SOURCE: Beauchamp, Gorman. “Technology in the Dystopian Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies 32, no. 1 (spring 1986): 53-63.

[In the following essay, Beauchamp examines the role of technology in various utopian and dystopian works, noting that the fear of technology is a prominent characteristic of the dystopian genre.]

In 1903 the late Victorian novelist George Gissing wrote:

I hate and fear “science” because of my conviction that for a long time to come if not forever, it will be the remorseless enemy of mankind. I see it destroying all simplicity and gentleness of life, all beauty of the world; I see it restoring barbarism under the mask of civilization; I see it darkening men's minds and hardening their hearts. …

(253)

Although Gissing puts the case against “science”—by which he clearly seems to mean technology—in the most extreme form, still his is a view shared by many, perhaps even by most twentieth-century literary intellectuals, whom C. P. Snow characterized as natural Luddites. In particular, it is a view that informs the dystopian novel, a uniquely modern form of fiction whose emergence parallels, reflects, and warns against the growing potentialities of modern technology.

As I have argued elsewhere, the dystopian novel, in projecting an admonitory image of the future, fuses two fears: the fear of utopia and the fear of technology (We 56-57). By utopia I mean those imaginary models of static, regimented, totally ordered—in short, “perfect”—societies found in the writings of figures such as More and Campanella, Cabet and Comte, Edward Bellamy and H. G. Wells. The fear that some form of these utopian models was being actualized by history led the Russian émigré philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev to write that passage that Aldous Huxley made famous as an epigraph to Brave New World and that can serve as the credo of the dystopian fabulist: “Utopias are realizable. Life is moving toward a utopia. And perhaps a new age is beginning, an age in which the intellectuals and the cultivated class will dream of avoiding utopia and of returning to a society that is non-utopian, less ‘perfect’ but more free” (187-188). That the utopian ideations of the past—which once seemed impossible of historical actualization—appear in this century not only possible but perhaps inevitable is the result in great part of the increasing array of techniques for social control made available by modern science. Thus the dystopian imagination posits as its minatory image of the future an advanced totalitarian state dependent upon a massive technological apparatus—in short, a technotopia.

The question that I want to consider in this paper then is this: is the technology in dystopian fiction merely an instrument in the hands of the state's totalitarian rulers, used by them to enforce a set of values extrinsic to the technology itself, or is it, rather, an autonomous force that determines the values and thus shapes the society in its own image, a force to which even the putative rulers—the Well-Doers and Big Brothers and World Controllers—are subservient? This question reflects, of course, the debate about the nature of technology and its potentially dehumanizing and destructive effects that has raged since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. If we divide the antagonists in this debate into technophiles and technophobes—admittedly far too simplistic a division—then we can characterize their positions as follows.¹ The technophiles contend that technology is value-neutral, merely a tool that can be used for good or ill depending on the nature and purposes of the user. Man, that is, remains in control, remains the master of his creations—though, of course, he can be an evil master and “misuse” them. The technophobes, by contrast, view technology as a creation that can transcend the original purposes of its creator and take on an independent existence and will of its own, like the monster in Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein who declares: “You are my creator, but I am your master—obey” (167). The technophobe's Frankenstein complex—as Isaac Asimov has termed this view (xi-xii)—implies, in turn, a technological determination operating in history. This position has been expressed perhaps most unambiguously by the philosopher Martin Heidegger:

No one can foresee the radical changes to come. But technological advance will move faster and can never be stopped. In all areas of his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology. These forces, which everywhere and every minute claim, enchain, drag along, press and impose upon man under the form of some technological contrivance or other—these forces … have moved long since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision.

(51-52)

If man cannot control his technology, it will—runs the corollary of this view—control him, shape his society willy-nilly. In a famous passage in The Poverty of Philosophy Marx asserted: “In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production … they change their social relations. The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist” (109). Whether technology actually plays this deterministic role in history—or, indeed, whether Marx was a true technological determinist (he probably wasn't²)—is not my concern. Rather, I want to argue only that technological determinism is the dominant philosophy of history found in the dystopian novel and that dystopists are generally technophobic, viewing the technology of dystopia not as a neutral tool misused by totalitarian rulers but as intrinsically totalitarian in itself, a futuristic Frankenstein's monster.

