“...because the truth of the matter is that by 1984, we were already to the level of surveillance and government intrusion found in that book.”
Hmm, in 1984 you had government surveillance devices in every room of your home that could be monitoring you at any time, 24 hours a day? Color me incredulous.
They easily had that technology, just used it more judiciously, requiring warrants easily obtained. And once in position, it was unlawful to interfere with such devices, if you discovered them. Public places and businesses did adopt much camera security during that time.
At that time, if you made more than four long distance phone calls a month, one of them would have been monitored by the NSA.
The popularity of the Internet was a major setback to such monitoring, then public domain encryption.
The successful conclusion of the (cold) war with Eastasia also caused much chaos in the surveillance networks.
So it has not been a straight line progression. But things really picked up after Reagan.