The Arrows of Time

‘For those rare cases where some future informant and present-day recipient might act together out of spite to violate your wish not to be informed of certain events, we can discourage that with appropriate punishments. Nobody is claiming that this technology will transform us into a flawless society, but people have survived over the ages without any perfect, pre-emptive cure for hurtful gossip or malicious slander. Words can damage people, I acknowledge that, but it’s nothing new. We’ll find the right balance in our laws to protect against the worst kinds of harm, just as we’ve done in the past.’

Agata had been stealing glances at the timer with her rear gaze and adjusting her pace. Now she waited a moment for it to start ringing, then reached down to silence it.

Ramiro took her place. ‘Agata has expressed a touching faith in the power of the law and technology to protect us from unwanted personal revelations,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe that her faith is warranted, but even if it were that wouldn’t be enough to make this system benign.

‘As I speak, many of you – I hope – are still struggling to decide how you’ll vote on this question. And when the result is declared, that will surely be a public matter. The announcement won’t be an invasion of anyone’s privacy, an act of libel, or anything else that could fairly or sensibly be punished. And yet if you’d known the result in advance, wouldn’t you feel that your own personal decision-making process had been altered? Of course you’d still be free to vote in accordance with your wishes, but the whole sequence of contesting thoughts – all the private debates inside your own skull that led you to that final action – would be playing out in a very different context.’

Ramiro checked the timer; he was still less than halfway through his quota, but he was not going to let himself get cut off again.

‘Knowing even the most mundane facts from the public record will crush our political lives, flattening our inner dialogues into a choice between impotent rage and apathetic conformity. Of course we’re accustomed to being helpless after the fact to reverse a vote that goes against us, but remember: the results of elections and referenda that we know in advance will not be guaranteed to be the same as they would have been in the absence of foreknowledge. We won’t be hearing about a future that would have happened regardless – as every proponent of this system will affirm, because if that were true it could never yield any benefits. Rather, we’ll be reshaping the whole process by which we make decisions – at the political level without a doubt, but I believe that the same kind of distortion will afflict every aspect of our lives.’

Ramiro waited for the satisfying punctuation of the bell, but then he realised that he’d rushed through his final words too quickly and left himself with time to fill. ‘For example,’ he extemporised, ‘decisions about births and child-rearing are as difficult as any we face, but it won’t take prying clerks to disclose our final choices to us once we hear from a child whose very existence had been in doubt.’ He caught a look of bafflement on one woman’s face, and an expression of outright hostility on another’s. ‘It’s not that a message like that need be unwelcome, but if we flatten the deliberation process, then just as with the vote—’

The timer interrupted him. Ramiro punched it, then slunk backwards.

Agata took centre stage, pausing just long enough to let Ramiro’s awkwardness linger and become fixed in everyone’s minds. ‘If you don’t want to read the result of some future referendum, I’m sure you won’t have to,’ she declared. ‘And if mere rumours of the result prove to be too hard to avoid, they could always be camouflaged with competing rumours. People could choose to learn the true result in advance from some trusted informant if they wished, but those who didn’t would end up hearing a range of false claims as well, with no way to distinguish between them.’

Ramiro waited for someone in the audience to ridicule this inane proposal, but they let it pass without complaint. Maybe they all liked the idea of taking advantage of their idealistic neighbours, who’d be wrapped in shrouds of scrupulously balanced, government-supplied misinformation.

‘This system could vastly improve our safety,’ Agata contended, ‘as Ramiro and everyone else acknowledges. We can deal with the privacy issues, and the political ones: your vote will always be your own to cast, and you’ll have the choice of knowing the outcome in advance or not, as you wish. But you don’t need to take my word for any of this. The present vote is merely for a year’s trial in which we can discover what the real problems are – and if, in the end, you find that they outweigh the advantages you’ll be free to change your mind and vote to have the system dismantled.