10. For A Dystopian Future, Why Is Technology So Erratic?
At the start of Catching Fire, we see President Snow visit the victorious Katniss Everdeen in District 12. He's brought with him a video of her kissing Gale that he captured secretly, and he lets her know that he's onto her: he's not going to let her cause any kind of revolution. Leaving aside where exactly he got the footage from, it's a poor quality video. Fair enough, this is a poor mining district, but this is the President - could he not afford a portable TV at the very, very least? What's not really alluded to is that the districts are starved of electricity. There's very little of it actually reaching Katniss's hometown, and that explains why she can escape through an electric fence every morning to hunt squirrels. It's one of the more straightforward answers that the book gives us, but it explains why Snow doesn't own a mansion in every district with 60-inch televisions on the wall, huge sound-systems and jacuzzis full of girls (also because it doesn't exactly fit the aesthetic of the film).
