For example, take this TV spyware thing, and rewind to the year 1986, and imagine RCA started selling televisions with microphones in them that recorded what was in your room and radioed it back to headquarters for some reason.

Obviously the costs wouldn't have worked at the time, but is there anything that was missing in our ability to describe the risks and wrongness? The concepts of privacy and consent, contracts and monopolies, ownership and licensing... They were all there 40 years ago.

In other words, the bee in my bonnet involves how the phrase "keeping up with the technology" sometimes becomes way to shift blame and a false target. It distracts us from the immediate political alignment problem towards a nebulous future technological one, which is so ill-defined it can never arrive. ("Once technology finally stops changing, then we'll legislate for our individual constituents' rights.")