Seems more like a real tragedy of private enterprise.
We used to assume that the surveillance world would be built by government (1984). But it turned out to be equally likely to be built by the free market.
The government has few uses for total surveillance, and almost all are obviously bad. Private enterprise has a million uses, most of them various degree of bad, but as a society we've been blind to this kind of badness for many decades now - for at least as long as lying in the face of your fellow humans and trying to hurt them materially has been considered a respectable profession.
It's because capitalism won the (absurd black-and-white framing of the) cold war, with America as its the biggest winner. We don't even recognize the level of propaganda that has gone into convincing us all that "markets" are the best optimizer ever designed and that profit equals morality--we just accept these as base principles without questioning them. Surveillance produces profit? Well let's have more then.
Seems more like a real tragedy of private enterprise.
We used to assume that the surveillance world would be built by government (1984). But it turned out to be equally likely to be built by the free market.