You're Soaking In It

     An online acquaintance, someone at least thirty years younger than I am, was viewing-with-alarm the other day: "I don;t want the world to become a kind of electronic panopticon, infested with a social credit system like Red China, where people get deplatformed or "cancelled" for Wrongthink!"

     It's a noble sentiment, but I think it's too late, possibly -- possibly! -- moot and askew from human nature.

     Taking those points one at a time:

     Too Late: I grew up in a world where you got a Social Security number when you entered the workforce, and were issued a flimsy little piece of cardboard with some of Uncle Sam's nice engraving, your name blurrily picked out in all caps by some kind of computerized printer, and a neatly-printed little notice: "NOT TO BE USED FOR IDENTIFICATION."  My parents had received theirs about the time they first got their own ration cards, and their parents--  Their parents had taken a dim view of the whole notion, another one of that over-reaching Roosevelt's schemes, this one cribbed from that scary lunatic Francis Townsend.   In that long-ago world, you might have been able to look up someone's name from their phone number or address, if you went to the library and looked it up in a city directory -- and your local library probably only had a current one for your town.  The librarian and the clerks at the bookstore and the five-and-dime were the only people who knew what books you were reading.  --And we were worried about invasions of privacy by things like yearly automobile inspections* and all those nosy questions on  the U. S. Census.†  As long as you kept the shades drawn and avoided breaking the law, nobody know what you were up to inside, John Bircher and Commie alike (though all those IMPEACH EARL WARREN stickers on the thicker corner fenceposts made it pretty clear which group was in ascendance.) Mow your yard oddly, though, and you might be the talk of the street.  This was the world that my grandparents thought was a bit too privacy-invaded by The Government and my parents admitted, well, yes, it was, but what are you gonna do?

     Possibly Moot: The Internet still interprets censorship as damage, and still routes around it.  It does the same thing with platforms.  The Eternal September eventually killed Usenet; MySpace collapsed of its own...something or other, possibly inertia.  Today's huge, dominating platform is very likely to become #YesterdaysNews, especially once it commences pushing people overboard for any flavor of wrongness.  Of course, this works as well for bad people as it does for nice ones -- possibly better.  But it always has.  The ISPs and national/international regulation of them is a weak point (with one bright spot), but the genie (GEnie?) is well and truly out of the lamp and it's not going back.

     Askew From Human Nature: Let's go back to the earlier generations I was writing about.  My grandparents grew up in tiny communities.  You could leave your past (mostly) behind by pulling up stakes and moving far away -- but you had to put them back down again at your new location.  People gossiped.  People visited.  If you never dusted behind the furniture, your neighbors knew about it.  If you had loud arguments, your neighbors knew about it.  If you were scrupulously honest in your dealings -- or not -- everyone knew about it.  No radio, no TV: idle talk was a major form of entertainment. 
       My parents grew up in small towns, often on the edge of larger ones; they graduated from the same High School a few years apart, with each class having less than fifty people,.  By the time I was twelve, I knew all their names.  Just from overhearing.  I only met a few, but they all kept in touch with one another; they knew what the others were up to.  They, well, gossiped.  And they kept track of the other people they went to a school with, and their neighbors and their teachers, shopkeepers and civil servants. A very few of them did things of which the rest disapproved, and were ostracized for it. Is any of this starting to sound familiar?  Social anonymity is a relatively recent phenomenon.
     This is how human beings are wired up. Inserting some electronics and code into the process does not change its fundamental nature.

    So, Panopticon? You're soaking it it. Just as all you ancestors did. Most of them didn't have electric lights; few of them enjoyed running water. Social interaction has gotten the same kind of technological upgrade, but the people driving the interacting have not changed.
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* Bit of a scam, bit of a good idea: cars wore out a lot faster back then and if you were, say, a teenager driving a twenty-dollar Ford Falcon, you were probably not going to replace the brake shoes until they'd scared you, or a turn-signal bulb until a policeman had warned you.  On the other hand, plenty of garages either used them to drum up business, or give your car a lick and prayer and handed over a sticker for a small and rapid profit.

† I dodged the Census twice because of discomfort with all the questions.  "Enumerate," fine, but until the flush toilets in my house get the vote, I still don't see any reason for the Federal government to know how many I have.