My first new book in three years is an old book. Sort of. Please support my work, and let me know what you think of the book. Here’s the promotional text:
Back in the year 2000, Ted Rall wrote and drew his graphic novel, 2024.
It seems like an eternity. Bill Clinton was president. The biggest TV shows in America were ER and Friends; the Foo Fighters and Linkin Park topped the music charts. More than 90% of households had a landline phone. Blockbuster Video had 9,000 brick-and-mortar stores. No one had heard of YouTube or Netflix. No one had ever been “canceled” the way we now understand that word.
2024 was Rall’s loving parody and update of George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was also an attempt to predict what society would look and feel like 24 years into the future…now.
This was a time when one-third of Americans still relied on dial-up landline phone connections to access the Internet. The Blackberry, the first device we would recognize as a smartphone, came out in 2002. The iPhone wouldn’t be introduced for seven more years; a Nokia cellphone where you pulled up the antenna to make a call was the best you could buy.
Few people imagined what was about to happen to us.
But Rall did.
Rall didn’t think we would succumb to Orwell’s authoritarian nightmare—because America’s ruling elites wouldn’t need a fearsome Party to spy on its nonexistent dissidents. We the People would become ever more docile and distracted. Thanks to the Internet, we would become so addicted to our devices that it would not be necessary for government to actively oppress us. Instead, we would oppress ourselves with our own stupidity.
Rall predicted a media environment developing where no journalism could be trusted because digital content would be intrinsically mutable, which would erase old consequences for being caught lying or making mistakes. Relationships between friends, lovers and colleagues would become so replaceable as to become valueless, rendering old values like loyalty and integrity obsolete. Anti-intellectualism, as old as America itself, would become the dominant paradigm of the 21st century.
2024 Revised is an expanded and enhanced edition of Rall’s prescient work from a quarter-century ago, now fully colorized for the first time. It also includes Rall’s detailed annotations of the text that elucidate his references to politics, history and pop culture. There’s also a brand-new foreword.
The future is now. 2024 Revised is a time capsule and a fun trip into retrofuturism. What did Rall get right? What did he miss? What should we have seen coming?
Order “2024: Revisited”: here.
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Looking forward to perusing the book!
On the subject of the future past:
“No one had ever been “canceled” the way we now understand that word.”
Didn’t they? The NYT wouldn’t run any of Noam Chomsky’s guest editorials. When he would collect them into a book they wouldn’t review it (while calling Chomsky the “greatest intellectual alive”). Television shows wouldn’t book him, etc.
Of course they didn’t burn his books (well, technically they trashed an edition once ;-). They didn’t outright arrest him (though he fully expected them to over his activism related to Vietnam and the Pentagon papers).
Wasn’t he “cancelled”?
The way I see with web 2.0 they mostly RESTORED the set of filters enabling freedom to speak without freedom to be heard which they temporarily lost with web 1.0 (or TikTok).
This framing makes more sense to me and also points towards restoring ownership over the means of cancellation to the people as a way forward.