Collision from Home: Margaret Atwood: Allow Governments to Control You and They'll Mistreat You

- The Handmaid's Tale author says emergencies like Covid-19 are likely to be exploited by power-hungry groups and that the world will never be the same again

- Atwood suggests the world will face changes similar in scale to the fall of the Soviet Union

- Atwood joined WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, Microsoft president Brad Smith and NBA Hall of Famer Shaquille O'Neal at the 30,000-attendee online event Collision from Home

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Web Summit

Jun 25, 2020, 12:39 ET

TORONTO, June 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Margaret Atwood today warned the world may be facing an upheaval as seismic as the fall of the Soviet Union. Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale and Man Booker winner The Testaments, was in conversation with New Yorker editor, David Remnick, at the 30,000-attendee online conference Collision from Home, produced by the team behind Web Summit – the world's largest tech conference.

"For a while in the 90s we were told, 'End of history' – guess what? That was wrong. There's always the volcanic explosion, the meteor that comes from nowhere – the thing you didn't see coming," she said, referring to Francis Fukuyama's 1992 work The End of History and the Last Man.

Atwood, whose latest collection of poems titled Dearly is slated for a November release, talked of her time living in Soviet-era Germany and watching the Berlin Wall fall, saying: "That was gone. Just overnight."

She went on to warn that governments and groups across the world may exploit the Covid-19 pandemic for their own ends and that the world will "never be the same again".

"Any emergency is likely to be exploited by a group seeking power. That is just a recurrent motif of human history," she said, adding, "We will however see a certain amount of, 'We need to control you more for your own good,' and the danger of that is once they've controlled you 'for your own good,' there's a likelihood that will slip over into controlling you for their good," she said.

Atwood did however end positively, saying: "I do believe there will be a future. We're not done yet."

Watch a clip from the interview here.

About Margaret Atwood:

Margaret is author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, critical essays and graphic novels. Her latest novel, The Testaments – sequel to award-winning novel and TV series The Handmaid's Tale – is co-winner of the 2019 Man Booker Prize.

About Collision:

Collision is known by CBC as the "TIFF for tech", while Inc. Magazine calls it the "fastest-growing tech conference in North America". Collision is set to move online for 2020 with Collision from Home. Collision will return to Toronto as a physical event for the second year from June 21-24, 2021 at the Enercare Centre.

About Web Summit:

Forbes says Web Summit is "the best tech conference on the planet"; Bloomberg calls it "Davos for geeks"; Politico, "the Olympics of tech"; The Guardian, "Glastonbury for geeks"; and, in the words of Inc. Magazine, "Web Summit is the largest technology conference in the world".

Whatever Web Summit is, it wouldn't be possible without an incredible team of over 200 employees based in Dublin, Lisbon, Toronto and Hong Kong, including world-class engineers, data scientists, designers, producers, marketers, salespeople, and more. They've disrupted an old industry by building incredible software and designing mind-blowing events, revolutionising how people and ideas come together to change the world.

Useful links:

Collision images: https://www.flickr.com/photos/collisionconf/

Collision speaker lineup: https://collisionconf.com/speakers

Collision schedule: https://collisionconf.com/schedule

SOURCE Web Summit