[Barrin92]

>It is in essence an attack on the human spirit.

Although this is by no means a consensus view on the human spirit. Culture and civilization are in many ways simply what you describe, means of domesticating the human animal. It's quite loaded to assume everyone who isn't on board with the Taxi Driver view of the human spirit is 'bad'.

Another user points to the Panopticon which wasn't viewed as evil or 'dystopian'. It was thought of as a humane, progressive reform of prisons that does away with the violence and privation you had in prisons up until that time. In a lot of Confucian cultures that remains today, you don't find a lot of Koreans, Japanese or Chinese people who think law enforcement and surveillance is crushing the human spirit, they'd tell you these are tools to cultivate civilized human beings so you don't end up like monkeys in the banana factory.

[BoxwoodSeed]

There's a small but important difference between surveillance in certain settings (like a prison) and surveillance around the clock. There's also a difference between keeping records forever and not keeping records at all.

The Panopticon was designed in a way that inmates would not know whether they were watched or not and there was no camera to record everything to be reviewed later by AI agents, either. It also wasn't something that caught on.

Personally, I don't mind surveillance in certain public spaces, as long as the public has access to everything that is recorded in real time and whatever archives are kept. If it's a camera in a public space you'd think it would be better if not everyone had access, then it's probably a camera that it would be better no one had access to.