The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick

  The totalitarian society envisioned by George Orwell in 1984 should have arrived by now. The electronic gadgets are here. The government is here, ready to do what Orwell anticipated. So the power exists, the motive, and the electronic hardware. But these mean nothing, because, progressively more and more so, no one is listening. The new youth that I see is too stupid to read, too restless and bored to watch, too preoccupied to remember. The collective voice of the authorities is wasted on him; he rebels. But rebels not out of theoretical, ideological considerations, but only out of what might be called pure selfishness. Plus a careless lack of regard for the dread consequences that the authorities promise him if he fails to obey. He cannot be bribed because what he wants he can build, steal, or in some curious, intricate way acquire himself. He cannot be intimidated because on the streets and in his home he has seen and participated in so much violence that it fails to cow him. He merely gets out of its way when it threatens, or, if he can’t escape, he fights back. When the locked police van comes to carry him off to the concentration camp, the guards will discover that while loading the van they have failed to note that another equally hopeless juvenile has slashed the tires. The van is out of commission. And while the tires are being replaced, some other youth siphons out all the gas from the gas tank for his souped-up Chevrolet and has sped off long ago.

  The absolutely horrible technological society—that was our dream, our vision of the future. We could foresee nothing equipped with enough power, guile, or whatever to impede the coming of that dreadful, nightmare society. It never occurred to us that the delinquent kids might abort it out of the sheer perverse malice of their little individual souls, God bless them. Here, as in [sic] case in point, are two excerpts from the media; the first, quoted in that epitome of the nauseating, Time, is—so help me—what Time calls the “ultimate dream in telephone service once described by Harold S. Osborne, former chief engineer at AT&T: Whenever a baby is born anywhere in the world, he is given at birth a telephone number for life. As soon as he can talk, he is given a watchlike device with ten little buttons on one side and screen on the other. When he wishes to talk with anyone in the world, he will pull out the device and punch on the keys the number. Then, turning the device over, he will hear the voice of his friend and see his face on the screen, in color and in three dimensions. If he does not see him and hear him, he will know that his friend is dead.”

  I don’t know; I really don’t find this funny. It is really sad. It is heartbreaking. Anyhow, it is not going to happen. The kids have already seen to that. “Phone freaks,” they are called, these particular kids. This is what the L.A. Times says, in an article dated earlier this year:

  They (the phone freaks) all arrived carrying customized MFers—multifrequency tone signals—the phone-freak term for a blue box. The homemade MFers varied in size and design. One was a sophisticated pocket transistor built by a Ph.D. in engineering, another was the size of a cigar box with an acoustical coupler attaching to the phone receiver. So far, these phone freaks had devised twenty-two ways to make a free call without using credit cards. In case of a slip-up, the phone freaks also know how to detect “supervision,” phone-company jargon for a nearly inaudible tone that comes on the line before anyone answers to register calling charges. As soon as phone freaks detect the dreaded “supervision,” they hang up fast.

  Captain Crunch was still in the phone booth pulling the red switches on his fancy computerized box. He got his name from the whistle found in the Cap’n Crunch breakfast cereal box. Crunch discovered that the whistle has a frequency of 2,600 cycles per second, the exact frequency the telephone company uses to indicate that a line is idle, and, of course, the first frequency phone freaks learn how to whistle to get “disconnect,” which allows them to pass from one circuit to another. Crunch, intent, hunched over his box to read a list of country code numbers. He impersonated a phone man, gave precise technical information to the overseas operator and called Italy. In less than a minute he reached a professor of classical Greek writings at the University of Florence.

  This is how the future has actually come out. None of us science fiction writers foresaw phone freaks. Fortunately, neither did the phone company, which otherwise would have taken over by now. But this is the difference between dire myth and war, merry reality. And it is the kids, unique, wonderful, unhampered by scruples in any traditional sense, that have made the difference.

  Speaking in science fiction terms, I now foresee an anarchistic, totalitarian state ahead. Ten years from now a TV street reporter will ask some kid who is president of the United States, and the kid will admit that he doesn’t know. “But the president can have you executed,” the reporter will protest. “Or beaten or thrown into prison or all your rights taken away, all your property—everything.” And the boy will reply, “Yeah, so could my father up to last month when he had his fatal coronary. He used to say the same thing.” End of interview. And when the reporter goes to gather up his equipment he will find that one of his color 3-D stereo microphone-vidlens systems is missing; the kid has swiped it from him while the reporter was babbling on.

