The English novelist Christopher Fowler ruminates to good effect in this blog post about George Orwell’s novel, 1984.
Orwell could never have predicted Trump. The fall of real authority came with the willing participant of the people. Few authors would imagine that citizens would deliberately vote themselves out of better living standards and less freedom. The internet meant that instead of there being one channel of state-controlled ‘Big Brother’ news where contradictory states could co-exist (‘War is Peace’) there were so many thousands of ways open to manipulation and abuse that information would eventually become ‘fake’ and meaningless. It was no longer essential to government that people believed lies.
This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 5, 2017.
