Author of the forthcoming novel 1994 and After, Peter Huber is a lawyer
and writer. He earned a doctorate in mechanical engineering from MIT and
served as assistant and later associate professor at MIT for six years.
His law degree is from Harvard Law School. He clerked on the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals for then Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg and then on
the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. He is a senior
fellow of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and serves as
counsel to the Washington, D.C., law firm of Kellogg, Huber & Hansen.
His professional expertise is in telecommunications markets and
antitrust policy.
Huber is the author of The Geodesic Network (U.S. Dept. of Justice,
1987), the report filed by the Department of Justice with Judge Harold
Greene on the occasion of the 1987 review of the AT&T divestiture
decree; coauthor of The Geodesic Network II: 1993 Report on Competition
in the Telephone Industry (Geodesic Publishing, 1992); and author of
Federal Telecommunications Law (Little, Brown, 1992), Liability (Basic
Books,1988), and Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom (Basic
Books, 1991). He is an editor of The Liability Maze (Brookings
Institution, 1991) and Phantom Risk: Scientific Inference and the Law
(MIT Press, 1993). Huber writes a regular column for Forbes, and his
articles have appeared in scholarly journals (including Harvard Law
Review and Yale Law Journal), magazines (The New Republic, Regulation,
Science), and many newspapers. He has appeared on "Face the Nation,"
"McNeil-Lehrer News Hour," and numerous other television and radio
programs.
Peter Huber's forthcoming novel has been described as a book that flips
George Orwell's nightmarish vision of 1984 into a "utopia." We asked
him just how he did that.
"Roughly speaking," Huber answered, "Orwell imagined the world of Stalin
filled with networked Apple computers--'telescreens'--and concluded that
it would be more horrible than any ever before imagined. He was wrong.
Orwell understood Stalin perfectly. But he did not understand the
telescreen. In my book 1994 I begin with the dystopia that Orwell leaves
us with at the end of 1984, and I paint a picture of how Orwell's--(and
now our)--information and communication technology would in fact destroy
Big Brother and eliminate the Thought Police."
We pressed him to explain how Big Brother and the Thought Police would
meet their fates, but Huber politely demurred. "Oh, let me leave a bit
of suspense to the book itself. But the general point is straightforward
enough: Better computing and communicating machines produce, overall,
more--not less--communication, more--not less--free expression, more--
not less--political involvement, more--not less--freedom of thought.
Telescreen technology gives far more freedom than it takes."
It seemed to us to be an amusing premise, so we asked Huber whether his
1994 is a funny book.
"Well, it's about as funny as Orwell's 1984, which of course isn't funny
at all, until you grasp just how wrong Orwell was, and then it's quite
amusing. I'm sure some people will think my book is funny in just the
same way."
Since the world sometimes divides between technological optimists and
technological pessimists, we asked him whether he thought of information
and communication technology as essentially benign, capable of leading
us in fact to a utopia. Did he see no dark side to it at all? Could it
destroy Big Brother (good) while at the same time be contributing to
social disintegration (bad)?
"Orwell tended to see things in similar terms," Huber told us. "What
shall it be: the Darwinian horrors of unfettered competition, or a
dedicated sect of central planners serving as eternal guardians of the
weak? A city teeming with police patrols, or a city in which every armed
citizen is a police force of one? Autocrats, who govern everything, or
anarchists, who govern nothing? The communist's centralism and cut-
throat efficiency, or the anarchist's liberty and cut-throat equality?
The single-minded unity essential to a nation in times of war, or the
suicidal herd instinct of Gadarene swine in times of peace? All these
neatly paired choices are false--falser today than ever before. An
extremely free--almost anarchistic--form of society is now completely
compatible with a high degree of cooperation. Freedom and organization
can be reconciled. Cooperation can be by consent. New technology
contains the power to forge a new kind of brotherhood, an equal dignity
among people who choose freely to collaborate amongst themselves.
"For the first time in history, it is possible to have brotherhood
without Big Brother. That doesn't mean the technology is 'inherently
benign.' Technology is neither inherently good nor inherently evil, it's
just powerful. With that said, computers and telephones are evolving
today in a way that decentralizes and disperses authority, without
leaving people in anarchistic isolation. I view that tendency as
benign."
