2020

Abstract

In this imagined future, a jaded and anxious history teacher takes her fourteen-year-old students on a virtual visit back to 2020. Along the way, 1984 keeps surfacing. The references are both explicit and implicit: the protagonist’s name is Win and her off-stage other half is Julia; the first and last lines are a play on Orwell’s oft-cited opening sentence; and Ari is a fan of David Bowie’s 1984-themed Diamond Dogs album. But whereas Orwell (and Bowie) saw a dystopian future devoid of privacy, Win, Ari, and Jay inhabit a world where Orwell’s vision isn’t an imagined future but a nightmarish past. As a result, however, they have to struggle with issues of trust and vulnerability.