William Gibson wishes George Orwell a happy hundredth birthday.

It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret.

In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.

I say “truths,” however, and not “truth,” as the other side of information’s new ubiquity can look not so much transparent as outright crazy. Regardless of the number and power of the tools used to extract patterns from information, any sense of meaning depends on context, with interpretation coming along in support of one agenda or another. A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what’s going on more quickly, but that doesn’t mean we’ll agree about it any more readily.

Orwell did the job he set out to do, did it forcefully and brilliantly, in the painstaking creation of our best-known dystopia. I’ve seen it said that because he chose to go there, as rigorously and fearlessly as he did, we don’t have to. I like to think there’s some truth in that. But the ground of history has a way of shifting the most basic of assumptions from beneath the most scrupulously imagined situations. Dystopias are no more real than utopias. None of us ever really inhabits either — except, in the case of dystopias, in the relative and ordinarily tragic sense of life in some extremely unfortunate place.NY Times op-ed

20 questions: “Is there power? Health care? How many troops remain? How many people died? In Baghdad,… some lingering questions about the aftermath of the war in Iraq”. The Globe and Mail [thanks, walker]

A sneak preview of the president’s 2004 campaign: “Presumably by accident, somebody left a live prototype of President Bush’s 2004 campaign site on the Web for a few hours today. (It’s locked up behind a password now, so all links in this item are to snapshots Slate took earlier.)” Slate chatterbox. Pitiful, superficial and arrogant is how this beta preview seems to me.

‘The once frowned-upon practice is no longer the exception but the rule,’ , argues Saul Bellow’s son, a writer himself. His upcoming book, In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History argues that the US is undergoing a revival of the ‘hereditary principle’ — to put it more bluntly, nepotism — in areas as diverse as business, sports, entertainment, the arts, and politics.

Sean Lennon and Jakob Dylan have record contracts. Laila Ali is a boxer. Sofia and Roman Coppola make movies. Their cousin Nicolas Cage is an Oscar-winning leading man. Michael Douglas, the scion of another Hollywood acting clan, appears in his latest film, It Runs in the Family, alongside his father, mother and son. Susan and Ben Cheever write fiction.

For the first time in 20 years, a Ford – William Clay Ford Jr. – is in charge of Ford Motor Co. And presiding at the White House is a man whose father once held the position, too. (At The New York Times, the job of publisher has been reserved forthe job of publisher has been reserved for family members for more than a century.) International Herald Tribune

Does someone succeed in the profession of their accomplished forebears because their name brings added value in that field; because they are assumed in some sort of genetic paradigm to have more of the “right stuff” and thus given an ‘in’; or because they do in fact have some heritable endowment in areas pertinent to success in that field? Bellow feels the ‘new nepotism’ is only partially the social fiction it was in days of old, instead tempered by meritocratic factors, and that this paradigm should be considered a ‘great achievement’ of our society.

This is Bellow’s provocatively contrarian claim: Today’s nepotism is good because it combines an admirable devotion to family with a principled commitment to merit. Having the right blood ties might win you entrée in your chosen field, but if you fail to perform, you’re unlikely to last. Or as Bellow serenely put it: “A famous name gets your foot in the door, but if the door slams on your face, it’s you who says ouch.”

Others noting the dynastic trend have been less sanguine about it. Even, lo and behold, Andrew Sullivan, pondering the Bush succession, worried that the only other nations that have recently passed power from father to son have been North Korea, Syria and Jordan.

[Let us hope Michael Powell does not have a future in the Dept. of State…]

Related:

At least 17 senators and 11 members of the House have children, spouses or other close relatives who lobby or work as consultants, most in Washington, according to lobbyist reports, financial-disclosure forms and other state and federal records. Many are paid by clients who count on the related lawmaker for support. LA Times

What do Fascism’s belligerent founding father and our own democratically elected Prime Minister have in common? “Every now and again, as I wander about town, my mind drifts from Mussolini and Fascism, the subject in hand, to another matter: Tony Blair and New Labour. Odd, but I cannot help noticing that Blair and Mussolini have rather a lot in common. I am not saying that Blair has consciously copied Mussolini. But Blair, probably without even realising it, does seem to have imbibed quite a few things from the Duce.” Independent/UK