I agree, it is too facile to conflate the two, that is why I tried to distance the real Stasi from the trends that I'm seeing by calling it "Stasi-lite". Howev

I agree, it is too facile to conflate the two, that is why I tried to distance the real Stasi from the trends that I'm seeing by calling it "Stasi-lite". However, I'm seeing disturbing accretions of power over time enabled by the social networks' data harvesting, and the concomitant gold rush to gather any data, anywhere and plug it into everywhere it fits into a coherent "data narrative". I don't want to concern-troll; I'm young enough to still hold out hope, but old enough to understand human nature has not changed for millennia. Counter-examples to your points, with the full awareness that we are nowhere near the overtly oppressive levels of the Stasi. * We already have police cruisers harvesting license plates passing by. It is not long before surveillance camera feeds are hooked up to facial recognition engines ostensibly for highly-targeted in-store ads using new hyper-local delivery platforms (video screens beckoning you with a product pitch predicted to appeal to you, hyper-local audio only you can hear delivering the pitch). How long before simply walking around yields a minutely-detailed, fully-automated diary of your daily goings about that even in the glory days of the Stasi took punishing levels of manpower? * The consumers of the data might not be centralized, but as many have observed, tech is usually a winner-take-all game and the harvesting and collation of the data will more likely than not be another Google (or Google itself). The data will be sold in a highly-segmented manner to extract the maximum profit from the data, but the concentration of power enabled by pulling all that data together in 1-3 entities, not to speak of the Palantir-like statistical associative inferencing, will be unprecedented. Imagine human nature around that kind of data corpus. * People regularly air dirty laundry I would have never imagined in such a public setting. Alias doxxing only need happen once, and then everything negative ever said comes crashing home to roost out of never-erased archives. These are tools, with no intrinsic moral compass; how we use them is subject to moral evaluation. I observe that the output of these tools will be too expensive for individuals to access and use themselves, and it is only in the remit of very wealthy individuals and the larger commercial and governmental entities. These are to me the new, much more powerful suasion tools than newspapers and TV could ever hope to aspire to, for they can shape opinions using individualized social circles and will "feel more genuine/authentic". This might seem benign, until say, someone buys out massive, long-term campaigns designed to say, sway public opinion "at the grassroots level" to go against vaccinations. We live in a fascinating era.