> This entire "progressive" attitude that everything continually gets better, besides being based on this recent most-peaceful time in history,
That seems to be pretty clear evidence that things get better. If some time in history were more peaceful than now, then I could see saying that there hasn't been progress. But by definition, if we're making progress, of course the present would be more peaceful than any time before it.
> relies on individuals pushing forth and being the change to their local social groups while simultaneously hiding from the larger social machines that would quickly squash them.
At some point the larger social machine has to be challenged. The longer it takes for that to happen, the more entrenched and harder to change it will get.
> The distilled results are then used, by somebody, to investigate and persecute outliers, engage in price discrimination, and implement commercial psychological warfare (advertising).
Outliers like people who don't pay fines they were legitimately assessed? Is it really persecution to find someone who owes money and ask them to pay it?
Price discrimination? Is this really a problem? If you're not willing to pay the asking price for something, don't pay it. The fact that somebody else might have gotten a better price is irrelevant. Price is determined by how much the buyer values the thing they're buying. That's how markets work. If anything this is a social benefit, as it makes people with money to spare subsidize goods for people without. If one guy willing to pay $600 for a plane ticket makes it possible for the airline to sell tickets at $200 to people who wouldn't have otherwise been able to afford them, that seems like a net benefit.
And advertising? Really? That's the big boogeyman here? Someone is going to collect all my data and use it to show me an ad? Heaven forfend, I might look at an ad. Oh, the persecution. "Commercial psychological warfare" is needlessly dramatic. It's an ad. Mostly, it's just stupid, and online easy to block.
> a problem caused solely by government requiring people to publicly broadcast their identity, putting them at the mercy of private surveillance.
I've still never once heard what the actual problem is. Every time this issue comes up, there's never been a single explanation of what somebody is going to do with an archive of my location data. Is the government going to use it to persecute me? How? The government already knows where I live and where I work. If they want to find me and persecute me, they'll do it. They don't need a list of every license plate camera I passed in the last 6 months to do that.
Some anonymous stalker is going to hack into the database and figure out I have a 76% chance of being at a particular coffee shop on a Wednesday afternoon and they're going to wait for me there? Really? They wouldn't just, I don't know, wait outside my house? Wouldn't that be easier? I've yet to see anyone explain how a database of past location data enables anyone to do something to you that wouldn't be more easily accomplished by other already available means.
The fluidity of information works in both directions. It's also easier for us to collect information about the government and expose abuse and corruption (e.g. the previously mentioned NSA leaks).
> Government obviously has an inherent interest in tracking everything and everyone down to the last quark
"Government" doesn't have an interest in anything. It's an abstract concept with no will of its own. Some individuals have an interest in tracking certain things (like delinquent fines) and others have other interests.