2003: 'Swings and roundabouts'
https://twitter.com/JG_Ballard/status/378122126600855552
'Nothing is real, everything is fake'. J.G Ballard interviewed by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, published in the catalogue for the Beck's Futures art exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2003.
BALLARD: The totalitarian systems of the future will be subservient and ingratiating, the false smile of the bored waiter rather than the jackboot. We see this subservient Stalinism in London mayor Ken Livingstone's plans for controlling central London traffic. Hundreds of spy cameras, an army of wardens, a computerised surveillance system out of Alphaville – in short, an Orwellian nightmare come true, but disguised as a public service. Of course, there should be no parking or traffic restrictions of any kind. What we need are more roads, a huge system of overhead freeways on the Los Angeles pattern. But we are too brain-washed to demand this.
OBRIST: Do you see the recent shift of "acceptable" societal behaviour into increasingly conservative norms as one more potentially dangerous form of such control?
BALLARD: There are swings and roundabouts. The loss of freedom in the surveillance society is balanced by the huge gain in freedom and possibility found in the internet. On the whole there is a loss in freedom, and the danger is that people may move into the area of psychopathology in order to enlarge the scope of their lives and imaginations.
