I think the article misses the mark attributing surveillance to a social need to control behavior that was a vacuum because of the dissolution of traditional co

I think the article misses the mark attributing surveillance to a social need to control behavior that was a vacuum because of the dissolution of traditional communities. Immediately before the surveillance era, at least in the US, crime rates had been declining for many years indicating no unraveling of social order. Meanwhile community dissolution had been going on for decades. I think the obvious answer is correct: mass surveillance became possible and cheap, and states adopted it as soon as they could. I think the motivation for the article is a hope for a kind of society where information technology can coexist without surveillance, and the author errs by misdiagnosing the shape this society could take. It won't be one where we revert to traditional community control which the author supposes, or one where people can outrun surveillance with savvy use of technology which seems to be the default position of many tech-savvy people. Rather the solution is to apply democratic control to information technology. Democratic control is the best way to mitigate concentrations of power such as the military, courts, taxation, etc.