“In some ways the Puritans seem to have taken the classic dystopian bargain — give up all freedom and individuality and art, and you can have a perfect society without crime or violence or inequality.” — Scott Alexander

“By preying on the modern necessity to stay connected, governments can reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals, the primary difference being that we paid for the tags and they’re in our pockets.” — Edward Snowden

If the Puritans pursued the “classic dystopian bargain”, maybe we’re pursuing the dystopian bargain nouveau. It’s not quite the opposite, but not far from it. We’ve given up all freedom by embracing ideological tribalism and accepting ubiquitous infotainment as a panacea, instead of agitating for the rights nominally promised by our two-faced governments. Who elected Janus? Why haven’t we kicked him out of office?

The rise of mass surveillance, enabled by SIGINT technology, is a good proxy for the government’s lack of respect for its citizens.

Sometimes my commentary on these issues can come across as anti-privacy or maybe pro-surveillance, because lots of the paranoid hacker-types I hang out with overestimate their threat models. So yes, I do want people to lighten up, and I’m pretty pessimistic about the prospect of “normies” using Tor and PGP.

But on the other hand, it’s terrifying that the NSA vacuums up all the information in the world. (International friends: your governments do it too, and they collaborate with the NSA when possible.) It’s terrifying that encryption is under fire. It’s terrifying that people get nigh disappeared in prison. I don’t know what to do with this world.

Maybe the answer is nihilism.