Sony hack heralds the arrival of Orwell’s nightmare

Nothing is really private in this cyber world, as Deborah Williams notes in the aftermath of the hacking of Sony.

The Interview, a movie starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, is thought to have been the target of cyber terrorists who attacked Sony's computere. Photo: Ed Araquel / AP

I think I broke the law yesterday. I read not one but several articles that quoted material from the now infamous “Sony hack.” You’ve probably seen some of those articles too, which reveal an unsavoury side of Hollywood that we all knew existed but seldom see so starkly. It’s enough to make one wonder if we shouldn’t all be using carrier pigeons to communicate, or perhaps even talk to one another IRL, as they say. After all, if Amy Pascal (co-chief of Sony) had been talking “in real life” with Scott Rudin, perhaps they wouldn’t have so blithely joked about slavery movies being the viewing choices at the Obama White House.

Given Ms Pascal’s “jokes” about the president’s taste in movies and the fact that she helped greenlight The Interview, a so-called assassination comedy about Kim Jong-Un, a dictator not known for his sense of irony, I have to wonder a bit about her sense of humour. But having a bad sense of humour shouldn’t precipitate what the US is now calling a cyberterrorism attack. A group calling themselves the Guardians of Peace, apparently acting on orders from North Korea, orchestrated these attacks to stop the release of The Interview.

One marvels at the fact that a country would go to such lengths for something so seemingly trivial. Did nobody say to Kim Jong-Un: “Relax, it’s just a movie?”

What the Guardians did is clearly illegal, a breach not only of international law but also personal privacy, which is why I’ve been reading the tawdry details revealed by the hack with a combination of guilt and Schadenfreude. I know I shouldn’t reward illegality with my attention, and yet at the same time, there is some small pleasure in watching the mighty be brought low. I mean, if the studio is going to keep pumping out Adam Sandler movies, even though Sony employees call the movies “mundane and formulaic,” shouldn’t someone be punished?

There is hubris at work here, too: didn’t Amy Pascal and others realise what we’re all supposed to know about online life? Nothing on a computer ever dies, it just floats in the ether: embarrassing photos and kitten videos mixed with credit card numbers, passwords and emails filled with things you probably shouldn’t have said. As for those of you who claim that Snapchat and similar apps solve this problem, think again. Security experts insist that even deleted material stays lurking on a server somewhere.

But have any of us really learnt this lesson? Think about what would happen if your emails complaining about your ridiculous boss suddenly became public reading material. Let’s face it: in private, none of us are always at our best.

And that’s the rub, isn’t it? “In private” used to be, well, private. But the concept of the private sphere seems to be eroding faster than the polar ice cap. CCTV cameras everywhere, ID cards that track us as we swipe us in and out of offices: we live with a level of scrutiny that even George Orwell couldn’t imagine.

The Guardians of Peace don’t call themselves “thought police”, but their actions may well have the same effect as those figures from Orwell’s novel. We have found ourselves in a virtual panopticon, the structure designed by 18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, in which an observer sits in the centre of a circle looking out at inmates who do not know from moment to moment whether they are being watched. There is no privacy in the panopticon other than what people can find in their own minds – and given enough time even the mind will conform to what it thinks the watchers want.

The Sony hack did not reveal any corporate malfeasance but it did reveal the deep vulnerability of our networked lives. Will we all eventually be forced to live in the constant cold light of public scrutiny? Who is watching us, and when? And can we ever elude the watchers? Those questions have fuelled generations of dystopian fantasies, but now they are no longer just the stuff of cinema. Now those questions are IRL.

Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her novel The Time Locket (written as Deborah Quinn) is now available on Amazon