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You see, when someone talks about "the governments" without realising that they do represent the people in a democracy, their ignorance show so much that it is difficult for them to attract any sympathy in those places where the laws are discussed.

by basilikum7 hours ago|

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It is ignorant to believe that democracy is a stable, self regulating equilibrium that maintains itself purely through elections.

The people in power in a democracy do not not persecute their dissidents because they are better people or because they got to power by being elected by the people, but because good democratic systems hold the people in power accountable to the general population. A surveillance state does the opposite. It holds the people accountable to the government.

Democracies stay democratic because the people hold power over the state and have means to get informed about the state. That requires for example journalism and protection for journalists and their sources. When the state can trivially find the sources of journalists and surveil the investigations of journalists before they can even publish anything that protection is no longer given.

When the state can know exactly all the people that participated in a protest that gives the state power over the people and takes power away from the people.

When the state can know exactly where in important organizations of all kinds there are dissidents so it can replace them before they can organize...

by tavavex7 hours ago|

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I'm sure all the people in the world suddenly did a 180 over the course of the last year, often with no new elections held, and all the governments are merely addressing their concerns by moving in complete lockstep with the exact same sets of policies proposed after ignoring 'the problems' for decades. After all, we live in a happy wonder world with perfect representation, direct democracy and absolutely no malicious actors, corruption, lobbying and coordination that is not controllable by ordinary people in any meaningful way - at least, as long as that thought-terminating assumption helps me argue for what I like. Stop protesting against Democracy (me).

by watwut7 hours ago|

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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.

by tavavex7 hours ago|

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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.