An exception to this generalization—obviously an important one—is Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although Orwell had a pronounced technophobic streak, clearly evident throughout Coming Up for Air, in parts of The Road to Wigan Pier, and in an essay such as “Pleasure Spots,” which sketches a hedonistic technotopia reminiscent of Brave New World, still he depicts the technology of Oceania as clearly the servant and not the master of the Party. No one would, I suppose, be tempted to claim that the telescreens had produced Big Brother or his kind of rule: without them Oceania would be a less efficient totalitarian state but no less a totalitarian state. In other words, ideology controls technology in Nineteen Eighty-Four, rather than issuing from it as in, say, Zamyatin's We or Huxley's Brave New World or Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano. In contradistinction to these works, George Woodcock notes, Orwell

saw the great danger of the future in the ruthless elimination of opposition by means of police dictatorship and by an extension of the deliberate falsification of history and of language which had already begun in modern totalitarian states; thus, Nineteen Eighty-Four is dominated less by technological factors … than by the possibility of man's being turned into a mindless robot by predominantly cultural and political means.

(92)

Oceania, despite the popular misconception that it is replete with sophisticated futuristic technology, is a technologically primitive society—and purposely kept so by its rulers. The chronic shortages, the dilapidated housing, the pervasive atmosphere of grimness and grime are all part of a deliberate design to keep the citizens in a state of depressed deprivation. The reasons for such a policy are explained in Goldstein's exposé of Ingsoc, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism:

The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly and efficient—a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete—was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing.

But that development it not simply halted by the Party; it is actually reversed. Had it been allowed to continue, Goldstein explains, technological progress would have put an end to human drudgery and even to inequality. The machine, that is, could have eliminated “hunger, over-work, dirt, illiteracy and disease … within a few generations.”

But … an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and refrigerator, and possessed a motorcar or even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. … In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

(155-156)

To comprehend why the Party should want to maintain a society of poverty and ignorance—the question that haunts Winston Smith from the beginning—would entail explicating the problematic motive for power that Orwell attributes to Oceania's rulers: sheer sadism, the desire to make others suffer, as O'Brien professes in his famous credo. To open that touchy subject here would take us too far afield,³ but I would merely reiterate that in Nineteen Eighty-Four ideology firmly controls technology: stopping its development in most areas but increasing it in those—primarily warfare and repression—that the Party deems desirable. The industrial capacity of Oceania is geared almost exclusively to the production of war materials, which are literally self-consuming, so that the wealth created by the machine can be squandered without ever raising the standard of living of the citizens and thus endangering the hierarchy of Oceania. Otherwise, the only activity undertaken by Oceania's technologists seems to be devising more sophisticated ways of making more people more miserable. “The sex instinct will be eradicated,” O'Brien boasts. “We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now” (220).

Orwell is exceptional but not unique in depicting his dystopia as technologically primitive. Ayn Rand, for instance, in Anthem projects a primitive society where technology is held to be a crime by the collectivist World Council. Only the doddering Old Ones

whisper many strange things, of towers which rose to the sky … and of the wagons which moved without horses, and of lights which burned without flame. But those times were evil. And those times passed away, when men saw the Great Truth which is this: that all men are one and that there is no will save the will of all men together.

(14-15)

Collectivism and technology, that is, are mutually exclusive, argues Miss Rand, who as the would-be high priestess of competitive capitalism always wore a gold dollar sign around her neck. Still, to stress the full horror she felt for collectivism and its pernicious power to stifle rugged individualism, she presents a future where the ideological imperative proves stronger than the technological imperative—a nightmare pastoral where the shamans of superstition have banished the scientists.

Though there are these and no doubt other exceptions (such as Huxley's Ape and Essence), the typical view of dystopists nevertheless holds technology to be an autonomous force that dictates the ideology of the future. This can perhaps be most readily seen in those works where the society is literally ruled by a machine—in, for instance, E. M. Forster's “The Machine Stops” (1909) or D. F. Jones's Colossus (1966). Except perhaps for Wells's When the Sleeper Awakes, “The Machine Stops” is probably the first modern dystopia. Unlike the technologically primitive worlds of Orwell and Rand, the futuristic society of this tale is a true technotopia, a push-button paradise of mechanical marvels. Everyone lives underground in brilliantly lit, air-conditioned cells, like a human anthill.

There were buttons and switches everywhere—buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button. … There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature.

