Go a little back and look at the prediction made in 1949 for the future, written in a book with the title "1984".

Sure, it came a little late than forecast, but a lot of it came true.

Today's society has been pretty predictable for quite a while:

• Political and social environments like now have been pretty common recurrences througout History, with the rise of Fascism in the early XX century being the previous time it happened (incredibly similar to nowadays, not just are most propaganda techniques and discourse used by the rightwing almost exactly same, but we even have a XXI century version of the NAZIs called Zionism doing pretty much the same thing as their predecessors did in 1930s Germany). Society and Economics seem to follow a grand-cycle with a period of around 100 years and we're back at the point of the cycle of "Highest inequality and the Elites diverting the discontentment of the populus away from them by funding Far-Right politics scapegoating foreigners and using tools of authoritarianism in power" hence why this shit ressonates so much with the 1920 - 30s.
• The extreme desire for surveillance of open authoritarians and those with covert authoritarian leanings (lots of those in Europe plus the previous regime in the US was already the latter, though now it's the former) and the forms it could take were pretty predictable by observing the secret police of the Fascist regimes in Southern Europe that lasted until the 70s and 80s as well in the Eastern Block, most notably the Stasi in Germany. It's quite linear to map what Stasi would do with today's technology and come up with using smartphones as mobile surveillance devices with the complicity of the Tech companies that control them (predictably so if you look at, for example, how IBM helped NAZI Germany), surveillance of citizen's use of the Internet and modern digital communications (already done by the 7-eyes for ages and explaining things like the repeated attempts at imposing Chat Control on EU citizens) and the increasing automation of mass trawling surveillance made possible by ML to allow far wider civil society surveillance levels than were possible for the Stasi.

Sure, people used to think "Democracy" and thus "This time is different", but it turns out politicians and elites under Democracy still operate per the very same principles of Power as in the early XX century, they just managed over the years since then to get the populace to stop thinking and talking about Power itself and instead think only in terms of Politics all the while making sure Politics was subservient to older forms of Power, most notably Money.

Personally, ever since I observed how governments in the West reacted to the 2008 Crash, most notably who they chose to save and who they chose to pay for it, that I realized that the power of Democracy (specifically, the control of Citizens over how countries are managed by chosing who manages it using their Vote) has been made almost entirelly subservient to the power of Money, which is why it looks so much like we live in Oligarchies with theatrical Voting that changes only that which Money doesn't care about (hence the loud Identity Wars in the Moral plane between the dominant parties) rather than real Democracy.