The internet of shits is here, with microphones and cameras are getting to be in everything including cars, living rooms, and refrigerators, and since cellphone screens are foldable now and body cameras are getting popular, soon companies will find a way to sell you on adding machines to much of your wearable clothing too.
Meanwhile, the internet itself is evolving so that you need a social media account for everything, and in India the government even uses biometrics as a government personal ID now. Your personal information and stupid old posts on social media never get deleted anymore either, and can later come back to haunt 13 year olds. It just appears to be deleted, but it's usually privately archived somewhere, like at the new This inhibits experimentation and there's a chilling effect on the young, who can face bigger consequences for political activity.
Orwell thought governments would build the infrastructure for the police state of 1984, while Huxley thought individuals would build dystopia themselves out from the bottom up, out of a love of distractions and entertainment. The future looks like a combination of the two: its consumers who are buying the surveillance apparatuses with the chains and shackles of the future, for the entertainment,l or convenience,and it's all subsidized by selling your personal information to growing international conglomerates that have been unregulated, (and which sometimes act like they're be above the law.)
We're becoming a hive mind, a single organism of interconnected data. That wouldn't be so bad except we still haven't managed to create stable and responsible governments. I think technology could create an inescapable police state that would spread from country to country like a virus. So there may be a looming time limit that challenges us, and we have to somehow vaccinate ourselves from both tyranny and collectivism, before we doom our species to a permanent dystopia.
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