On the first page of George Orwell's 1984, Winston Smith clambers up the stairs of his London apartment building and passes a poster of an enormous mustachioed face. "It was one of those pictures," Orwell writes, "which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move." Beneath the face runs that ominous warning: Big Brother is watching you. But not until Smith reaches his eighth-floor flat do we understand the extent of Big Brother's intrusion. Mounted on the wall of nearly every home in Oceania is a "telescreen," which the ruling party uses to transmit propaganda and watch citizens' every move.
Give Orwell credit for envisioning the flat-panel television two decades before RCA, then subtract a few points for his technopolitical prognostications. Orwell feared that one day a ruthless, omnipotent state would train cameras on its citizens, surveilling them into obedience. Yet as the gruesome digital photos from Abu Ghraib prison demonstrate, something different can happen. Instead of merciless totalitarians keeping the people in check, citizens can hold the state accountable. Today, armed with a cheap digital camera, Little Brother is watching.
That's what occurred at Abu Ghraib - by accident, if not by design. A small band of Army reservists from the 372nd Military Police Company took photos of themselves tormenting naked Iraqi prisoners to later use to threaten other captives (and apparently to amuse themselves). But networked technology, unlike Orwell's vision of a top-down system, is nearly impossible to control. Once those images leapt from a single disc to the Web, as such images inevitably do, they morphed from tools of submission into instruments of accountability. The photos led to the courts-martial of Americans on both sides of the camera. They sparked calls for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation and sent George W. Bush's approval ratings to the lowest level of his presidency.
The Pentagon thought that embedded journalists would provide Americans a window on the war and also offer the government an opportunity to shape public opinion. Little did Rumsfeld & Co. imagine that the soldiers themselves would be the embeds. "We're functioning in the information age," the defense secretary grumbled, "where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."
Rumsfeld's complaint is precisely the technology's virtue. Orwell never foresaw telescreens pointing in the other direction. A lone individual can now monitor a large institution and transmit the pictures to the entire planet. For example, in an effort to control the war's images, the Pentagon banned all unofficial photos of soldiers' coffins. But civilian contractor Tami Silicio snapped photos anyway, which soon pinged across the Internet. All it took was one person with a Nikon Coolpix and an email connection to defy a military with several million troops and a $400 billion budget.
There is a dark side to all these "weapons of mass documentation," as comedian Jon Stewart called them. Orwell was similarly prescient about this - at least in the abstract. In 1984 he imagines a government that rewrites history to serve its own aims. Winston Smith himself works for the Ministry of Truth, altering official records to reflect the ever-changing party line. (Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.)
Today, with all these citizen monitors, that sort of wide-scale manipulation is difficult for the state to accomplish. But technology makes smaller-scale manipulation preposterously easy for individuals. For instance, lost amid the hubbub over the Abu Ghraib photos was a minor UK scandal. The Daily Mirror published images of British troops urinating on Iraqi detainees and butting them with rifles. The country was horrified - until it was revealed that the images were fakes.
In the age of Photoshop, anyone can operate their very own Ministry of Truth. If reality bites, we can just defang it and alter the picture to better serve our aims. Power corrupts; digital power corrupts digitally. The result could be a Gresham's law of photography - a proliferation of images in which the fraudulent drives out the authentic. Or perhaps, bewildered by false documentation and unsure of whom to trust, we'll simply believe the images we want to believe - the ones that confirm our prejudices and ennoble our cause. Those instruments of accountability could morph again - into cudgels of confirmation whose purpose is as propagandistic and dishonest as the programs that blared through Winston Smith's telescreen.
So while we cheer the ability of individuals to keep an eye on those in charge, we should be wary - as Orwell would have cautioned - that technology is no substitute for integrity. In 2004, Big Brother can't hurt us, because Little Brother has the power. Be thrilled. Or worried. Or both.
Contributing editor Daniel H. Pink (dp@danpink.com) is author of A Whole New Mind.START
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