Surveillance: Is it inevitable?

If we have some sort of choice, and we can get rid of the massive surveillance systems, then it's probably a good idea. Certainly it accords more appropriately with my libertarian mode of thinking.

Now obviously, government has a 'king of the hill' aspect to it. In order to materially reduce it's size and scope, you have to beat it in some way, and in some material/symbolic way you have to be 'the king' and keep humiliating all the bad actors who will desperately show up to try to use government. I think we see this a little bit in America right now with Trump's presidency apparently triggering people to become extra especially nutty.

Like why do you kneel? I can imagine, should some overlord show up to subjugate us, he would not bother to check if you were kneeling in protest, he'd just want you to kneel.

But I digress, and all evidence points to much more dangerous responses happening. They will happen for a while, probably.

But ultimately, the idea is that the only way to de-politicize things is to hold the line until everyone learns charging up the hill is pointless. Then everybody goes home and actually invests in doing non-political stuff, and then maybe we can quietly take down the hill.

I have begun to think maybe surveillance is a hill unto itself. That it is already out there in force, and the only way to get it under control is take it and use it. The trickiest part, of course, is that in order to reform it, you have to remove the people who love it, and put people into place that are fundamentally opposed to it- which is a contradiction I don't know how many people can live with. And then the people you remove would likely just start doing it on their own, so maybe you can't just shut them down...

It is a very troubling thing. One upside though, is that good surveillance can help with governance. The downside is that it may corrupt.