John Robb nails it. The nation-state is crumbling worldwide. Economies everywhere have been stagnant for years. Only a few on the top are prospering. But the natives are getting restless and increasingly mistrust their supposed leaders (who, instead of leading are mostly plundering and corrupt.) The only way for them to maintain control is by instituting an Orwellian surveillance state where everyone is tracked all the time and where your communications can and will be used against you. Of course, as the state loses legitimacy, the police and military it relies on to maintain control becomes more questioning and less loyal, which leads to more attempts to monitor everything. Emphasis added.
As an example, Canada just outlawed wearing masks at protest, to make facial recognition easier.
This loss of legitimacy and an creeping economic impotence (in almost all cases in developed world, they haven’t delivered prosperity to most citizens in decades) has led to a gnawing fear within political and bureaucratic elites. A fear that they are losing control. A paranoia that turns every citizen into a potential enemy of a nation-state that requires enemies in order to justify its existence.
This is a key insight. The primary reason for the existence of the nation-state is war. But the big wars have all been fought. Therefore they must declare war against tiny, outside groups, conflating those groups importance to that of a nation-state, and also must declare war against their own populace,
This is why Canada would make wearing mask in public a crime that could put you behind bars for up to a decade. Incidentally, that’s more time than any bankster got for defrauding us of trillions of $$ in 2008!!
This impotent paranoia is also behind the NSA’s push to build a surveillance apparatus that tracks and gathers data on every citizen 24×7. Data, that once accumulated, imperils the security of every American. Imperils the security of every American? A database that constantly gathers and combines smart phone activity, social media activity, and much more (more than what any commercial company could do its most graphic wet dream). A permanent and growing database like that, is the golden ticket to an information catastrophe for each and every American if it ever fell into the wrong hands. Its very existence puts us all at risk far, far, far, more than the handful of underwear bomber plots it contributes to foiling.