[shit_game]

"Now" is when this level and depth of mass identification and surveilance has become technologically feasible, financially valuable, and politically possible.

The political planets have aligned in many nations for private industry to lobby for this power, sating their own goals as advertisers and the state's goals as authoritarians. This is an open conspiracy between every tech giant and every government to perpetually identify every action that every person ever makes online for the sakes of advertising, propagandizing, surveiling, persecuting, and imprisoning people.

It is not a coincidence that this is occurring in all western nations at the same time; these economies are incredibly large and active, and these governments have been under attack from the far-right for decades.