The Dead Past by Isaac Asimov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Happy goldfish bowl to you”

Asimov was remarkably prescient as both an intellect and a writer. The Dead Past demonstrates the reasons why on both counts.

Published in 1956, The Dead Past is concerned about the loss of privacy through modern technology long before home computers, digital surveillance, and governmental obsession with counter terrorism. He understood exactly what was at stake if our lives were to become ‘transparent’ to others. And he understood the moral issues involved - not just those of personal integrity, but the more general ones of the ethical limits to human curiosity. The central question he raises is whether or not there is ever reason for the suppression of scientific knowledge.

In 2013, Dave Eggers published his novel, The Circle (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), which covers the same ground as Asimov’s story. Set in a Microsoft-like high-tech ‘campus’, the employees are expected to submit to a regime of ‘total transparency’ as a condition of employment. They and their families are monitored continuously. Privacy, and therefore secrecy, including the secrecy required for lies and deceit, are, as in The Dead Past eliminated. And Eggers describes precisely the effects that Asimov suggested almost six decades previously - essentially the breakdown of familial and civil relationships under the strain of ‘truth’ revealed through technology.

As is typical of much of Asimov, there is also a complex background against which his moral tale is played out. The clash of culture between scientific and literate academics, the increasing funding and control of research by government, the compartmentalization of knowledge required by modern industry, fake news, and the questionable ethics of research are all topics Asimov touches in this short piece. Each of these became publicly acknowledged in politics often only substantially after Asimov raised them.

If a mark of the writer’s art is its continuing relevance to humanity long after the particular conditions in which it was conceived have faded, Asimov’s work has proven itself to be of the first rank. He only gets better, it seems, as technology and its implications move on.

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