> That's a little disrespectful to those who actually lived in surveillance states. Is your neighbor watching you, ready to report you to the state for suspecte

> That's a little disrespectful to those who actually lived in surveillance states. Is your neighbor watching you, ready to report you to the state for suspected subversive activities? What's worse, if your neighbour consented to watching you and is actively reporting, or if the surveillance state doesn't even need your neighbour's consent to watch you because these neighbours (and family, friends, partner, etc) are all on Facebook, voluntarily carrying GPS-tracked recording devices everywhere they go, even into your bedroom--thereby making any defensive choice you can make for yourself useless, not joining Facebook, taking care what happens to your phone, etc. Certainly you can argue it's more disheartening and chilling if, through propaganda, your neighbour voluntarily chooses to report you to the state. On the other hand, the part where the state doesn't even need consent, that they can watch you much more closely and accurately, all the while your neighbours believe everything is fine--that's also pretty bad. I'm all for perspective, but can we agree that it's just different? Maybe they don't carry people off to secret prisons quite as often any more. But the level and depth of surveillance is a lot worse, they know a lot more about everybody. And the propaganda, they don't need it to convince your neighbours to spy on you to make sure you're not doing anything subversive, no they control the Facebook feeds and the media's narrative to attack the concept of "subversive" itself. > And even if the government knows that you do these things, how much of a threat do you need to pose before they'll act against you in particular? The governments of old would routinely act against large numbers of their population for far less. But what if today, for the governments it is easier to not just act against you in particular, they defuse the whole threat on a much wider scale, the "terrorist propaganda" with a truckload of "fake news" (already there, just a little nudge into the spotlight). I suppose that yes, if you carefully add all the pros and cons together, these old surveillance states were in fact worse. Given that I believe torture is one of the worst possible things you can do to a person, and that happened on a much larger scale, if you're keeping score that really makes it worse. On the other hand what we have now in the West is also pretty bad. And the level and depth of surveillance and control is worse now. Just because something that was worse was called a "surveillance state", doesn't mean we are also living in one now, and that it's doing bad things to our freedoms. (granted your last line pretty much tried to say this, I felt like I needed to add some words)