Paycheck

My two favorite science or speculative fiction writers are the late Philip Dick and Roger Zelazny. While I tend to favor the latter in my recreational reading, with his beautiful floral prose and the incredible power of his myth mining, Dick had a cold prescience of the future that was startling in both its accuracy and dark foreboding.

Philip Dick

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was the real father of cyberpunk, Gibson, Stevenson and the dystopian like that followed owe much to him. Bester may have had a glimpse beforehand but Dick fleshed out the coming darkness thoroughly.

I was thumbing through the Philip Dick Reader the other day and I reread the story Paycheck. It was written in 1952, published in Imagine in June of 1953 and is remarkable in its predictive vision. I understand a crappy movie was once made of it that had little resemblance to the short story, I never saw it.

Dick visualized a future world where the rights of the citizen were largely extinguished but the powers of the corporation were basically unfettered. A man wakes up after being used for a two year job with his brain scrubbed and finds that he has kept the random keys to his awakening and memory close at hand.

...But the real problem right now was not a problem of speculation. It was very concrete. The Security Police were looking for him. They had his name and description. There was no use thinking of going to his apartment -- if he even still had an apartment. But where, then? Hotels? The SP combed them daily. Friends? That would mean putting them in jeopardy, along with him. It was only a question of time before the SP found him, walking along the street, eating in a restaurant, in a show, sleeping in some rooming house. The SP were everywhere.
Everywhere? Not quite. When an individual person was defenseless, a business was not. The big economic forces had managed to remain free, although virtually everything else had been absorbed by the Government. Laws that had been eased away from the private person still protected property and industry. The SP could pick up any given person, but they could not enter and seize a company, a business. That had been clearly established in the middle of the twentieth century.
Business, industry, corporations, were safe from the Security Police. Due process was required. Rethrick Construction was a target of SP interest, but they could do nothing until some statute was violated. If he could get back to the Company, get inside its doors, he would be safe. Jennings smiled grimly. The modern church, sanctuary. It was the Government against the corporation, rather than the State against the Church.

It is hard for me to read this short story now and not think of the Citizens United SCOTUS case, where Corporations were granted the free speech privileges of human beings in order to deliver unlimited donations and shield their donors from public eye. The rights of corporations have been greatly extended while the rights of regular citizens have tended to suffer.

Philip Dick saw it, or something very much like it, coming way back in 1952. Like he saw so many other things. He had one thing wrong, he didn't get that the government and the corporations would, rather than fight with each other, tend to consolidate their power and work together against the individual citizen but Ike wasn't there yet to tell him to beware the military industrial complex. That wouldn't happen until 1961.

Nexus - One

Google, the information titan and behemoth that graciously provides me the free working space to host this blog, announced its new Android 2.1 mobile phone this week. I have mixed emotions about the release. I had no knowledge of it when I bought it's simpler country cousin, the droid several months ago, a piece of hardware that is now looking so, well, 2009.

The tangible benefits to the new phone seem fairly benign, more text recognition, minor bells and whistles added. Snapdragon processor and a removal of the physical keyboard, something I would personally hate. (The flat droid keyboard requires a fingernail, while my old blackberry was more of a fingertip affair.) Touchscreens do not give enough of a firm reaction for serious typers or texters.

It strikes me as a bit odd that the company licenses its OS and then tries to compete with its supposed partners, in my case Motorola. I would have liked to know about this phone prior to signing my new two year agreement with Verizon.

But the other thing about this product that sort of frosts me as a sci fi buff is the name, Nexus One. The late Philip Dick was one of my two favorite authors along with Roger Zelazny. The Nexus One was the name of his android class in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? You know, the book that Ridley Scott fashioned the seminal movie hit Bladerunner out of.

When I power up my droid, George Lucas gets a little residual for coining the word for Star Wars. But the deceased Philip Dick is dead, he has no juice, and his intellectual property rights get stomped on.  Nexus One is such a clear rip off sobriquet for an android. Couldn't they have used a little creativity and came up with something novel?

I would have hoped that Google could show a little more class and respect for one of the true visionaries in twentieth century literature. They started out as a very cool company but after the fiasco in China and now this, you have to wonder if they are losing their soul.