alt Hacker News>I felt like Orwell made the point well enough in 1984.
True enough. Although I think Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth came closer to our current situation with The Space Merchants[0] (which I just read, almost by accident).
Orwell was more explicit in his exposition of totalitarianism and told a more compelling story than Pohl/Kornbluth did in their tale of authoritarian/corporatist dystopia.
That said, the universe of The Space Merchants more closely matches the current environment, IMHO.
That looks like a great book, I'll have to check it out!
My go-to in fiction for comparison with the authoritarianism of the modern world is actually Brave New World. We were drugged (whether pharmacologically or psychologically) into submission, more than we were beaten into it.
1984 is great however for getting the surveillance point across in the most brutally direct way possible. The telescreen was a mind-bogglingly prescient idea for a guy writing a book in the 1940s. "Omnipresent and almost never turned off, they are an unavoidable source of propaganda and tools of surveillance." We actually did it. We invented and embraced George Orwell's telescreens of 1984, en masse. The only difference is we put them in our pockets and carry them around all day, instead of having them in our living rooms.