An apocalypse that never was

From Ben Elton's This Other Eden, which I re-read during a weekend away in Oxford:

"Remind me because I forget, did the consumer write Oliver Twist? Or Beethoven's 'Fifth'? No, I don't think so. As I recall it was artists who did those things, people with special talents. And what did the consumer do? The consumer consumed it didn't he? Sucked it right up and went away with his life enriched"..."The public always had the technology to get involved with the action if it wanted to. Right back to the Greeks. All they had to do was get up on stage and join in. But they didn't do it, did they? Weird, huh? Maybe, just maybe, they kind of guessed that it would completely screw up the show. The public could always choose their own ending when they read books. All they had to do was get a damn pen and write in that Scrooge never got nice and Moby Dick was a chipmunk. But they didn't, and why? Because the public don't pay for entertainment in order to have to provide it themselves. The whole damn nightmare was a conspiracy by scientists and computer brains to make everyone in the world as boring as them." 

(Interesting book, This Other Eden, a science fiction tale of a future that already never happened in which environmental catastrophe came in the form of ozone layer depletion and resource-exhaustion rather than rising seas and what we currently think of as global warming.)