The tech is in the hand of bad actors, they are wiping out civilization. If you have no privacy, you have no freedom of thought, you cannot learn to think, and

The tech is in the hand of bad actors, they are wiping out civilization. If you have no privacy, you have no freedom of thought, you cannot learn to think, and cannot become a person. Water bags, yes ("the last man lives the longest"), humans no, civilization no. Surveillance and militarization protect that undertaking of destruction, they don't prevent it, they get arrayed against those who would attempt to prevent it. e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/j... It's like the people who invaded Iraq and made ISIS possible, then go on and tell people what to do about ISIS, and so on. How about bringing to justice the and seeing judged in our history books the "bad actors" in past and present we know exist for sure, rather than rationalizing continued obedience to them by squinting hard, to try and see "silver linings" in clouds they are seeking to force upon us? That's the mechanism here, it's not like we live in a normal world as free adults, and someone says "hey, tech is getting very powerful, let's talk about privacy". No, we rationalize what we see powerful conglomerates pushing over decades, in an arms race against civilian populations that begun before we were even born. > It's pretty ironic that the so-called 'least advantaged' people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction. -- Noam Chomsky > What mattered in our early, nontheoretical education in morality was never the conduct of the true culprit of whom even then no one in his right mind could expect other than the worst. Thus we were outraged, but not morally disturbed, by the bestial behavior of the stormtroopers in the concentration camps and the torture cellars of the secret police, and it would have been strange indeed to grow morally indignant over the speeches of the Nazi big wigs inpower, whose opinions had been common knowledge for years. [..] The moral issue arose only with the phenomenon of "coordination," that is, not with fear-inspired hypocrisy, but with this very early eagerness not to miss the train of History, with this, as it were, honest overnight change of opinion that befell a great majority of public figures in all walks of life and all ramifications of culture, accompanied, as it was, by an incredible ease with which life long friendships were broken and discarded. In brief, what disturbed us was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about. They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it. Without taking into account the almost universal breakdown, not of personal responsibility, but of personal judgment in the early stages of the Nazi regime, it is impossible to understand what actually happened. -- Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"