History never repeats quite the same way. There are some low-hanging parallels to 1984, but if we limit ourselves to that frame of reference we miss a large ran

History never repeats quite the same way. There are some low-hanging parallels to 1984, but if we limit ourselves to that frame of reference we miss a large range of elements that might prove to be enormously important. There's stuff like hate speech regulations and all that but there's also a million things going on elsewhere, and any patterns only seem obvious many years later in retrospect, if they ever become so. Future generations will probably have a frame of reference completely different from what we expect them to have now. Come to think of it, it would be hard to explain all the motivations of life in 2021 to someone in 1984 who had yet to live through the intervening years...