alt Hacker NewsThat 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.
>That looks like a great book, I'll have to check it out!
Honestly, I wasn't all that impressed with the novel. The characters were rather two-dimensional and the plot was somewhat muddled.
That said, its depiction of a corporatist/authoritarian society incorporates some of the tropes (rewriting history, mass market influencing/propaganda, redefining "good" and "bad", demonizing the "other" etc.) included in 1984 and Brave New World (BNW), but in a far right wing context. Which, as I mentioned, is more apropos to current circumstance than are the left wing "utopias" depicted in 1984 and BNW.
As such, while I don't discourage you from reading The Space Merchants (or its 1984 sequel, The Merchants' War -- which I haven't read), I'm not saying it's a fabulous piece of literature. Pohl[0][2] has written much better stuff, with similar cynicism but significantly better plotting and character development and takes on technology (cf. Heechee Saga[1] -- which I highly recommend -- and others).
In any case, I agree with your assessment of BNW WRT today, but with a far right wing dystopic bent rather than a far left wing dystopic one -- hence my reference to The Space Mechants.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederik_Pohl
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heechee_Saga
[2] Pohl was, as were many mid 20th century Sci-Fi (and other) authors, alarmed by the rapid population growth after World War II, especially as Malthus[3] was widely read at the time and we had not yet seen the fruits of the widespread agriculture technology deployment of the 20th century (Green Revolution[4]).
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_P...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
Edit: Clarified prose. Added footnotes for more detail.