Josef K. is arrested one morning and never told what he's accused of. He spends the rest of the novel navigating a court system with no visible structure, no accessible rules, and no path to actually learning the charge against him — until the process itself becomes indistinguishable from the punishment. Kafka's target isn't a dictator; it's a system so opaque that guilt or innocence stops being the relevant question.
There's no telescreen in The Trial, no propaganda ministry, barely a visible state at all — just an endless procedural apparatus: lawyers who can't get answers, offices that lead to other offices, hearings that clarify nothing. Control here doesn't require surveillance or persuasion; it only requires that the process be so confusing and endless that resistance becomes exhausting before it becomes possible.
"Kafkaesque" entered the language for a reason — the experience of facing an opaque bureaucratic process with no clear rules, no accountable individual, and no way to determine what would actually resolve the situation turned out to be a recognizable and recurring feature of large institutions generally, government and otherwise.
The novel's court is almost mystically inaccessible — an institution that seems designed to be permanently unknowable rather than merely poorly run. Most real bureaucratic dysfunction is more mundane: understaffing, conflicting incentives, and accumulated process rather than any deliberate design toward opacity, even when the effect on the person caught inside it feels similar.
Administrative processes — immigration, insurance appeals, content moderation disputes, credit disputes — that offer no clear point of accountability or resolution path echo the book's core mechanism. See Surveillance Notes for dated, sourced examples.