Are we already in the totalitarian dystopia? From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

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I had a nightmare that I leaked some classified information and got arrested and waterboarded by New York Times reporters.
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The goal is to keep us fighting with as much hostility as possible over issues which inconvenience our rulers as little as possible. It’s really amazing how successful they are at this.
The other day I saw a video of a guy angrily running over a case of Budweiser with a monster truck for reasons that made no sense to me, and everyone was excitedly yelling their opinions about it, and I was just like, oh my god we are so fucked. They’ve got us totally wrapped up.
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You couldn’t design a more effective totalitarian dystopia than the one we’re in right now. One where everyone’s brainwashed by propaganda without even knowing it, where everyone thinks, acts, votes and shops exactly as their rulers want them to, all while thinking they are free.
People worry about technocratic escalations like increasing surveillance, digital IDs, central bank digital currencies etc, and rightly so; those measures do give the powerful a greater degree of power over the populace. But many incorrectly imagine that a future technocratic dystopia created by those measures would look a lot different from the dystopia we’re in right now, and it simply would not. Those measures would be used to help keep this current system locked in place, not to create a new one.
People imagine totalitarian dystopia as some dark threat looming in the future because they don’t understand how profoundly unfree we already are right now. They think we’re free because we can choose what to buy at the supermarket and call the president “Brandon”, but we’re not. They imagine that our rulers have some grand conspiracy to create a dystopia where they can force us all to do as they wish, not realizing that we’re already in a dystopia where we are doing exactly as they wish. It really can’t be improved upon. They’re just locking it in.