Snowden is and always will be a hero.

Sorry we let you down dude.

It has significant mental health and social effects, too. We need to start seeing these behaviors by governments and corporations the same way that we see similar actions by abusive people. Stalking and monitoring someone isn't wrong only because a regular individual is the one doing it, it's wrong because it's fundamentally wrong. Such behaviors are designed to intimidate and control someone. It is absolutely unjustifiable on every level.

Lol there is a ring camera on every door and an Alexa in every home. Mass surveillance is so normal they got "normies" to pay for it monthly.

I find this argument compelling:

"We have a physiological need for privacy. Mammals in particular respond poorly to surveillance. We consider it a threat because animals in the wild are tracked by predators, and it makes us feel like prey."

Taken from this TEDx talk: https://youtu.be/jVeqAemtC6w Quoted bit starts at 5:45

In all honesty, I believe it falls on each of us to educate as much people as possible in the actual dangers of mass surveillance and what are the potential options to minimize it's impact.

For example, I've been advocating for privacy within my family, friends and other acquaintances for years now. Only recently have I managed to get my wife to start caring (some fearmongering was required) and have gotten a friend from church already on track to eliminating Google, Crapple, mainstream social networks and even self hosting. Some people at work have been reaching out to ask me how they can start moving away from the big tech overreach, and now even my kids have gotten their friends on Simplex, which have made some of their parents move to it as well.

Again, it's taken me over 7 years to manage this little, but it's something. If all of us keep doing this, avoiding getting to the point of annoying others (though I've annoyed quite a few persons with this, but whatever) more and more people will start moving in that direction.

Just getting some people to change from chrome to brave, which is one of the easiest things to do without making them change their streamlines, or move to Signal from SMS and WhatsApp, is already making headway.

If we get tired and stop preaching security, the surveillance wins. At least that's how I see it.

Define normal...

If you go by the definition of being the most common thing, the current surveillance capitalist dystopia is literally the new normal.

What you mean is that you feel it shouldn't be normal. And you're right. But sadly, it is now undeniably the norm.

In humans, there's good things and there's bad things. But most of it is actually in-between.

If you take out everything bad, that satisfies you for the moment. And then you go on, looking for further progress. You take out the almost-bad, the somewhat-bad. In the end, it leaves only the good. But that is not enough for a human to live on.

Constant surveillance leads to burnout and extremely high stress-levels.

i talked to people that had a difficulty grasping the concept of "if you delete a post, it might still be stored on the server"

the obscure and closed tech we have makes it hard for laymen to get a true grasp on whats truly happening.

I personally love mass surveillance. What other use could tax dollars have anyway

It's normal but people don't like it. Just ask the people you know if they are ok with all the mass surveillance, they don't like it. But it's just too difficult for them to do anything about it. They don't like this "small beginner steps" approach to privacy. They want complete privacy without effort or nothing at all and they don't want to pay for it. It's laughable and sad but that's my experience talking about privacy with people. But the point here i guess is that mass surveillance has been forced on us all. They create a new wonderful technology with lots of use case but then they also add in some mass surveillance on it as well as a bonus.

You might also be interested in the Panopticon.

I'm not sure if you have looked around much but mass surveillance is pretty normal these days.

Terrible isn't it. I just want to be left alone.

Typical 1984 behaviour and wrong thinking

What you define as normal?

There's a reason I tell people that if I ever met God or Santa Claus, of beat their ass for assuming my end of the deal without me.

we've traded privacy for access to ease, and i don't think we're going to able to put the genie back in the bottle

Welcome to the Future where everyone can see you at all times and you will not able to do much with it. (unless you live in an underground cave like Batman)

People have been conditioned to believe that determination of an act's morality is somehow changed when when carried out on a large enough scale, or when performed by certain entities.