“But maybe they aren’t politicians any longer. They have become instead pantomine villains whose real job is to make us angry. And when we are angry, we click more. And clicks feed the ever-growing power and wealth of the corporations that run social media. We think we are expressing ourselves, but really we are just components in their system. At the moment, that system absorbs all opposition, Which is why nothing ever changes.” — from Adam Curtis‘s Hypernormalization, a 2016 BBC documentary that popped on 10.16.16 16 on the BBC iPlayer. Curtis’s basic thesis (per Wiki page) is that “since the 1970s, governments, financiers, and technological utopians have given up on the complex ‘real world’ and built a simple ‘fake world’ that is run by corporations and kept stable by politicians.”

In other words, we’re living in a much more Orwellian big-brother realm than most of us realize.