The new seekers

In Version 2.0 of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith will have a ‘preferred customer’ gold card for Googlezon, the corporation that results from the merger of the internet giants Google and Amazon.

Google has completed its mission to organise all the world’s words, images and sounds and make them easy to find; and, once you’ve found what you want, Amazon sells it to you. By recording everything you purchase, look for, look at, listen to or read, Googlezon comes to know your tastes better than you yourself do. It serves you a personalised programme of recommendations and targeted promotions, all of these backed up with patented One-Click™ ordering. You need never again use your initiative to track down new favourites: the privatised Ministry of Information has anticipated your every need.

This scenario is taken from an eight-minute film distributed (via the internet, of course) in 2004 and presenting itself as reportage from the Museum of Media History in the year 2014.