We are a surveillance state. We(geeks) all made a fuss over it about 20 years ago and no one seemed to care so here we are. Every so often someone new realizes it, freaks out, and not much changes. I wish I weren't so cynical but at some point I just got tired of losing sleep over it.
The difference is surveillance states have historically leveraged people rather than passive tracking. It’s wildly different knowing your friends, family, even children are being indoctrinated to report you for things that may or may not have happened at which point you just disappear like many people you never heard from again.
It’s actively stressful in a way that cellphones just don’t evoke.
White or not if you are only middle class in middle america that ticket for the weed and steeper paraphernalia charge are going to hurt. Good luck getting the dumb things you've done as a teenager expunged unless you are actually upper class in middle america and therefore have access to legal council that your parents bankroll.
It is a sad kind of funny, watching people realize what happened.
I saw someone I know ranting elsewhere recently about how "nobody saw this coming" and "nobody warned us". I called him out on this, because I vividly remembered a conversation with him when he was telling me what a paranoid weirdo I was, and how self-important I was being, to assume anyone cared enough about what I had to say.
He claimed to not remember it. I found the email thread, mostly to make sure I wasn't wrong, but chose to stop responding instead.
