If today a new Humbert Humbert, the celebrated character in Lolita, were to leave home with a young girl, we’d be able to find out all about him. The satellite navigator in his car would tell us where he is and where he’s going; his credit cards would show which motel he’s been at and whether he booked one or two rooms; the closed-circuit television in supermarkets would show him buying a porno magazine rather than a newspaper, and if he gets a newspaper we could discover his political leanings; if he buys a Barbie doll at the supermarket, we can assume the girl is still underage; and if he links up to a pedophile site on the Internet, we could draw our own conclusions. Even if Humbert Humbert hasn’t yet committed any crime, we could decide he has dangerous inclinations and think it a good idea to have him arrested. If, then, the young girl happens to be his niece, and if this person’s private fantasies didn’t in fact lead to any criminal acts, no matter: it’s better to have one more innocent person in prison than a dangerous loose cannon in society.
All of this can now be done. Furio Colombo, in his book Privacy, adds a small touch of science fiction and imagines a device that makes it possible to monitor not just behavior but also thought. Build into it a belief that prevention is the supreme good, and there you have it. By comparison, Orwell’s 1984 is a fairy tale with a happy ending.
Reading Furio Colombo’s book, you might wonder whether we’re not already nearing the future it predicts. I’d like to use his book as a pretext for imagining a game halfway between the present reality and the future he foretells.
The game is called Brothers of Italy but can be played just as well in other countries, and is a refinement of Big Brother. Instead of people sitting in front of a television to watch the goings-on of a few half-wits put into an artificial situation, by extending supermarket monitoring systems to the entire urban setting, to every street and public building, perhaps even to private homes, viewers could follow hour by hour, minute by minute, the daily goings-on of other citizens as they wander the streets, do their shopping, make love, work, come to blows over some minor car accident. Great fun. It would make reality seem far more exciting than fiction. The taste for voyeurism and gossip in each of us would be given free rein.
I can’t pretend that it wouldn’t raise certain problems. Who is watching, and who is performing? At first, those who watch would be the ones who didn’t have anything better to do, whereas the action and entertainment would come from those who did. Later it may turn out that some preferred not to be seen, but to stay at home and watch others. But the monitoring would also reveal the private lives of those watching, and sixty million viewers could end up watching sixty million viewers in real time, prying on the expressions on their faces. And most probably, since it’s becoming increasingly important to be seen, everyone would perform so as to be seen. But who then would watch? They would all need a small portable viewer in which, as they perform, they could see others performing. We could be left with sixty million people behaving abnormally while they watch the others behaving abnormally as they stumble about performing while watching their tiny portable televiewer. In short, we’d have a real treat in store.
2001