[tommit]

This seems a bit over the top to me. I don't think I agree with your overall sentiment, even though I share some of the fear.

Our phones were certainly not designed to be surveillance devices, that's just a side effect of having one central device that includes pretty much all of your life's data. As convenient as it is to have everything that matters to you on one device, it simply makes spying that much easier.

I'm not going to go into the smart home debate. I personally don't think that most smart devices are actually spying on you, though a lot of them are security nightmares and could be easily configured to do so by a malicious third party.

I don't share your sentiment towards the guardian at all. I think it's important they are writing articles like this -- thereby doing more to put an end to it than most. You not using a cell phone and telling your friends not to either is likely not having as much an impact on the public as such an article does.

That last sentence of yours pretty much makes any debate pointless, however.

[jokethrowaway]

The idea of journalism is good in principle, but it rarely works in our modern highly centralised and easily controlled society.

Journalists are not independent enough to create a market of actors with different ideas and point of views. If they are, they're probably internet blogs or youtubers and are labeled conspiracy theorists by mainstream journalists.

In the mainstream media you have a few narratives (typically one per party but there may be variations) who are sponsored by either the government or massive businesses.

There are certainly noteworthy exceptions (think about Greenwald - Snowden) but those are few and far.

[hoseja]

Education, especially history education is very thinly veiled nationalist-and-obedient-worker indoctrination.

[jackson1442]

I'm curious where you got this idea from. If anything, my university history classes looked at US history as a power struggle and certainly not through rose-colored glasses.

Sure, elementary education glosses over the state's transgressions and the like, but it doesn't seem exactly appropriate to go into detail about how native americans were raped and murdered by colonizers to a 9 year old.

Education teaches people to think critically, which is incredibly important to liberal society and, if anything, would encourage people to _not_ be obedient workers.