It’s one of the ugly ironies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: various totalitarian regimes took the first crack at building surveillance states; but they couldn’t keep the cost, complexity, and sheer unpopularity from eventually dragging them down.
Now the ‘free world’ is taking a turn, and it turns out that good old innovation(with a hefty dose of advertising) is not only capable of building a more pervasive surveillance apparatus; but of operating it at a profit. What could possibly go wrong?