Although Peter Huber's 1994 turns George Orwell's 1984 upside-down,
Huber has enormous respect for Orwell and has read everything Orwell
ever wrote.
"At his best," says Huber, "Orwell is more than brilliant. His best is
1984. That book still casts a dark shadow over every advance in
telegraphy, telemetry, telephony, and television--which is to say, all
the telecommunications technology that is transforming the fabric of our
lives today. No one who has actually read Orwell can go a week without
remembering him in one context or another. At any moment, some scene or
neologism that comes from this one short book, which you hardly even
remember the name of, is liable to drop into your mind. 'Big Brother.'
'The Thought Police.' 'Newspeak.' 'Doublethink.' 'Reality Control.'
These were all created by Orwell in 1984, which is not so much a book as
it is a world. Through 1984, Orwell has done what very few writers ever
do: he has added not only phrases but his own name to the English
language. There are books that one reads over and over again, books that
become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole
attitude to life, and1984 is one of them. Whether you approve of him or
not, Orwell is there, like the Washington Monument.
"1984 isn't his only great work, of course. Orwell's essays are in some
respects better than his books. 'Politics and the English Language.'
'Shooting an Elephant.' 'A Hanging.' No young man or woman should leave
high school without reading these three great classics. They are simply
magnificent in the way they're written.
"Finally, Orwell takes on the issues that endure. If one has once read
Orwell with attention, it is not easy to go a day without quoting him,
because there are not many subjects of major importance that he does not
discuss or at least mention somewhere or other, in his unsystematic but
illuminating way. 1994 is my imaginary dialogue with George Orwell. It
is a strange thing to have a 300-page conversation about contemporary
problems with a man who has been dead more than forty years; with most
long-dead men such an exercise would be a waste of time. But all of
Orwell's important thoughts remain fresh, and his concerns still
preoccupy us."
We couldn't resist asking Huber to speculate on how he and Orwell would
get along if Orwell were alive today. Would Orwell say that he--Orwell--
had been wrong? or would he repudiate Huber? or could the two of them
come to terms over a glass of beer?
"I would like to think we would come to terms," Huber said confidently.
"If Orwell had lived to the age of eighty-two, as his own father did, he
would have died in 1985. A life that long would have allowed him to read
history's own review of 1984 and given him time to compose his own
letter to the editor in reply. He admitted error in other things readily
enough--always in a spirit of reflection and honest, self-critical
inquiry. He was never a man afraid to face facts, even facts that
contradicted what he himself had once believed. As often as not, he had
already written the contradiction himself. Orwell thrived on what he
called 'doublethink,' the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in
one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them. He would have seen
the other side, if he'd been given enough time."
We mentioned to Huber that Neil Postman, the media critic who was a
featured speaker at last year's Educom conference, noted that Aldous
Huxley contrasted his own Brave New World with Orwell's 1984 by saying
that in Orwell's book, people were controlled by inflicting pain,
whereas in Brave New World, they were controlled by inflicting pleasure;
Postman thinks that the information technologies are degrading American
life by reducing public conversation to a kind of baby talk.
"Well," said Huber, "I don't think that Huxley has it right when he says
that the key to control in 1984 was inflicting pain. The last section of
the book--and the least well remembered, the least effective--does
concern torture and brainwashing. But government's control of the
citizenry in 1984 has little to do with pain, or even terror. The key is
electronic surveillance--the 'telescreen.' Orwell says this quite
explicitly in the middle of the book, where he explains how the '1984'
society emerged: 'By comparison with that existing today, all the
tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. . . . Part of
the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to
keep its citizens under constant surveillance. . . . But with the
development of television, and the technical advance which made it
possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument,
private life came to an end. . . . Every citizen, or at least every
citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-
four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of
official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed.
The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of
the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now
existed for the first time.'"
Huber continued: "And I don't agree with the 'baby talk' criticism of TV
either. Of course television includes a vast wasteland, a Sahara Desert
of the intellect. But it also contains much new and valuable
information. And in any event, television is very fundamentally
different from two-way communication.
