A friend has stopped offering Stripe to customers of his Magento hosting service. The reason, he told me, is that Stripe frequently delays payments. You can find lots of articles about issues with Stripe on the web.
A surprise is that they don't mention his "Homage to Catalonia", which tells Orwell's experience of fighting in the Spanish civil war. It may have been the first time that he encountered the ugly face of the Soviet Union's totalitarian system, making him question the ideology behind. "Animal Farm" and "1984" look to me like they were heavily influenced by Orwell's experience in the civil war.
The big brother surveillance part in "1984" is really only part of the story - there is a lot more in the book, and it wasn't science fiction either.