What goes around comes around
(Even if we don’t realize it)
Published in 1969, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik describes a world of pre-cogs who can divine your intent and telepaths who can listen in on your most private thoughts. These are countered by “inertials” who have anti- talents corresponding to the various psychic talents. The inertials are available through “prudence agencies.” The psychic and prudence agencies are bitter rivals, often killing each other’s agents. You can have exactly as much privacy as you can afford.
Meanwhile, the world runs on micro-payments. It costs a nickel to operate the door to your apartment. All your appliances from toasters to ovens to refrigerators are coin operated, as are the elevators, television, and entertainment systems. You can’t even invite a date home if you lack funds to operate the basics your own apartment so in a way even relationships are coin operated. The entire population has been monetized at the point and moment of consumption and in every aspect of their lives.
When PKD wrote the book its deep emotional impact derived largely from the contrast between the complete acceptance by the characters in the story to this state of affairs versus the aversion the reader is intended to feel at the way value is harvested from the human population with the mechanical precision and efficiency of a factory farm. The reader cannot empathize with the protagonist without also imagining themselves in the coin-operated Panopticon in which the story is set, where the most mundane of daily tasks are monetary transactions and not even private thoughts are private.
I suspect that there was a period in the 80s and 90s Ubik was “merely” a dark and unsettling sci-fi romp. That was before we implemented the society Dick describes. Swap out pre-cogs for surveillance marketing, psychics for our FBI, NSA and the like. Prudence agencies become ad blockers and cryptoware. Instead of paying with coins, we pay for much of our daily experience with our attention but it’s still a transactional micropayment, extracting compensation at the point of consumption with the mechanical precision and efficiency of a factory farm just as Dick describes. Not that we lack coin operation to the degree it exists in the book. We just pay monthly instead of per-use, for example everything from Spotify, to Netflix, to smart lights, to smart door locks, to smart thermostats. Protagonist Joe Chip pays his landlord to operate his door, we pay Schlage. Same difference.
Though we haven’t implemented every element of PKD’s vision, when we do we often surpass his wildest dreams. For example, our surveillance isn’t nearly as invasive as his telepaths and pre-cogs. Yet. But his is imagined in the world of atoms where the scope of surveillance was limited by the laws of physics. The telepaths’ paranormal powers were not grounded in Newtonian physics but the supply of telepaths was finite and they required proximity to the target. It was impossible in Dick’s fictional world to surveil all the people all the time and you mostly could rest easy in privacy through mundane anonymity. If you weren’t interesting you enjoyed your privacy. Of course, in that case you were also among those least in need of it.
Today’s modern surveillance is based on bits instead of atoms which means we can surveil all of the people all of the time, whether they are interesting or not. This started with web browsing, spread to location tracking in our phones, and eventually we began to put surveillance into every personal device and repurposed the word smart as a euphemism for “data mining device.” We have “smart” forks and toothbrushes, footballs and basketballs, jewelry and watches, entertainment and game devices, appliances and outlets, cars and bikes, security systems, “smart” sex toys, and anything else you can think of. All of these devices phone home with data about their owner.
We also retain the surveillance data indefinitely and if some person becomes interesting at a future date, we can retroactively surveil them in minute detail. Over time as the surveillance data accumulates and as our analysis algorithms improve we are relentlessly narrowing the capabilities gap between digital surveillance and that of telepaths and pre-cogs. We aren’t yet as accurate and invasive, but have no illusion that value is not already being extracted from you with the mechanical precision and efficiency of a factory farm.
Modern readers know they are supposed to react emotionally to the surveillance and micropayment economy Dick paints as the background for the story. The plot is premised in part on this reaction and that assumption is reflected in plot devices, exposition, and character development. He practically clubs the reader over the head so it would be hard not to know we are supposed to be revulsed by it.
But that emotional impact relies on the delta between the world Dick describes and the one in which the reader lives. The more different these are, the greater the emotional impact of the story. When Ubik was first published it required the reader to imagine themselves in a micro-payment panoptical society. Today’s reader is required to imagine they are not. That’s more than a little terrifying.
