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The Only State, where We takes places, is ruled by a highly advanced mathematics of happiness, administered by a combination of programmers and machines. While love has been eliminated from the Only State as inherently discriminatory and unjust, sex has
not. According to the Lex Sexualis, the government sex code, "Each number has a right towards every other number as a sex object." Citizens, or numbers, are issued ration books of pink sex tickets. Once both numbers sign the ticket, they are permitted to
spend a "sex hour" together and lower the shades in their glass apartments.

Zamyatin was prescient in imagining the operation and also the underlying moral and intellectual foundations of an advanced modern surveillance state run by engineers. And if 1984 explored the opposition between happiness and freedom, Zamyatin introduced
a third term into the equation, which he believed to be more revolutionary and also more inherently human: beauty. The subjective human perception of beauty, Zamyatin argued, along lines that Liebniz and Searle might approve of, is innately human, and
therefore not ultimately reconcilable with the logic of machines or with any utilitarian calculus of justice.

In We, the rule of utilitarian happiness is embodied in the Integral, a giant computing machine/spaceship that will "force into the yoke of reason other unknown beings that inhabit other planets, perhaps still in a wild state of freedom." By eliminating
freedom and all causes of inequality and envy, the Only State claims to guarantee infinite happiness to humankind-through a perfect calculus that the Integral will spread throughout the solar system.

In reality, sexual relationships are a locus of envy and inequality in the Only State, where power rests in the hands of an invisible elite that has removed itself somewhere beyond the clouds. But the real threat to the ideal of happiness incarnated in
the Integral is not inequality or envy or hidden power. It is beauty, which isn't rational or equal, and at the same time doesn't exclude anyone or restrict anyone else's pleasure, and therefore frustrates and undermines any utilitarian calculus. For D-
503, dance is beautiful, mathematics is beautiful, the contrast between I-330's black eyes and black hair and white skin is also beautiful. Beauty is the answer to D-503's urgent question, "What is there beyond?"

Beauty is the ultimate example of human un-freedom and un-reason, being a subjectivity that is rooted in our biology, yet at the same time rooted in external absolutes like mathematical ratios and the movement of time. As the critic Giovanni Basile
writes in an extraordinarily perceptive critical essay, "The Algebra of Happiness," the utopia implied by Zamyatin's dystopia is "a world in which happiness is intertwined with a natural un-freedom that nobody imposes on anyone else: a different freedom
from the one with which the Great Inquisitor protects mankind: a paradoxical freedom in which there is no 'power' if not in the nature of things, in music, in dance and in the harmony of mathematics."

Against a centralized surveillance state that imposes a motionless and false order and an illusory happiness in the name of a utilitarian calculus of "justice," Basile concludes, Zamyatin envisages a different utopia: "In fact, only within the 'here and
now' of beauty may the equation of happiness be considered fully verified." Human beings will never stop seeking beauty, Zamyatin insists, because they are human. They will reject and destroy any attempt to reorder their desires according to the logic of
machines.

A national or global surveillance network that uses beneficent algorithms to reshape human thoughts and actions in ways that elites believe to be just or beneficial to all mankind is hardly the road to a new Eden. It's the road to a prison camp. The
question now-as in previous such moments-is how long it will take before we admit that the riddle of human existence is not the answer to an equation. It is something that we must each make for ourselves, continually, out of our own materials, in moments
whose permanence is only a dream.


David Samuels is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. He is a longtime contributor to Harper's, N+1 and The New Yorker.

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