"The...limitless capacity of Puritanism for evil is due to its intrenchment behind the State and the law.
Pretending to safeguard the people against “immorality,” it has impregnated the machinery of government and added to its usurpation of moral guardianship the legal censorship of our views, feelings, and even of our conduct.
Art, literature...the privacy of the mails...our most intimate tastes, are at the mercy of this inexorable tyrant."
- Emma Goldman, The Hypocrisy of Puritanism, 1917
100+ years ago anarchists were writing essays complaining about state censorship, and invasions of privacy.
Three things have changed since then:
1. we have formalized the mathematics of cryptography, and the engineering of privacy systems.
2. those marginalized communities who were once isolated, now have means to connect on a global scale.
3. every tyrant from 100+ years ago is dead.
I don't believe it's a natural state. But the arc of the moral universe can be bent towards justice.
@sarahjamielewis and each state has mass espionage machines with cheap memory which can actually store sensitive parts of data (like personal correspondence) almost indefinitely. They had to send real agents 100 years ago to do that kind of stuff, for any suspect, which is not scalable.
So it's kind of questionable, who is better loaded with opportunities.
Sarah Jamie Lewis
Gadfly (-booq-)
Dmitry Mantis