In the year 1984, how did they view the year 2024? We can know from the book The 2024 Report by the journalist Norman Macrae.
As a long-time deputy editor of The Economist, Macrae was one of the best-placed men to think ahead into the future (now our present).
He had been among the contributors to General Sir John Hackett’s highly popular The Third World War, which in 1979 imagined WW3 (started by Soviet Russia, won narrowly but completely by NATO). Macrae began his book (supposedly set in 2024) bewitchingly, datelined Tahiti, and stating that mankind had achieved ‘comfort, ease, abolition of crime and freedom of living styles’.
You could argue that those imagining the future set themselves an impossible task – if humanity can imagine the future, surely they would live it? It’s easy to get it laughably wrong. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, for instance, published in 1826, set in the 21st century, has people still travelling on land by horse, and at best by hot-air balloon; not even the railways (just beginning in England) are included.
Macrae cannot imagine the details of 2024: mobile phones, email, the geopolitics. He does a good job of guessing how new inventions might bring change, such as ‘a very much refined version of the electroencephalograph’. Instead of electrodes, around your head went SQUIDs (super-conducting quantum interference devices). “By this means information about the electrical activity of the brain could be presented in the same form as information about its biochemical activity.” Society used this to treat the ‘mad and the bad’, or ‘the mentally ill and the criminally deviant’. As Macrae imagined:
“The biggest, but accepted interference with human freedom since 2008 has been the growth of tracking devices, which have to be carried by some convicted criminals and even by some ‘potential terrorists’ who have been identified by their SQUIDs (sometimes inaccurately). These devices are carried today by most of the 0.2 per cent of mankind who ….. commit over 90 per cent of crime.”
SQUID readings
Judges convicting criminals take account of SQUID readings to decide on sentences – perhaps probation, monitored by a tracker; or (because it saves the state money) communes agree to take in offenders, in return for a fee for time the criminals don’t re-offend. Most politicians standing in election make their SQUIDs public, the same as they might their tax records. As a journalist for a liberal newspaper, Macrae made the case against the ‘excessive government’ of the 1970s and 1980s, and for a world that in many ways sounds familiar in 2024: tele-commuting, flexible working, workers choosing to base themselves where it’s sunny, watching not television by TCs (‘free as air telecommunicating computer terminals’, arguably what we know as the internet).
In terms of criminal justice, Macrae noted how private enterprise had made ‘private leisure areas like Disneyland’ successful and free of crime by ‘nosey parker’ methods of tracking groups or individuals that might cause trouble. Society had picked up some methods and employed ‘competitive crime prevention corporations that are now paid on performance contract’. Guns had to have a tracker device ‘bleeping a silent radio message’ so that police knew where guns were’, and some offenders had to be similarly traceable if they wanted parole. Prison was discredited as actually creating criminals and making those imprisoned more likely to re-offend. Hence the idea of ‘farming out of criminals’ to communes under contract (while checking the communes weren’t misusing the criminals as slave labour).
Choose government
Macrae’s 2024, then, has freed itself from ‘over government’ whether by western democracies or the Communist dictatorships. Macrae wrote that ‘we can now choose our government with our feet, by going to live in the community whose lifestyle we like’; Macrae playfully assumed he’d go to Tahiti (could everyone who wanted to be on the island, fit?!); yet in the real 2024, some in Europe are howling because mainly young people in Iraq, Pakistan, Eritrea and Syria are travelling to Europe for much the same reasons.
The publishers and public must have liked what they read, because Macrae then wrote The 2025 Report. Perhaps he predicted who won the 2025 Derby?!
