Hacker News Reader

The last part wits the nail on the head. Orwell envisioned a future where everyone was forced to have a telescreen watching them at all times. He never for a second dreamed of a future where people would buy a telescreen for the most trifling convenience of going "alexa, is it going to rain today".

View on HN

Huxley and Bradbury did.

This is actually why I always considered Brave New World to be much closer in predicting the future, at least in spirit if not in hard details. Let people access personal distractions, conveniences and pleasures on your road to total surveillance, and attempts at social control, and you can apply them with very little need to ever enforce miseries like those of "1984"

Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four still function as science fiction, Fahrenheit 451 basically captures the present.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com