this is very good and very true but i dont personally beleive there is a huge distinction between government and tech monopoly to be made and tech monopoly is an arm of empire imo not to say there arent tensions and contradictions built into that
The tech company's ability to obscure invasiveness and methods of accumulating information is what totalitarian governments wish they had, and are slowly lurching towards. Governance is really far behind what a facebook/Google/amazon knows about you
It's no coincidence that the truly populist "western" political movements of recent years in Trump & Vote Leave were the ones who embraced the ability to scrape data and manipulate their marketing to the inner whims of AI and adjusted accordingly
The same thing is clearly happening with the non-lockdown movements but that manipulation is far greyer and pulling a variety of directions, which is why you have people who are effectively left-wing holistic suddenly joining forces with far-right twats like Farage et al
The furore about vaccine passports etc is really chasing the past, the horse has bolted. The computers know where you are anyway