Other people have already made better critiques of your post. I find it to be a hollow assertion based on multiple inaccurate assumptions, but I want to focus

Other people have already made better critiques of your post. I find it to be a hollow assertion based on multiple inaccurate assumptions, but I want to focus narrowly on one point that I don't think anyone else has addressed yet. So what's the reason for attributing so much power to these external "forces", none of which have ANY intrinsic power beyond what you give them? You seem to be playing fast and loose with the distinction between "you" meaning me as an individual and "you" meaning a society that includes myself. I, personally, don't necessarily give the NSA any power. Unless you're saying that apathy in a democracy does give them power. But therein lies the switch from individual to collective "you". If I alone dedicated my entire life to removing their intrinsic power, I still wouldn't be able to remove it's power. Snowden threw away his life to try and remove the power behind the NSA. He was uniquely positioned to challenge their power and only managed to get egg on their face and start public discourse. Societal things like this necessitate discussion, because that's the only way the power drawn from a large number of people can work to counter that power acting towards it's natural incentives. Or are you going to argue that because I am able to to completely withdraw from society and live in a cabin in the woods I'm opting into the power exerted by governments and corporations? By that logic my continued decisions not to commit suicide are approval of whatever government rule happens to be the status quo. Rhetorical power of death aside, I do find that to be both quite true and utterly irrelevant to a conversation on the type of world I'd like to live in beyond the barest of bare minimums.