Very true that government is not cohesive, it appears not to be so almost by definition ;) But power seems to be sliding more and more into the hands of massive

Very true that government is not cohesive, it appears not to be so almost by definition ;) But power seems to be sliding more and more into the hands of massive corporations, also thanks to most politicians' inherent inability to grasp the concept of responsibility. Google, Facebook, Apple et al. are pushing an industry which (in my mind) has a very real potential to turn into mankind's most perversely decadent apogee so far, say, over the course of this century. I'd tend to set the bar a bit lower than that because a lot can happen in a single century, and the 20th has been pretty unprecedented in terms of stuff happening to humanity. Anyhow, Cloudflare for example are enabling surveillance and legitimising it all at once by ssl-mitm'ing an increasingly large part of the public internet. CF makes it normal to stumble upon a page that you can't access because your connection is supposedly being used for nefarious purposes. Granted, that mostly happens to Tor users, but my point stands: non-proxied connections directly from home also get the CF treatment, but completely transparently. Which is worse, come to think of it. Also, by making browsing through Tor tedious, its use is discouraged for everyday Joe, making the haystack smaller, making it easier to target specific groups of people. Why does half a dozen ad networks have to be there at every turn? I personally don't see them anymore, but the requests are still made. Very few people go through my hassle of continually adjusting umatrix, and that is perfectly understandable, but only underscores the issue: the surveillance infrastructure/apparatus that would have been so loved by the Stasi is already up and running, happily chugging snap after snap after like after tweet after brainfart after snap. The impression that the big Orgs aren't doing anything too nasty today is no guarantee that they still won't tomorrow. Skynet is ready for action, if you will, and flexing its muscles every now and then (newsfeed manipulation?). Both Brave New World and 1984 ended up wrong in the sense that a truly global war would probably not work for very long and truly global peace is still way, way, way off. Still, BNW's peace of mind can be created artificially by just not telling people about stuff, which, incidentally, is very easy to do if you have complete control over what people look at 24/7 because they do so through your platform(s). As long as nothing is visibly wrong in somebody's day-to-day life and the guilty are always found, no point in looking for them any more, right? My point being that while yes, 1984 and BNW have got it wrong with the government, I think the government should be seen as the source and sink of power over people regardless of its actual implementation as e.g. dictatorial state or capitalist corporate structures. That way, the books' ideas can still be applied to today's politics.