Now 25 years later, they know who you are talking too, what you are talking about, where you are almost in real time, what websites you browse, books you read, music you like, podcasts you indulge in, what social media trends you follow, general political points of view, sexual orientation, what you look like and so on... It was all taken one little inch at a time and now we have mass apathy about it all.
And once they have taken that little bit, they will never let it go by choice.
Here in Australia, there are now ID proof of age requirements for Social media (still a little loosely enforced)and pornography. They have their foot in the door, you can see where it is going next.
No it doesn't make that assumption? The crazy tricks are for the engaged, for the outer party members. The proles just get bread and circuses.
You're extremely naive about China. Do you think they wanted the Great Leap Forward and the Eliminate Sparrows campaign? One man's ill-informed policies caused a famine resulting in 15-55 million deaths. The One Child Policy? The state response to Tiananmen Square protests? The Great Firewall? The Social Credit system? Why does Foxconn have anti-suicide nets? You think industry tycoons being in bed with government is bad? It is! Now note that the theory of the Three Represents is part of the Chinese Constitution. Ask yourself why notionally independent Hong Kong imprisoned a large number of pro-democracy campaigners. These are not signs of a benevolent dictatorship. It's a totalitarian state maintaining its dominance over the masses and its elites revelling in the spoils. Why do you think there is such a push by rich Chinese to get their capital out of the country?
Perhaps you should read Brave New World instead?
Look, it’s extremely hard to remain some kind of objective nowadays on the internet. I no longer know what is true and what is false.
Truth has lost all meaning and was replaced by politics.
Even history books written by scientists are routinely under attack.
In my country of Poland a Nobel prize winner, someone that my teachers said was a hero, suddenly became the villain. I never got my head around it. It still puzzles me. Like a some thorn in my side. He was a national hero? Now he is the bad guy? Why? It’s strange and unsettling how fast narrative changed to serve some political goal and everyone just went with it.
I am not resistant to narratives but I seem to routinely miss them. Then I wake up and everyone is saying some strange extreme things and are angry at each other and it seems fabricated to me many times.
Such as in my city was recently some uptick of anti car sentiment. Yeah like discussion is normal and we want to live in best possible environment but this wasn’t discussion. It was just people throwing shit at each other and extreme tribalism. It’s unsettling to see this. Social media has been doing something terrible to people. And I think it all serves somebody’s interests. Someone benefits from these divisions and wars.
We need to collectively unplug and get a grip
Try visiting if you get the chance and see for yourself how things are. Depending on your workplace you may also have many Chinese coworkers who would be glad to tell you what life is like there.
Definitely don’t listen to Reddit, but also don’t listen to the countless other forums trying to convince you it’s a North Korea like dystopia.
There's always a tussle for who "controls the narrative", it's not always the well-informed. Look at the Covid 19 outbreak. An honest medic would say it's your choice to take the rapidly-developed vaccine, we don't have as extensive safety and efficacy studies as usual but we're in a time crunch, here are its known side-effects, but also consider what happens if you don't take it and end up contracting the virus, which was ultimately fatal for millions, more fatal the older you were. I wouldn't have believed such basic medical advice could be politicised, but there it was with an American right-wing claiming the medics were lying (why would they?!) and performatively defying basic instructions to avoid spreading a pandemic, then predictably dying of something they could completely have avoided, like Herman Cain. Then they started going for the absolutely bonkers science-free "remedies" invented by their tribe, like shining UV light up your arse or taking horse de-worming tablets. Meanwhile the American left-wing wanted to insist on people wearing masks (even where distancing or ventilation improvements would be more effective) and fire people for not taking the vaccine (what happened to informed consent?)
I don't know which Nobel prize winner became the villain, but I can believe both that it can happen unjustly (politicians or social activists start attacking them for their other beliefs), and sometimes justly; "Nobel disease" is when the celebrated scientist lets recognition go to their head and starts speaking in areas where they aren't experts. The famed example is Linus Pauling who got the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, but in later years started hawking vitamin C tablets saying it could cure cancer; it can't, and he died of cancer. Additional studies have shown that when taken intravenously it can have an effect on some cancer cells as part of a chemotherapy regime, but as orally ingested tablets it's worthless.
For what I've said on China in the previous comment, I have never been, but I am fairly certain of the veracity of all the issues I raised. I can't speak for any specific Chinese person and how they feel about their government, I'm sure millions of them are happy in life no matter how the country is run, and certainly the country is more prosperous these days, but these issues are still there, and we in the West should try our best to avoid lapsing into authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
Orwell has been quoted that Animal Farm was a also a critique of capitalism, in favor of democratic socialism.
You also say GP is naive about China. But China has been actually less oppressive as time goes along. In fact, historically, authoritarian states often become less oppressive without foreign interference (my home country, Czechoslovakia, was on path towards democratic socialism in the 1960s, unfortunately, it was reversed for geopolitical reasons; such has been experience of many American client states as well). (And you also have liberal states becoming more authoritarian on their own, we can see that in the western world, due to concentration of wealth.)
This indicates there is no "natural law" that makes things more (or less) authoritarian. It depends on people pursuing politics, and being informed.
It actually asks hard questions and explores the tradeoff of an "utopian dystopia." In contrast to the society Orwell describes, where the government is cartoonishly evil, the one of "Brave New World" genuinely cares for the happiness of its subjects, and most of its subjects are genuinely happy, even if we disagree with the methods that it uses. This is by design; I read somewhere that Orwell wanted to position 1984 in explicit contract to Huxley, killing any debate on whether his described society was better or worse than the one the book was written in.
I think he heavily underestimated the human ability to ferret out the truth when the only thing the state gives them is lies. Even without access to reliable news sources, most people will at least realize that the news is lying to them. Even if they don't know what the truth is, they'll know that it's not what they're told it is.
I think the key to a working dystopia is to genuinely make people's lives pleasant. We care about the economics a lot more than we care about the politics. If you're a free democratic socialist republic and decrease people's monthly meat rations, citizens will riot and demand true democracy. If you are a democracy and the price of meat goes up due to the bird flu epidemic, people will riot and demand communism and wealth redistribution.