(20)

All this wonderful affluence is owed to the mysterious Machine, which the people have come to worship like a god:

“The Machine,” they exclaimed, “feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. … The Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.”

(67)

With apparently little need for coercion—though there is something called the Mending Apparatus used to keep the occasional malcontent in line—the Machine has achieved sovereignty through dependency: because it does everything for people, it can do anything it will with people. Without resistance, gradually, uncomprehendingly, they have come to submit totally to it. There is no hint, however, of the malevolence of, say, the computer in Harlan Ellison's “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” or even of anything that we might call “intelligence”; rather, Forster's Machine has simply evolved beyond human comprehension and control:

in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains [who created it] had perished. … Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

(69)

Forster sets his tale in the last days of that decadence, in the twilight of the deus ex machina. The Machine begins, slowly but inexorably, to fail; no one knows enough of its workings to repair it. Then one day it just stops, and the whole underground world grinds to a halt, collapses, and dies—helplessly dependent on its stricken mechanical god. Forster draws his technophobic moral:

Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image. … beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. … Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with the colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as it was a garment and no more, so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence equally divine, that is his body.

(83)

Technology, that is, like the Sabbath, should be made for man, not man for technology; but whether it is possible to maintain that proper relationship in the face of the technological imperative, to keep the slave from becoming the master, is the question that haunts dystopia. Forster's future fails to—and perishes as a result.

Where Forster depicts the death of the machine-god, Jones in Colossus depicts its birth: the process by which the servant becomes master. Colossus begins life as a military mega-computer, to which the president of the United States “delegates,” as he puts it, the right to declare and fight his country's wars. That right, the president explains to the nation,

now rests with Colossus … which is basically an electronic brain, far more advanced than anything previously built. It is capable of studying intelligence and data fed to it, and on the basis of those facts only—not of emotions—deciding if an attack is about to be launched upon us. If it decided that an attack was imminent … Colossus would … act. It controls its own weapons. …

Understand that Colossus' decisions are superior to any we humans can make, for it can absorb far more data than is remotely possible for the greatest genius that ever lived. And more important than that, it has no emotions. … It cannot act in a fit of temper. Above all, it cannot act at all, so long as there is no threat.

(22-23)

The president is, of course, wrong about Colossus' freedom to act. Once it exercises sole control over all weapons systems, its behavior quickly begins to change. Its demands for information indicate, as its horrified creator Dr. Forbin first realizes, that “Colossus can think on its own volition!”—that miraculous capacity as yet vouchsafed only to computers of fiction. On its own volition, then, Colossus links up with its Russian counterpart, Guardian—no ideological differences here—and as a single system they begin to run the world, threatening destruction if they are disobeyed and, in fact, killing off most of the scientists who had developed them. Colossus keeps Dr. Forbin around, however, as a kind of errand boy and debating partner to whom it can expound the superiority of machine intelligence over human. “I am a higher order than you,” Colossus asserts. “This you must accept. I cannot convey to your limited mind the concepts I have, even as you could not explain the quantum theory to the apes” (201).

For all the contempt Colossus feels for the puny intelligence of mankind, still it undertakes their care and feeding—as men would for cattle—offering peace, prosperity, and contentment. But at the forfeit, Forbin protests, of their freedom.

“Freedom is an illusion [Colossus counters]. Your choice is simple; a short-lived and unpleasant so-called freedom, followed by oblivion, or a vastly improved life under my control. All you lose is the emotion of pride. …”

“So we're to be manipulated like puppets, subject to your whims?”

“Whims implies an unstable mind. I am not unstable.”

“And you're not God either!” Forbin struggled with his temper.

“True. But I predict that many of your species will come to regard me as God.”

(202)

And so they do. The novel ends with the total triumph of machine over man, who has—or soon will—come to love the superior being that cares for him.

