It seems that people's separation of reality and fiction has gotten downright dismal. I would blame LLMs but I have seen far too many peope unironically cite "Elysium" as "evidence of what the rich are planning" well before LLMs went mainstream.
I feel such a bore, but seeing characters like Deadpool walking around in real life makes my eyes roll. Although interestingly Borat's universe is this one, well his show really does blend fiction and reality.
Then again politicians are gaslighting us left and right (saying things not far from "chocolate rations have gone up"), just like Borat pretending to be an uncouth journalist from Kazakhstan...
Hah the context of the 1984 reference hits hard:
> It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday […] it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. [...] The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically. passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grams. Syme, too - in some more double complex way, involving doublethink-Syme, swallow it. Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory?
