Comment by watwut
6 hours ago
The surveillance economy was brought in by people who were pontificating about freedom. Freedom for companies created it and bad faith arguments about freedom sustained it. The evil governments were Johny come lately here, basically. I have read absolutists libertarian rants about "the governments" trying to remove the freedom. In overwhelming majority of the cases, these people were actually supporting fascists and those strong rants were just tools to achieve that goal.
And now, general public is pissed about consequences of what large companies caused so much, that it is willing to put a lot of power into the hand of evil government, because they see it as less evil.
To me, again, this doesn't look like a real attempt by the people to counteract the corporations, although it's certainly sold and advertised that way. I think it's the world's biggest collaboration project between tech megacorporations and governments. Many companies stand to gain a lot from the removal of privacy, because it discourages competition and funnels users away from doing anything on their own and towards compliant services owned by these companies. More importantly, these companies will be the enforcement arm of many anti-privacy technologies. They're the ones who will be sifting through internet traffic, processing pictures of your IDs, organizing datapoints about everything you've ever done on their services. All mandated by governments as part of the world's largest conflict of interest. All the governments will do is just bundle these streams of data into narratives and timelines, a full automatic dossier on everyone without ever having to do actual old-school spying on them.