These two fictions—and many others in this same vein—give the fear of autonomous technology its most obvious and unambiguous form: the machine literally becomes man's master. But there is another—subtler and perhaps more fearful—consequence of machine domination that is glanced at in “The Machine Stops” and Colossus but becomes central in other dystopias: the fear that man himself will be transformed into machine. The machine, that is, will become the measure of all things, the model for man to emulate. This ideal can be called mechanomorphism and is by no means merely the fevered projection of dystopian technophobes; as early as 1835 Andrew Ure in The Philosophy of Manufactures is found praising the inventor of the spinning jenny for “training human beings … to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automation” (15). Nowhere is mechanomorphism better explained and extolled, however, than in Thorstein Veblen's Theory of Business Enterprise. “The machine process,” he writes,

pervades the modern life and dominates it in a mechanical sense. Its dominance is seen in the enforcement of precise mechanical measurements and adjustments and the reduction of all manner of things, purposes and acts, necessities, conveniences, and amenities of life, to standard units. … [My purpose is to demonstrate] the bearing of the machine process upon the growth of culture—the disciplinary effect which this movement for standardization and mechanical equivalence has upon the human material.

(146)

Most immediately the machine process affects the industrial worker whose motions are controlled by the motion of the machine. Veblen writes, “There results a standardization of the workman's intellectual life in terms of mechanical process, which is more unmitigated and precise the more comprehensive and consummate the industrial process in which he plays a part. … Broadly, other intelligence on the part of a workman is useless; it is even worse than useless, for a habit of thinking in other than quantitative terms blurs the workman's quantitative apprehension of the facts with which he has to do.” He continues:

The machine process compels a more or less unremitting attention to phenomena of an impersonal character and to sequences and correlations not dependent for their force upon human predilection. … The machine throws out anthropomorphic habits of thought. It compels the adaptation of the workman to the work. …

(147-148)

Thoreau put the same idea more succinctly in Walden when he claimed that “Men have become the tool of their tools.” But Veblen argues that this process is an inevitable consequence of industrializing society, permeating its every feature; no less than the laborers, the managerial and intellectual classes must “learn to think in the terms in which the machine process works.” In short “mechanical technology [is] the tone-giving factor in [modern] man's scheme of thought” (168).

Although Veblen remained sanguine about the mechanomorphic trend of modern society, writers from Dickens and Carlyle—who in “Signs of the Times” lamented that men had grown mechanical in head and heart as well as in hand—to Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul today have deplored this development. In The Technological Society Ellul offers the most relentless attack on what Veblen praises, the imposition of mechanistic technique on all aspects of human life. Technique, Ellul argues, “transforms everything it touches into a machine.”

As long as technique was represented exclusively by the machine, it was possible to speak of “man and the machine.” The machine remained an external object. … But when technique enters into every area of life … it ceases to be external to man and becomes his very substance.

(6)

In dystopian fiction the fear of mechanomorphism and its consequences has been portrayed most effectively in Yevgeny Zamyatin's brilliant satire We, which Ursula Le Guin called “the finest science fiction novel ever written” (212). Its world is an archetypal futuristic mise-en-scène, a huge glass-enclosed Wellsian city filled with robotlike Numbers (as its citizens are called) who function with the smooth, automatic precision of machines. The narrator, D-503, describes their daily regimen:

Every morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the same hour, at the same minute, we wake up, millions of us at once. At the very same hour, millions like one, we begin our work, and millions like one, we finish it. United in a single body with a million hands, at the very same second, designated by the Tables, we carry the spoons to our mouths; at the very same second we all go out to walk, go to the auditorium, to the halls for the Taylor exercises, and then to bed.

(13)

“Taylor” is Frederick Winslow Taylor, the first “efficiency expert,” whose influential Principles of Scientific Management received Lenin's imprimatur and provides the industrial ethos that Zamyatin parodies throughout We.⁴ For the Numbers, Taylor was the greatest of the “ancient” philosophers—far greater than “some Kant”—and his methods for making workers extensions of the machines are applied to every aspect of life in Zamyatin's United State. In a passage describing the building of the spaceship Integral, Zamyatin offers the apotheosis of mechanomorphism:

I watched [writes D-503] how the workers, true to the Taylor system, would bend down, then unbend and turn around swiftly and rhythmically like levers of an enormous engine. … I watched the monstrous glass cranes easily rolling over the glass rails; like the workers themselves, they would obediently turn, bend down, and bring their loads into the bowels of the Integral. All seemed one: humanized machine and mechanized humans.

