Simultaneously quite a bit more than one would hope and yet quite a bit less than people fear monger is there.

Interesting article. Especially comparing Orwell and Huxley’s different fears, Orwell’s being more 20th century and Huxley’s marching our 21st century.

But I think more fundamentally, from our 21st-century perspective, it’s about what we were talking about earlier. He failed to appreciate the evolution of surveillance and state power. If you’re living in Russia or communist China right now, this is a very serious issue. But if you’re living in the West, your surveillance is not coming from the state for the most part; it’s coming from private corporations. And I think he just didn’t foresee the role that large corporations would play in controlling our access to information and controlling information about us in the 21st century.