Hello,
I was with my brother and his group of friends, and one of his friends was talking about various drugs. My brother told him, “Shut up, you’re going to put us on a watchlist,” and he said it in a serious tone. It felt pretty dystopian when he said that; honestly, it was a bit eerie, mostly because he’s being controlled and self-censoring without anyone there, and he seems to be aware of the freedom he’s giving up, yet he continues to act this way. I’ve talked to my brother about privacy and why it’s important many times, but he would rather live this type of controlled life and doesn’t care because “they already know everything about me anyway.” He’s in his early 20s.
Has anyone else had moments like this?
Assuming this is the US, I doubt it’s that easy to land on any sort of watchlist. Unfortunately, paranoia doesn’t require any actual hard evidence.
At one time searching for linux was enough. https://www.eweek.com/security/linux-lands-on-nsa-watch-list/
The point being that people are doing it to themselves and that feeling is coming from some where.
Obidient population is a authoritarian wet dream… Look at Germany and Russia, they will take anything and then cry daddy made them do it.
That was literally the main point in 1984. The mass-surveillance wasn’t literal, but meant to be implied by the despotic authority of “Big Brother”. In reality people were encouraged to tell on each other. A neighbor of the main character meets him while he’s incarcerated at the end of the book, sent to prison because his own children told on him about how he talked in his sleep… and he was proud of them for it.