Nineteen Eighty-Four in the British Telephone System

Futures ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 173-191
Author(s):  
Jacob Ward
Keyword(s):  
Computer Simulation ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Predictive Power ◽  
George Orwell ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Transformative Power ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
Telephone System ◽  
System P ◽  
British Telecom

This chapter explores science fiction, computer simulation, and Thatcherism in the long-range and business planning departments of the British Post Office’s Telecommunications Division and its successor, British Telecom, as Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government transferred telecommunications from public monopoly, run by the Post Office, to liberalized corporation, run by British Telecom. Ward charts the negotiations between simulated and literary utopias and dystopias, analysing managerial representations of information technology’s transformative power. Managers understood computer simulations as interactive futures, bringing techno-moral changes of predictive markets and emancipatory electronics from the future to the present. They dismissed the dystopias of H. G. Wells and George Orwell as outdated, in contrast to the computer’s predictive power, but in doing so, these managers tacitly accepted the ‘hypersurveillant’ power of computer simulation, where customers could be simulated and surveilled ahead of time. Ward thus highlights digital utopianism’s contradictory values of deregulation, personal freedom, and technological planning.

‘The Pragmatist’s Solution to Poverty’

2019 ◽  
pp. 125-144
Author(s):  
Peter Sloman
Keyword(s):  
Low Income ◽  
Income Tax ◽  
Tax Credits ◽  
Basic Income ◽  
British Government ◽  
Conservative Government ◽  
System P ◽  
Low Income Families ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Negative Income Tax

The ‘rediscovery of poverty’ prompted a wide-ranging debate over how the British government could best support low-income families. One radical response came from Edward Heath’s Conservative government, which published plans to replace the whole system of personal tax allowances with refundable tax credits—the closest any British government has come to introducing a Universal Basic Income. This chapter examines the origins of the Tax Credit Scheme in 1971–2, which was devised by special adviser Arthur Cockfield in response to the rising cost of tax administration and the difficulty of establishing a selective Negative Income Tax in Britain. As the plans took shape, however, the cost of introducing the reforms on a no-losers basis became a source of growing concern within government. Indeed, Treasury officials were relieved when Labour’s victory in the February 1974 election made it possible to jettison the scheme and focus on simplifying and computerizing the PAYE system.

Testing the Moral Status of Artificial Beings; or “I’m Going to Ask You Some Questions …”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael LaBossiere
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Presumption Of Innocence ◽  
System P ◽  
Moral Theories

While sophisticated artificial beings are still the stuff of science fiction, it is reasonable to address the challenge of determining the moral status of such systems now. Since humans have spent centuries discussing the ethics of humans and animals, a sensible shortcut is to develop tests for matching artificial beings with existing beings and assigning them a corresponding moral status. While there are a multitude of moral theories addressing the matter of status, the focus is on two of the most common types. The first comprises theories based on reason (exemplified by Kant). The second comprises theories based on feeling (exemplified by Mill). Regardless of the actual tests, there will always be room for doubt. To address this, three arguments are presented in favor of the presumption of status, similar to that of the presumption of innocence in the legal system.

Hierarchical glass transition of hard hemidisks with local assemblies

Soft Matter ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (35) ◽  
pp. 8108-8113
Author(s):  
Wei Zheng ◽  
Qun-Li Lei ◽  
Yuqiang Ma ◽  
Ran Ni
Keyword(s):  
Computer Simulation ◽  
Glass Transition ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
System P

Using computer simulation, we investigate the glass transition of a two-dimensional hard-hemidisk system.

Introduction: The Tracks at Cedar Springs

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
William deBuys
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Historic Site ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Main Road ◽  
The People ◽  
System P ◽  
General Store ◽  
National Park System ◽  
And Storage

March 1919 . Somebody killed the trader at Cedar Springs. The murderer also set fire to the trading post, and soon the dried-out floor planks and the roof beams and split-cedar ceiling erupted in smoke and flame. Except for its sandstone walls, the building would have burned to the ground. The next day a plume of smoke still hung in the Arizona sky, and people from miles around came to see what was the matter. Few automobiles had reached the windy expanses of the Navajo Reservation in those days, and men and women of all ages filed in by foot and horseback and in their buggies and buckboards. The first ones to arrive found the corpse of Charley Hubbell. Cedar Springs was less than a crossroads, not really a hamlet. It stood within a circle of rough-sided buttes a few miles east of the main road between Hopi and Winslow. It consisted of a combined general store, trading post and post office, plus various pens and corrals. Navajos from a considerable distance came to exchange sheep and handcrafts for the things they needed. Charley Hubbell lived at the trading post and presided over what went on. The people who found his body dispatched a messenger on a fast horse toward Ganado, fifty miles northeast, to find Charley’s nephew Lorenzo, who was known throughout Navajo country. A man of giant girth and matching gravitas, Juan Lorenzo Hubbell had bought the Ganado trading post forty years earlier. With acumen and persistence he built a string of almost thirty such establishments from one end of Navajo country to the other. In many cases he appointed members of his large, mixed Anglo and Hispanic family to run them. The post near Ganado, to which the messenger was sent, served as his home and headquarters. Together with its broad sprawl of barns, corrals, and storage sheds, it is preserved today as Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site, a unit of the National Park System.

Resources for a Journey of Hope: Raymond Williams on Utopia and Science Fiction

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Milner
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
George Orwell ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Interest In Science ◽  
Selective Tradition ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Future ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Science Fiction Studies ◽  
The City

Raymond Williams had an enduring interest in science fiction, an interest attested to: first, by two articles specifically addressed to the genre, both of which were eventually published in the journal Science Fiction Studies; second, by a wide range of reference in more familiar texts, such as Culture and Society, The Long Revolution, George Orwell and The Country and the City; and third, by his two ‘future novels’, The Volunteers and The Fight for Manod, the first clearly science-fictional in character, the latter less so. This article will summarise this work, and will also explore how some of Williams’s more general key theoretical concepts – especially structure of feeling and selective tradition – can be applied to the genre. Finally, it will argue that the ‘sociological’ turn, by which Williams sought to substitute description and explanation for judgement and canonisation as the central purposes of analysis, represents a more productive approach to science fiction studies than the kind of prescriptive criticism deployed by other avowedly ‘neo-Marxist’ works, such as Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction and Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future.

The UK Post Office, British Telecom and the law

1983 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 304-306
Author(s):  
Paul Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Post Office ◽  
The Law ◽  
British Telecom ◽  
The Uk
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