[jammies]

I think I'm a pretty creative guy, so I wonder if I should start inventing some conspiracies of my own - I'm sure I could do a better job than the vast majority of these nutjobs. As long as my ideas are "interesting" and "thought-provoking", it doesn't matter if they are true. Or so it seems.

On another note, the Soviets managed to indoctrinate and control hundreds of millions of people using nothing more technologically sophisticated than typewriters, guns, and barbed wire. The idea that technology will be used to impose unconquerable tyranny ignores the human mastery of outthinking systems, for criminals and revolutionaries will always find the weakness of any inequitable power structure in the end - the weakness of the people who populate it and who can be induced to pervert it for the sake of personal gain.

Focusing on the implementation of surveillance or tracking devices as a threat to freedom gets it backwards - it is ideas that create a totalitarian state, not inventions, and the present time is the least censorious era for ideas that has ever existed. Further, this trend continues towards more and more freedom of thought, not less, despite the attempts of repressive states and organizations to reverse it. As communication between individuals becomes more and more simple and less and less expensive, no other scenario is possible - you cannot impose ideas from the top-down onto people that have horizontal access to a limitless number of dissenting opinions. You can certainly try, and even achieve some short-term success, but in the long term totalitarianism is destined for obsolescence in the same way that feudalism or the divine right of kings eventually became irrelevant and unsustainable.