Thanks for helping me remember watching Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring fail :-(

I would actually disagree. We, as ordinary citizens, are much more aware of the intrusions of authoritarian regimes or institutions into our lives, but by and large, are not exceptionally pressed-upon by them in comparison to past societies.

I would like to emphasize that I am NOT saying "uwu the NSA can take pictures of my asshole when I'm not looking, as a treat 😊", but that we're probably not in a particularly different position, in terms of relative ability to observe and escape observation, than past societies.

Fuck governments spying on their citizens, the same way I'd say fuck pre-modern societies spying on their subjects for the benefit of the elites - but bored apparatchiks with phone-taps and program backdoors is a change in form from priestly hierarchies extracting confessions from you and your social circle; and local elders secretly opening and resealing letters and harassing your friends and family into condemning you; not really a change in substance. It's not so much worse as stretched over a greater geographical area, as is all modern life.

I mean, hell, as late as the early 19th century, "My landlord spied on me through the keyhole" was a perfectly good reason to get executed for sodomy; and as early as Ancient Rome (and probably earlier, tbh) a man's private conversation with his own family might be used to have his throat cut after a banquet. The means of transmission (overlapping social circles instead of overlapping institutions) is different, but the end result of violation of privacy in service to the politics of the elite (local or national) is the same.