Word: winstons
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...Rall's Winston Smith lives in Canamexicusa, which exists in perpetual trade-war with either the "Euros" or the Asians. Meanwhile Smith spends his days in an "upper-middle management" job and either trading shares, buying consumable goods over the ubiquitous web-tv, or watching porn. Mirroring the events of "1984," the "2024" Winston takes an interest in illegal, bootlegged, old-school videogames like "Pong," and has an affair with a woman who's upper-upper management. Eventually he gets caught and subjected to "Channel 101," an educational program about rats, which so severely strains Smith's entertainment requirements that...
...even hypocritical. One of Rall's consistent objects of parody, the use of irony as a disaffecting, unempathic "attitude," is embodied in the "2024" catchphrase, "Yes. No. Whatever." Yet Rall's entire book reads like an exercise in ironic detachment. He even uses it for gags, as when Winston rebelliously listens to the two-hit 1980s group Quiet Riot. We never care about the characters because Rall doesn't want us to. If anything, the diseffected cynicalness of "Yes. No. Whatever," sums up the whole book's attitude. How ironic...
...enjoy some of the ideas of "2024." Rall is smart and intuitive in a vicious sort of way. His running gag of business minutiae as the new entertainment feels dead on. Likewise it's funny when Winston reacts to Channel 101 being "the worst thing in the world," with that meaningless, fully-corpratized hipster catchphrase, "That's cool." But the book lacks the central values of human decency which made it matter that Winston Smith of "1984" came to scrawl "2+2=5" into the dust of his cafe table...
...company purchased Rockefeller Center in 1989. Internet upstart AOL signaled the rise of digital by buying last century's media giant, Time Warner, owner of this magazine. China and Taiwan now have their epochal deal, signed by scions of wealth and privilege from either side of the Taiwan Strait. Winston Wong, the estranged son of Taiwan's most colorful executive, has gone into business with Jiang Mianheng, the low-profile son of Chinese President Jiang Zemin. They have started a $1.6 billion venture to make integrated circuits in Shanghai?a partnership that highlights the economic trend most worrying to Taiwan...
...Wong-Jiang chip factory that takes the trend far beyond the realm of sneaker manufacturers looking for cheap workers. Winston Wong was once heir apparent to his father's company, Formosa Plastics, one of Taiwan's biggest firms. In 1995, Taiwan newspapers reported that Wong was cheating on his wife with a university student; Wong's stepmother shoveled them much of the dirt. It turned out she wanted her own children to run the company. Her husband, Wang Yung-ching, who has three wives of his own, backed wife No. 3 and forced his son to leave Taiwan for embarrassing...