ABSTRACT
Political activity merely strengthens government. Conservatives are doomed to ineffectiveness, liberals driven to expand government or abandon their idealism. Liberals, in their eagerness to solve public problems, will insist that government massively apply technology to their solution. Conservatives, seeing in computerized government a multiplied threat to freedom, will intensify their Kamikaze attacks on big government. Socialist George Orwell's vivid 1984 described a world without freedom, a world in which machines are used as instruments of tyranny to perceive and punish even the most timid expression of individuality. Yet the superstition that only government can focus today's technology on social problems has become a mental reflex. Even more frightening are the predictions that technology will be used to control and homogenize men. Friedrich von Hayek and Orwell both show that technology magnifies the threat of tyranny, or, in other words, the coming of a one-sector society.
