21st century hacker who wants, among other things, to achieve anonymity.
In earlier eras, this wouldn't be an impossible dream; just walk out of the village and poof! Problem solved.
But as surveillance technologies - and the will to use them - developed and grew it became increasingly difficult to be un-known. Even the proverbial desert island provided no refuge from the system's never sleeping eye.
Brunner's 21st century isn't a pleasant place: some government agency or corporation is always watching, analyzing, pattern matching and searching for breaches of apparently limitless laws and regulations.
When I first read the book - sometime in the mid 1980s - it felt like a cool diversion, a proto-cyberpunk foundation text, harbinger of a state of mind, a way of thinking about complex data systems that I woke up to, as if from a dream. How could you call yourself a steel eyed keyboard jockey if you hadn't absorbed "Shockwave Rider"?
Now it feels like a brick to the head, a slap across the face on a sub-zero day - the sense of recognition is sharp and hard. It scarcely seems like fiction anymore.
.d.