"Television does indeed have a tendency to become a mass opiate, because
it is a limited, one-way medium, with the content controlled at
comparatively few, centralized points. Old-fashioned broadcast has
always been the technological darling of despots and dictators. Goebbels
loved the radio. His political successors have always adored television.
There's nothing a man like Fidel Castro or Kim Il Sung appreciates more
than a broadcast studio and a couch potato.
"Two-way telecommunication is fundamentally different. It lets people
talk back. Opinion polls, call-in shows, and electronic town meetings
usurp the 'mediating function' of people like Neil Postman--or me. The
middleman in the dialogue of democratic government is cut out of the
process, in much the same way as Sears is cut out by mail order catalogs
and 800 numbers. I don't think the tendency of that kind of technology
is to impoverish the human intellect."
And what does Huber think of the current flurry of merger talks?
"Telephone and cable technologies are converging fast. Both telephone
and cable already pass over 90 percent of U.S. homes. With yesterday's
analog technology, two-way voice and one-way video weren't easy to
combine. But in the digital world, a byte is a byte: the same networks
readily carry voice, video, and data. Telcos have the technology to
deliver television over their networks. Cablecos have the technology to
provide telephone service over cable networks combined with wireless
add-ons. It is the obvious competitive possibilities arising from the
convergence of cable and telephone that triggered the avalanche of
megadeals that captured the business headlines throughout 1993. All of
the cable/telco deals, such as Southwestern Bell Cox/Hauser, US
West/Time Warner, BellSouth/Prime, NYNEX/Viacom, and Bell Canada/Jones,
join businesses that provide service in different geographic markets.
The Bell Atlantic/TCI merger was to be the largest and it attracted the
most discussion, but it was only one among many. None of the deals
involve horizontal consolidation of competing networks within the same
local market. The future in this kind of environment is not monopolistic
Big Brotherhood; it is intense competition among a fractious, rivalrous
brood of Hatfields and McCoys."
Huber's 1991 book Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom
(recently released in paperback) is a withering (and highly
entertaining) attack on certain kinds of academics who will serve as so-
called "expert witnesses" to support spurious lawsuits. We wondered
whether there has been much of that kind of activity in the area of
information technology.
"I'm sure there have been lots of bad predictions," Huber told us.
"Generally, the far futurists--Orwell and McLuhan spring to mind--take
the biggest risks and are eventually proved to be the most flamboyantly
wrong. In the 1960s, a lot of computer pundits believed in Grosch's law,
according to which large computers would always be more powerful, pound
for pound, than smaller ones. The whole country was going to end up
being run by one or two supermachines, probably located at O'Hare
airport. The microprocessor has proved all of that flamboyantly wrong,
of course. The Japanese have made a spectacularly bad call with HDTV
[high-definition television]. They should have read George Gilder, who
predicted their HDTV disaster perfectly about five years ago. Somewhere
in Japan now there are a bunch of technovisionaries who are (or should
be) looking for new employment."
With his novel finished, Huber's next project is another
telecommunications book, intended for a general audience. "I hope to
finish it in the next few months. I'm also working on an update to my
Federal Telecommunications Law treatise."
We asked Huber--engineer, telecommunications and antitrust lawyer, and
novelist--to examine his career, explain how things happened, and
predict what he sees for himself personally in the future.
"Well, I was happily teaching engineering at MIT when I finished my law
degree (on the side). And then an obscure appellate judge in Washington,
D.C., Ruth Bader Ginsburg, offered me a clerkship, and I took a
sabbatical to accept it. After that, Justice Sandra O'Connor offered me
another clerkship, which I couldn't turned down. The Department of
Justice then invited me to do a large study on the aftermath of the Bell
breakup [published as The Geodesic Network, 1987]. I got into the habit
of writing law/science/technology policy books, and have been at it ever
since.
"For the future, more of the same, I suspect. I have several smaller
projects on environmental law and liability still going. Writing the
Orwell book was exceptionally fun. I also expect to complete a second
telecommunications treatise sometime in the next year or two."
Obviously, a Renaissance man. But that's absurd. Peter Huber's not a
Renaissance man; he's a man of modern times: 1994 and after (to be
precise!).