How long does it take for a twisted wrist to recover? It's had two days and my patience has expired. Just have to administer more single malt sedative and keep going. Beware of typos. I'm prone to missing keys at the moment.
Anyhow, with the pseudonymous ghost book in the bag, I'm back to the dystopia. In it, there are no political parties. The government is the Coalition which long ago absorbed all individual parties. This was sold to the drones as a fairer form of government in which all parties have a say. What they didn't mention was that there is nobody in opposition any more. No debates, so no need to televise or even report on Parliament at all.
There are elections. The Coalition choose the candidates and the people vote for the one they want, but it doesn't matter because the 'nobody loses' children are all grown up now so all the candidates get in anyway.
There are no party members in the general population. Orwell's 1984 had government, party members and proles. All I have is government and proles. No need for general party members since all candidates get in so there's no point canvassing, and the Coalition funds itself from taxes (an idea kindly provided by a chap called Clegg) so has no need for membership fees. This means they don't need the unions either so those are gone.
I thought this was outlandish enough to keep me far enough ahead of real life for a change. Then I took a look at Fausty's place and thought some very bad words. I'm going to have to write faster even if I have to do it with a stick taped to my nose.
Well, I still have the homes. All homes are owned by the Coalition and they, or rather the locally unelected council, decide which one you get to live in. I had to come up with a way for the Government to own all private property. They couldn't just steal it, there would be riots, and no way would anyone ever believe they bought it.
It was easy in the end. Banks foreclose on properties all the time. They lend you money knowing full well you'll never be able to keep up repayments and then they get the house, plus they keep everything you've paid towards it so far. All I had to do was have the Coalition lend 100% mortgages to suckers and then foreclose on them. It might take a couple of generations but eventually the Government owns every house. Well, except those owned by the rich but by this stage only the Government and a few of the big industrialists are rich.
That surely has to be in the realms of fantasy. So imagine my dismay when I visited Dioclese.
I was thinking of naming this 2084 as a homage to Orwell but that's much too far away. I think all books will be banned long before then. There are no paper books, magazines or newspapers in the story, by the way. All abolished to save the planet. You get everything on an iBook-like pad and if Winston Smith's equivalent edits something, all copies change at once. There is no option to print anything out, there are no printers and possession of paper is a criminal offence.
I have the precursor on my desk. It's called a Kindle and it is perfectly capable of updating itself even if I'm not using it.
There has to be a way for the rebellious youth to let off steam without threatening the system at all. There is always rape, murder, sadistic torture and theft, and they are allowed to do all that as long as they don't do it to anyone connected to the Government. That part is pretty much here anyway. That just leaves organised protest from the inevitable malcontents and freedom subversives.
They can protest with a licence (already here) and the Government will print approved placards and have copywriters produce non-offensive slogans for them for a fee. The Government permits dissent and is willing to assist the people in getting their voice heard, all they have to do is abide by the guidelines.
Would that ever happen? Would people be daft enough to pay those they protest against to supply them with their materials?
Yes. Yes they would. (Kudos for that post title, by the way.)
As titles go, the original 'Ghosthunters' was pointed out by several people as being misleading. It's true, especially as I write ghostly things too. '2084' was a pretty idea but not practical. I have some other ideas but a decision on titles can wait until the thing's finished.
If I'm going to put a time reference in the title, I'm thinking along the lines of 'The middle of next week'.
Maybe, by the time it's done, 'The middle of last week'.
Hell, I might as well call it 'Here is the news'.
8 comments:
The protesters typically protest that the existing policies of the government need to be followed through "more rigorously". And they are paid by the government to do so. Oh, sorry, we have that already.
True, their real slogan is 'Less Freedom Now' and most of them don't even realise it.
Dear Mr Leg-iron
Seemingly the ConDem-olition™ already plan 95% mortgages which is practically 100%.
Allegedly George Orwell was going to call the book 'The Last Man' or something similar. Instead he chose date of the year he wrote or published it ('48), reversed.
Following Orwell's format you could call your book ‘Twenty Twenty One’ or ‘Two Thousand and Twenty One’.
I hope this helps
DP
It's called a Kindle and it is perfectly capable of updating itself even if I'm not using it.
And that's one of the main reasons I bought a Sony instead (the epub thing was the other).
Like the last idea for a title, L-I. It's already starting to sound less like a dystopian future and more like current affairs. That list for the back of the book of what's already happened in real life is getting longer and longer.
Leg-iron. Try projecting out 35 years, it worked for Orwell. Whether through prescience or luck, it panned out. From the vantage point of we smokers of the world, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's 1984 call for a Smokefree Society by the year 2000 precisely marked the start of this modern Nanny Hell we're in, forever establishing George's credentials as a first rate prophet.
If you find reality overtaking your dystopia, may I suggest the following:
(a) A utopian novel (from the proles point of view), and how it all breaks down (I suppose that may have been the original premise for Animal Farm before Orwell ran with it).
(b) A history of our current times written 30-40 years hence from the view of the victors (who of course, write history) of two parallel scenarios: the powers that be winning (we the drones being slaves to an unelected and unremoveable world govt) and the proles winning (powers that be hanging from lampposts). If written in the form of a school textbook, this could access the lucrative teen market too.
Personal experience. I offer it for what it is worth. Beware of strapping your wrist too tightly. Too tight and IME healing is delayed.
Strapping should give just gentle support and inhibit large or sudden movements of the joint. It should not be a tourniquet. It calls for bandaging subtlety. And frequent adjustment unfortunately.
Best wishes.
Terrific insights, L-I. And thanks for the mention.
Cloud computing is another step on the road to the Orwellian 'updatable book'-approach to facts - with which Winston Smith was so familiar.
It's already here, and spreading. Our phone calls, texts, emails, online PDA documents, satnav data, calendars, etc., are in effect owned by the bodies that house them. Hence the incentives given by the globalists for you to upload as much as possible.
It's no surprise that Twitter, Facebook, LinkIn, Microsoft, Google and others were Bilderberg attendees this year - along with Mandelsnake and Osborne. And now we have Google+!
http://faustiesblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/bilderberg-2011-st-moritz-full-attendee.html
Micro$not's long ambition has been to proliferate "thin client" computers with no hard drives, such that the local computer has no operating system, no local applications and no control of or right to the data. That dream is reaching fruition.
Every time we buy these gadgets and operating systems, we encourage them. So while I love the convenience that a Kindle would offer, I refuse to own one. A good PDA will do the job - and give you more control, for longer.
I've turned off all automatic updates on my computer.
There was a hell of a row in the US a few years back when it was discovered that any visitor to a US government site explicitly granted the US government the right to access any and all information on your computer - on the spot! This 'right' derived from the terms of service (which nobody reads). I might've blogged this - can't recall.
The US government tells us that this is no longer the case. But they break their own laws all the time, so they're probably still downloading info from suckers' computers.
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