When he reveals himself to be a writer (again, aligning himself with the creative, imaginative, and independently minded), we also learn that he hasnвЂ™t sold anything for years because nobody buys books or magazines any more. Of course, even before he is arrested, it is clear that everyone else in the city has willingly embraced their chains. His only вЂcrimeвЂ™ is in refusing to plug himself into the electronic brain-drainer that has done for his fellow citizens. (Of course, the internet can be a way to encourage critical thinking by being a two-way medium, so itвЂ™s not quite this simple.) Leonard Mead is a danger not because he might commit a crime while he is out on one of his evening walks, but because he is a reminder of the free-thinking (and free-moving) spirit which others have lost: a spirit he might reawaken in them if others see him outside.

The more cynical commentator might observe that this is the world born at the beginning of the 2020s, if we broaden out вЂtelevisionвЂ™ to include other media such as вЂthe internetвЂ™ in the pantheon of ways-of-keeping-a-population-passive-and-easy-to-control. Crime, it turns out, has been largely eradicated, because everyone remains indoors all night, glued to their television sets. We are told that this is one of only two police cars in the whole city of three million people there had been three police cars until an election the year before, when it had been decided that there was no need for so many as three. A police car stops to ask Leonard who he is and what he does for a living. We learn that it is his habit to do this every night, sometimes staying out until midnight before he returns home.ДЄs the story progresses, it emerges that this sort of behaviour вЂ“ staying in all night, every night, and consuming hours of television without ever venturing out вЂ“ has become not only common, or normalised, but, in effect, the law. He is the only person out on the street at night, because everyone else is indoors, watching their television sets all night. A man named Leonard Mead, who later identifies himself as a writer, is walking the deserted streets of a city. The story takes place on one night in November 2053.

The pedestrian meaning