Sales of George Orwell’s utopian novel 1984 (1949) have spiked twice recently, both times in response to political events. In early 2017, the idea of “alternative facts” called to mind Winston Smith, the book’s protagonist and, as a clerk in the Ministry of Truth, a professional alternator of facts. And in 2013, the U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden compared widespread government surveillance explicitly to what Orwell had imagined: “The types of collection in the book–microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us–are nothing compared to what we have available today.”

Snowden was right. Re-reading 1984 in 2018, one is struck by the “TVs that watch us,” which Orwell called telescreens. The telescreen is one of the first objects we encounter: “The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.” It is omnipresent, in every private room and public space, right up until the end of the book, when it is “still pouring forth its tale of prisoners and booty and slaughter” even after Smith has resigned himself to its rule.

What’s most striking about the telescreen’s ubiquity is how right and how wrong Orwell was about our technological present. Screens are not just a part of life today: they are our lives. We interact digitally so often and in such depth that it’s hard for many of us to imagine (or remember) what life used to be like. And now, all that interaction is recorded. Snowden was not the first to point out how far smartphones and social media are from what Orwell imagined. He couldn’t have known how eager we’d be to shrink down our telescreens and carry them with us everywhere we go, or how readily we’d sign over the data we produce to companies that fuel our need to connect. We are at once surrounded by telescreens and so far past them that Orwell couldn’t have seen our world coming.

Or could he? Orwell gives us a couple of clues about where telescreens came from, clues that point toward a surprising origin for the totalitarian state that 1984 describes. Taking them seriously means looking toward the corporate world rather than to our current governments as the likely source of freedom’s demise. If Orwell was right, consumer choice–indeed, the ideology of choice itself–might be how the erosion of choice really starts.

The first clue comes in the form of a technological absence. For the first time, Winston finds himself in a room without a telescreen:

“There’s no telescreen!” he could not help murmuring. “Ah,” said the old man, “I never had one of those things. Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow.”

Though we learn to take the old man’s statements with a grain of salt, it seems that–at some point, for some people–the owning of a telescreen was a matter of choice.

The second hint is dropped in a book within the book: a banned history of the rise of “the Party” authored by one of its early architects who has since become “the Enemy of the People.” The book credits technology with the destruction of privacy, and here we catch a glimpse of the world in which we live: “With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.”