Ben Elton has been getting bleaker and bleaker. Blind Faith, which is an update of and homage to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, pulls together a number of trends and shows us where they could go. These include the surveillance society that Britain has become, with CCTV and mobile phones allowing the authorities to follow and trace your movements; ubiquitous use of social media including blogging (compulsory) and always-on video chat rooms; global warming that has flooded London; the attacks on science represented by those who believe in faith alone as the answer; and the dumbing-down of entertainment and social intercourse that Elton has charted so brilliantly, especially in Dead Famous and Chart Throb; As the blurb has it “In this world, nakedness is modesty, independent thought subversive, and ignorance is wisdom”.
Trafford Sewell is the modern-day Winston Smith, a “civil servant of sorts” who works for NatDat, the National Data bank, which collects and stores “Every single recordable fact about every single person in the country…Every financial transaction, every appearance on a CCTV camera, every click on every computer, every quirk of every retina, every filling in every tooth, captured and entombed in the mainframes of NatDat…” But Trafford wants some degree of privacy, somewhere he can think thoughts that he doesn’t have to blog about. He would also like some privacy with his wife Chantorria, and to protect their baby, Caitlin Happymeal, in a world where vaccination is abhorred, and child mortality is rife. He hesitates to Tube the birthing video and is reprimanded by his Confessor.
Trafford does find a way to think for himself and to learn about ideas and science, and above all about reason. Just as Winston Smith saw that the proles provided hope for the future, so Trafford sees that reason and the theory of evolution are the way the world will be saved – perhaps not soon enough for him, but the tyranny of the Temple will certainly be overcome. It would be interesting to spend more time on the parallels with Nineteen Eighty-Four.
I said that Ben Elton was bleak, but what reinforces the bleakness is that the awful world of Blind Faith is already happening, in parts, and it is easy to see us going there. Elton shows us that the trends he works on are related and interconnected, and come down to the importance of ensuring that individual thought can be maintained; that privacy, whether physical, mental or spiritual is essential to us; and that blind faith should not trump reason and science. There are lessons for how we use technology to support society, and importantly there are unforeseen (but perhaps inevitable) consequences that will arise whenever new ways of communicating and sharing become universal, and subject to human behaviour.
Blind Faith by Ben Elton, published by Black Swan (paperback, 2008), ISBN: 978-0-552-77391-1
Other books by Ben Elton – Stark (1989), Gridlock (1991), This Other Eden (1993), Popcorn (1996), Blast from the Past (1998), Inconceivable (1999), Dead Famous (2001), High Society (2002), Past Mortem (2004), The First Casualty (2005), Chart Throb (2006)
Strangely Connected
Strangely Connected 
Compulsory blogging for civil servants! What have you set in train, Hugh?
And not just blogging! In Ben Elton’s dystopian vision of the future everyone has to express themselves all of the time, by word, by video, by blog, by participation in group and mass events – ghastly. Obviously, it gets to the point that the only people who really care about any of this mass display of all sorts of stuff are the weird and kinky and the secret police (if those are different categories). Read it, and find out that it illustrates Clay Shirky’s discussion about social awareness and that the rulers’ use of technology will backfire because the technology itself will lead to everybody knowing that everybody knows that everybody knows, and that is when regimes change.