Just to play Devil's Advocate, real total surveillance might not be bad. If you were hooked into a system that actually monitored all minds in real time and con

Just to play Devil's Advocate, real total surveillance might not be bad. If you were hooked into a system that actually monitored all minds in real time and connected you directly to whatever other mind you wanted to reach out to with no misunderstanding, you'd have a hive mind that was no longer human but might be capable of more complicated thoughts. It's been done plenty of times in science fiction, but now we're getting to the point where we can actually transmit some information directly from mind to mind. I think there's room for voluntary connectivity without being invasive. There should always be a way to have total privacy whenever it's desired, and that should be true for the near future without question. But there's a chance that at some point, people won't even want it anymore. If it happens voluntarily as people become more comfortable with each other, I'm not sure if it will even be bad. Forced is no good of course, and using surveillance to impose oligarchical control is terrible, but if we move gradually, I don't think anyone can really predict how it might turn out.