"Everybody looks at everybody all the time and you don't need to be a celebrity to feel the need for privacy. I myself was recently in big trouble with my Confessor for being slow to post a birthing video. I'm not talking about being either an extrovert or an introvert: I'm talking about people who don't believe privacy is a perversion, people who think it might even be a virtue."
I'm in two minds about Blind Faith. I really enjoyed the sci-fi satire in Ben Elton's earlier novels, especially This Other Eden and Stark. But I find The Circle - the Dave Eggers novel not the lame NetFix adaption - to be much more effective as a dystopian projection of privacy-dissolving "social media". On the other hand, Eggers' novel was published in 2013, while Blind Faith came out in 2007, when FB, YT and Xitter were only just appearing. Making Elton's dystopia much more prophetic.
That said, there's a fine line between satire and snobbery. Idiocracy manages to stay on the right side of it by making its protagonists a working class grunt and a sex worker. Ben Elton's growing disdain for infotainment ("Reality TV" and "social media") pushes some of his later books onto the snobbery side of the line, starting with Dead Famous in 2001. Sadly, for all its aspirations to be Brave New World for the digital age, I think Blind Faith is firmly on the snobbery side of the line too.
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