In The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling combine their efforts to produce a darkly disturbing ‘alternate history’ of the nineteenth century. Gibson and Sterling describe Victorian England, with a twist: Charles Babbage’s difference engine, the first computer, is immensely more powerful and pervasive than it was in our real time line. Gibson and Sterling take the repressed, disciplined society which first invented the Panopticon, and give it massive computing power. The result is, as one might expect, horrifying. Citizens are given numbers and ID cards (rather as they are in many actual contemporary societies), and the Victorian government maintains vast stores of computerized data on all of its subjects. A good example of this computerized Victorian disciplinary regime is the Quantitative Criminology section of the Central Statistics Bureau: ‘The QC section was a honeycomb of tiny partitions, the neck-high walls riddled with asbestos-lined cubbyholes. Gloved and aproned clerks sat neatly at their slanted desks, examining and manipulating punch-cards with a variety of specialized clacker’s devices.’ Surely this vision of well-disciplined workers in a vast, cubicle-riddled office building is quite familiar to any citizen of the West in the late twentieth century. But somehow it becomes more sinister when Gibson and Sterling project it back into the nineteenth century. Gibson and Sterling perform the admirable service of making the carceral society that we take for granted into something slightly strange, and in so doing they increase its susceptibility to analysis and critique.
Lewis Call, Postmodern Anarchism (Lexington, 2002), pp. 135–6.