  If, as it seems we are, [sic] in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, human individual would be: Cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities. If the television screen is going to watch you, rewire it late at night when you’re permitted to turn it off—rewire it in such a way that the police flunky monitoring the transmission from your living room mirrors back his house. When you sign a confession under duress, forge the name of one of the political spies who’s infiltrated your model-airplane club. Pay your fines in counterfeit money or rubber cheks or stolen credit cards. Give a false address. Arrive at the courthouse in a stolen car. Tell the judge that if he sentences you, you will substitute aspirin tablets for his daughter’s birth control pills. Or put His Honor on a mailing list for pornographic magazines. Or, if all else fails, threaten him with your using his telephone-credit-card number to make unnecessary long-distance calls to cities on another planet. It will not be necessary to blow up the courthouse anymore. Simply find some way to defame the judge—you saw him driving home one night on the wrong side of the road with his headlights off and a fifth of Seagram’s VO propped up against his steering wheel. And his bumper sticker that night read: Grant Full Rights to Us Homosexuals. He has, of course, torn off the sticker by now, but both you and ten of your friends witnessed it. And they are all at pay phones right now, ready to phone the news to the local papers. And, if he is so foolish as to sentence you, at least ask him to give back the little tape recorder you inadvertently left in his bedroom. Since the off-switch on it is broken, it has probably recorded its entire ten-day reel of tape by now. Results should be interesting. And if he tries to destroy the tape, you will have him arrested for vandalism, which in the totalitarian state of tomorrow will be the supreme crime. What is your life worth in his eyes compared with a $3 reel of Mylar tape? The tape is probably government property, like everything else, so to destroy it would be a crime against the state. The first step in a calculated, sinister insurrection.

  I wonder if you recall the “brain mapping” developed by Penfield recently; he was able to locate the exact centers of the brain from which each sensation, emotion, and response came. By stimulating one minute area with an electrode, a laboratory rat was transfigured into a state of perpetual bliss. “They’ll be doing that to all of us, too, soon,” a pessimistic friend said to me regarding that. “Once the electrodes have been implanted, they can get us to feel, think, do anything they want.” Well, to do this, the government would have to let out a contract for the manufacture of a billion sets of electrodes, and in their customary way, they would award the contract to the lowest bidder, who would build substandard electrodes out of secondhand parts.

  The techn
icians implanting the electrodes in the brains of millions upon millions of people would become bored and careless, and, when the switch would be pressed for the total population to feel profound grief at the death of some government official—probably the minister of the interior, in charge of the slave-labor rehabilitation camps—it would all get folded up, and the population, like that laboratory rat, would go into collective seizures of merriment. Or the substandard wiring connecting the brains of the population with the Washington, D.C., thought control center would overload, and a surge of electricity would roll backward over the lines and set fire to the White House.

  Or is this just wishful thinking on my part? A little fantasy about a future society we should really feel apprehensive about?

  The continued elaboration of state tyranny such as we in science fiction circles anticipate in the world of tomorrow—our whole preoccupation with what we call the “anti-utopian” society—this growth of state invasion into the privacy of the individual, its knowing too much about him, and then, when it knows, or thinks it knows, something it frowns on, its power and capacity to squash the individual—as we thoroughly comprehend, this evil process utilizes technology as its instrument. The inventions of applied science, such as the almost miraculously sophisticated sensor devices right now traveling back from war use in Vietnam for adaptation to civilian use here—these passive infrared scanners, sniperscopes, these chrome boxes with dials and gauges that can penetrate brick and stone, can tell the user what is being said and done a mile away within a tightly sealed building, be it concrete bunker or apartment building, can, like the weapons before them, fall into what the authorities would call “the wrong hands”—that is, into the hands of the very people being monitored. Like all machines, these universal transmitters, recording devices, heat-pattern discriminators, don’t in themselves care who they’re used by or against. The predatory law-and-order vehicle speeding to the scene of a street fracas where, for example, some juvenile has dropped a water-filled balloon into the sports car of a wealthy taxpayer—this vehicle, however fast, however well-armed and animated by the spirit of righteous vengeance, can be spotted by the same lens by which its superiors became aware of the disturbance in the first place… and notification of its impending arrival on the scene can be flashed by the same walkie-talkie Army surplus gadget by which crowd control is maintained when blacks gather to protest for their just rights. Before the absolute power of the absolute state of tomorrow can achieve its victory it may find such things as this: When the police show up at your door to arrest you for thinking unapproved thoughts, a scanning sensor that you’ve bought and built into your door discriminates the intruders from customary friends and alerts you to your peril.

