Good point, and important to remember. But also the pessimism may have actually helped us get to where we are, by vividly warning about the alternatives.

a lot of it got outsourced to the private sector.

> recording police abuse on smartphones,

So American police brutality is in the process of being solved right now?

1984 was sort of a worst-case extrapolation of the following trend that Orwell described in 1944. I'd say that as far as the trend itself goes, he was plenty accurate.

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I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.

As to the comparative immunity of Britain and the USA. Whatever the pacifists etc. may say, we have not gone totalitarian yet and this is a very hopeful symptom. I believe very deeply, as I explained in my book The Lion and the Unicorn, in the English people and in their capacity to centralise their economy without destroying freedom in doing so. But one must remember that Britain and the USA haven’t been really tried, they haven’t known defeat or severe suffering, and there are some bad symptoms to balance the good ones. To begin with there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you realise, for instance, that no one in England under 26 now has a vote and that so far as one can see the great mass of people of that age don’t give a damn for this? Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side. Indeed the statement that we haven’t a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look for their fuhrer elsewhere. One can’t be sure that that won’t change, nor can one be sure that the common people won’t think ten years hence as the intellectuals do now. I hope they won’t, I even trust they won’t, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.

Meanwhile, technological power has instead gone to the megacorporations, which have amassed enough of it that they now rival governments in reach and strength. Citizens attempt to use technology to check their power, but are routinely thwarted by the fact that the corporations have technology at least as good, as well as better funding and large numbers of warm bodies willing to do their bidding—either under threat of losing their livelihoods, or because they enjoy the exercise of power themselves.

I agree with your conclusion (it's unhelpful to have an overall pessimistic view of technology), but changing which pessimists you listen to does make a difference. In this case, rather than listening to the pessimism of George Orwell, we apparently should have been listening to Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, because the broad strokes of what we have now are very similar to aspects of the cyberpunk dystopia that their works and those that followed them described.

I think you are misreading 1984 as a warning about technology.

The book was finished in 1948, when governments were perfectly capable of turning fascist and exterminating millions of people with 1940s era technology.

Orwell also wrote a famous book about talking farm animals doing the same sorts of things.

Yes. I never understood why Data had to type rather than just use wifi

I think you should focus more on the Borg, instead of "Data" with respect to the dangers of AI

The Borg were a great enemy, at least in the 2nd and 3rd season. The writers shouldn't have let the lowly humans defeat them.

In 1984 human creativity is a threat to the state's existence. The Inner Party is literally working on dumbing down langauge through the generations to limit what can be thought. Machine creativity poses no such threat.