Nineteen Eighty-Four in the British Telephone System

Abstract

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 They dismissed the dystopias of H. G. Wells and George Orwell as outdated, in contrast to the computer’s predictive power, but in doing so, these managers tacitly accepted the ‘hypersurveillant’ power of computer simulation, where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.