  Let me give you an example. At the enormous civic center building in my county, a fantastic Buck Rogers type of plastic and chrome backdrop to a bad science fiction film, each visitor must pass through an electronic field that sets off an alarm if he has on him too much metal, be it keys, a watch, a pair of scissors, bomb, or .308 Winchester rifle. When the hoop pings—and it always pings for me—a uniformed policeman immediately fully searches the visitor. A sign warns that if any weapon is discovered on a visitor, it’s all over for him—and the sign also warns that if any illegal drugs are found on a visitor during this weapons search, he’s done for, too. Now, I think even you people up here in Canada are aware of the reason for this methodical weapons search of each visitor to the Marin County Civic Center—it has to do with the tragic shootout a year or so ago. But, and they officially posted notice of this, the visitor will be inspected for narcotics possession, too, and this has nothing to do with either the shootout or with any danger to the building itself or the persons within it. An electronic checkpoint legitimately set up to abort a situation in which explosives or weapons are brought into the Civic Center, has been assigned an added police function connected with the authentic issue only by the common thread of Penal Code violation. To visit the county library, which is in that building, you are subject to search—must, in fact, yield absolutely and unconditionally—for possession without the juridical protection, built into the very basis of our American civil rights system, that some clear and evident indication exist that you may be carrying narcotics before a search can be carried out against you. During the search I’ve even had the uniformed officer at the entrance examine the books and papers I was carrying, to see if they were acceptable. The next step, in the months to come, would be to have such mandatory check-points at busy intersections and at all public buildings—including banks and so forth. Once it has been established that the authorities can search you for illegal drugs because you’re returning a book to the library, I think you can see just how far the tyranny of the state can go. Once it has provided itself with an electronic hoop that registers the presence of something we all carry on us: keys, a pair of fingernail clippers, coins. The blip, rather a quaint little sound, which you set off, opens a door not leading to the county library but to possible imprisonment. It is that blip that ushers in all the rest. And how many other blips are we setting off, or our children will be setting off, in contexts that we know nothing about yet? But my optimistic point: The kids of today, having been born into this all-pervasive society, are fully aware of and take for granted the activity of such devices. One afternoon when I was parking my car on the lot before a grocery store, I started, as usual, to lock all the car doors to keep the parcels in the backseat from being stolen. “Oh, you don’t have to lock up the car,” the girl with me said. “This parking lot is under constant closed-circuit TV scan. Every car here and everyone is being watched all the time; nothing can happen.” So we went inside the store, leaving the car unlocked. And, of course, she was right; born into this society, she has learned to know such things. And—I now have a passive infrared scanning system in my own home in Santa Venetia, connected with what is called a “digital transmitting box,” which, when triggered off by the scanner, transmits a coded signal by direct line to the nearest law-enforcement agency, notifying them that intruders have entered my house. This totally self-operated electronic detection system functions whether I am home or not. It is able to discriminate between the presence of a human being and an animal. It has its own power supply. If the line leading from it is cut, grounded, or even tampered with, the signal is immediately released, or if any other part of the system is worked on. And Westinghouse will reinstall it wherever I live: I own the components for life. Eventually, Westinghouse Security hopes, all homes and businesses will be protected this way. The company has built and maintains a communications center near each community in this country. If there is no police agency willing or able to accept the signal, then their own communications center responds and guarantees to dispatch law enforcement personnel within four minutes—that is, the good guys with the good guns will be at your door within that time. It does not matter if the intruder enters with a passkey or blows in the whole side of the house, or as they tell me it’s being done now, bores down through the roof—however he gets in, for whatever reason, the mechanism responds and transmits its signal. Only I can turn the system off. And if I forget to, then—I suppose, anyhow—it’s all over for me.

  Someone suggested, by the way, that perhaps this passive infrared scanner sweeping out the interior of my house constantly “might be watching me and reporting back to the authorities whatever I do right there in my living room.” Well, what I am doing is sitting at my desk with pen and paper trying to figure out how to pay Westinghouse the $840 I owe them for the system. As I’ve got it worked out now, I think that if I sell everything I own, including my house, I can—oh, well. One other thing. If I enter the house—my house—and the system finds I’m carrying illegal narcotics on my person, it doesn’t blip; it causes both me and the house and everything in it to self-destruct.

  Street drugs, by the way, are a major problem in the area where I live—that is, the illegal drugs you buy on the street are often adulterated, cut, or just plain not w
hat you’re told they are. You wind up poisoned, dead, or just plain “burned,” which means, “You don’t get off,” which means you paid $10 for a gram of milk sugar. So a number of free labs have been set up for the specific purpose of analyzing street drugs; you mail them a portion of the drug you’ve brought and they tell you what’s in it, the idea being, of course, that if it has strychnine or flash powder in it, you should know before you take it. Well, the police saw through into the “real” purpose of these labs at one glance. They act as quality-control stations for the drug manufacturers. Let’s say you’re making Methedrine in your bathtub at home—a complicated process, but feasible—and so every time a new batch comes out, you mail a sample to one of these labs for analysis… and they write back, “No, you haven’t got it quite right yet, but if you cook it for perhaps just five minutes longer…” This is what the police fear. This is how the police mentality works. And, interestingly, so does the drug-pusher mentality; the pushers are already doing precisely that. I don’t know—to me it seems a sort of nice idea, the drug pushers interested in what they’re selling. Back in the old days they cared only that you lived long enough to pay for what you purchased. After that, you were on your own.