furialog Highlight

We don't immediately recognize this as dystopia, because dystopian story-telling usually oversimplifies the format of the oppression. In 1984 the government controls the meager supply of drab consumer goods, and the single broadcast/surveillance channel. But of course Walmart has endless aisles of things, and the TVs in the TV aisle have endless channels. We have choices.

But our choices are stocked by Walmart. Or Amazon, or a handful of morally interchangeable competitors. The TV channels are numerous in frequency, but monotonous in signal, and monopolized in control. You can have any innocuous flavor of filler surrounding your advertisements (for innocuously flavored fillers). Orwell thought this gray-goo of a world would be imposed on us by the State, but the capitalist innovation is to invert this. Power is consolidated by money, not vice versa. Citizenship is portioned into voters, who are then repackaged as consumers. Anything functional in government is absorbed or disassembled until it can impose no miserly restrictions.