When 1984 rolled around and the only Big Brother in sight was the one getting trashed in Apple’s Super Bowl commercial, a lot of people thought George Orwell was wrong. Those people were making the mistake of interpreting Orwell’s book as a prediction, instead of a warning. Winston Smith, the protagonist in the story, was’nt even sure what year it was. But that’s the risk you take when you write speculative fiction and pin it to a particular year.
Have you noticed the recent commercials talking about the coming switch to high definition television? The Future is coming, and if you currently have a television set that gets its signal with an antenna, you’ll need a converter box after February 17, 2009. The government is going to subsidize your purchase of that box, if you’re one of the people who need one. That’s very nice of your government.
Conspiracy-minded individuals, or folks who think Orwell’s warnings are still worth worrying about, might recall the television sets in 1984 that have built-in cameras so the Ministry of Truth can monitor everyone in their homes.
Cable converter boxes work both ways. They send as well as receive data. Old-style television sets with rabbit ear antennas on the top are incapable of that little trick.
Hmm.
Another piece of speculative fiction comes from Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2005. In Countdown to a Meltdown, James Fallows writes from the point of view of a political strategist in 2016, recalling the events that led to economic disaster. According to Fallows, here is where America stands in 2016:
- Our country no longer controls its economic fundamentals.
- Compared with the America of the past, it has become stagnant, classbound, and brutally unfair.
- Compared with the rest of the world, it is on the way down. We think we are a great power—and our military is still ahead of China’s. Everyone else thinks that over the past twenty years we finally pushed our luck too far.
Fallows is scarily accurate but may have missed the timing on his speculation. I sure wish we had eight more years.