And we haven't seen anything yet in terms of decentralized technology. Distributed apps are about to explode soon [1]. I don't know if that will "stop" mass sur

And we haven't seen anything yet in terms of decentralized technology. Distributed apps are about to explode soon [1]. I don't know if that will "stop" mass surveillance, as I assume metadata could still be collected unless we think of ways to anonymize almost everything, too, and not just decentralize everything, but at least it should severely limit the mass collection of the content itself. And if we decide as a society that mass anonymization is what we need (in other words, how the Internet was before Facebook, Google+ and post-9/11 NSA), I think we'll have the technical ways to do it. I believe we should be more optimistic about the future, and I think the author is right that there is a bigger underlying trend here that gives a person more freedom than one has ever had. In a way it feels like how we see the latest economic crisis and see the news about millions of people losing jobs and whatnot, but we forget that if we look at the data, we're now much "richer" than we were decades or a century ago. It's easy to lose track of the bigger picture. But it's also true that any given country can fall from democracy into a more totalitarian state (I think UK is doing that the fastest these days), but it's not like we haven't stopped stuff like that from happening before, and it's not going to be a permanent state. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQQEdUoCtdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQQEdUoCtdg https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Paper https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Pa...