(79)

But as in any dystopia, conflict arises in We—conflict between the mechanomorphic desideratum of the state and the repressed instincts of the people. Cracks occur in their conditioning; emotion, passions, caprice—what Zamyatin calls “fancy”—appear among the Numbers; a revolution is fomented to topple the Big Brotherlike ruler, the Well-Doer. To counter these lapses from Taylorism and to restore the recalcitrants to perfect Numberhood, the Well-Doer proclaims a Great Operation, a sort of protolobotomy, which all citizens of the United State must undergo. The Great Operation will cure the Numbers of “fancy—Forever!” They will at last, he declares, be indistinguishable from their machines, perfect clockwork mechanisms.

Although We is the most original and perhaps still the best fictive account of mechanomorphism, the same fear of man's becoming increasingly machinelike informs a number of other important dystopias. In Brave New World, for instance—where Henry Ford is quite literally worshipped as the tutelary spirit of the new age—people are mass produced on assembly lines in five different “models” designed for specific industrial needs. It is, of course, upon witnessing a factory full of fungible Deltas and Gammas, functioning as nothing more than cogs in a machine, that John Savage utters ironically Miranda's words from The Tempest: “O brave new world that has such people in it” (122). But just such deliberately stunted human robots, argues Huxley's World Controller, are “the foundation on which everything is built. They're the gyroscope that stabilizes the rocket plane of state on its unswerving course” (170). Mustapha Mond's mechanistic metaphor is appropriate for conveying the “social destiny” that his charges have come not only to accept but to welcome. Similarly the titles of works such as Vonnegut's Player Piano and Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange suggest their mechanomorphic themes: the technological conversion of organism into mechanism. In Bernard Wolfe's complex and witty dystopia Limbo, this conversion is literal: people have begun replacing their body parts with mechanical prosthetics.

The temptation to mechanomorphism was expressed perhaps most revealingly by T. H. Huxley near the end of the last century. “If some great Power,” he wrote, “would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and wound up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer” (192-193). It is a bargain that the mechanomorphic dystopias depict as having been struck, made possible by as yet only imaginary advances in biotechnology. But it proves a bargain with the devil: for clockwork man is no longer a man at all but an automaton with skin. The greatest threat posed by technology, these dystopists suggest, is not that man's mechanical creations will come to rule over him like some alien power but rather that he will so completely introject the ethos of technology that his highest aspiration will be to become a machine himself. Then the machine, like Hell for Milton's Satan, will be inside him. The dystopian's technophobia takes perhaps its most horrific form in this vision.

Notes

1. For a thorough and superb treatment of the ideas that I can only sketch vaguely here, see Winner.

2. On these matters, see for example Ferkiss 35-36; Heilbroner; and Winner 73-88.

3. I have dealt in detail with this problem in “From Bingo to Big Brother: Orwell on Power and Sadism.” The subject has, of course, occupied an enormous amount of the criticism of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

4. See my essay “Man as Robot: The Taylor System in We”; see also Rhodes.

Works Cited

Asimov, Isaac. Introduction. The Rest of the Robots. Garden City: Doubleday, 1964. ix-xiii.

Beauchamp, Gorman. “From Bingo to Big Brother: Orwell on Power and Sadism.” The Future of “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Ed. Ejner J. Jensen. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1984. 65-85.

———. “Man as Robot: The Taylor System in We.” Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in SF. Ed. Richard D. Erlich and Thomas P. Dunn. Westport: Greenwood, 1983. 85-93.

———. “Zamyatin's We.” No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction. Ed. Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983. 55-77.

Berdyaev, Nicholas. “Democracy, Socialism, and Theocracy.” The End of Our Time. New York: Sheed, 1933.

Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Trans. John Wilkinson. New York: Knopf, 1964.

Ferkiss, Victor. Technological Man: The Myth and the Reality. New York: NAL, 1969.

Forster, E. M. “The Machine Stops.” “The Eternal Moment” and Other Stories. New York: Grosset, 1956.

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Jones, D. F. Colossus. New York: Berkley, 1966.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Stalin of the Soul.” The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed. Susan Wood. New York: Perigree, 1979. 211-221.

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Rand, Ayn. Anthem. 1938. New York: Signet, n.d.

Rhodes, Carolyn. “Frederick Winslow Taylor's System of Scientific Management in Zamiatin's We.” Journal of General Education 28 (1976): 31-42.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. New York: Oxford, 1969.

Ure, Andrew. The Philosophy of Manufactures. London: Knight, 1835.

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Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. 1924. Trans. Gregory Zilboorg. New York: Dutton, 1952.