Isn’t it absurd that Orwell’s deep warning in 1984, with Big Brother and the spectre of room 101, the worst that a person can face, in an authority knowing their very worst fear, turned into the 15 minutes of fame media-fest of Endemol’s Big Brother. The media horror became truly gross when they did what they did to Jade Goody, following her dying of Cancer. As the writer said on The Night Watch last night, ‘we think goodness and honour is the human, but savagery can be part of it too’, or to that effect. Some people can cope, other people would rather die, there is no absolute about what you can deal with, or rather adults can deal with, but not everyone is the same at all. The thing that children must be protected from, especially on the Internet, is what they are not emotionally equipped to deal with or judge, though children will find many ways to get around prespcriptions to find out about ‘the adult world’. The founder here, perhaps part adult, part child, had his Room 101, but what’s yours?
For writers this is a very big Cautionary Tale, but what I’d like Abrams and an ex agent to wonder is, ‘oh my God, how could we do that to any individual, in the end?’ They won’t. ‘A Man he hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.’ But make people the villain and perhaps they start turning into a bit of a villain. No one likes the confessional, or the martyr, though they say the confession is sometimes the moment of healing, while perhaps I had to speak up in front of my own stories and fans.
ps Erratum for originally saying Huxley, but perhaps that ending is more precient than we know. Brave New World and 1984 are perhaps two books easy to conflate but its interesting that a classic like Brave New World was at 329 on Amazon today, after all those years!
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