The state is beginning to recognise this and is taking steps to try to claw back some power.
My perception is opposite. Over the last 20 years we have gone from a fairly free country to what feels like a police state with the most effective surveillance in history.
Are you actually familiar with, for example, the extent of Snowden's revelations? What an erosion of liberty the Patriot act is? Or how unusual it used to be to see armed security guards in random office buildings?
My theory is that the state took advantage of the combination of panic over terrorism and falling costs of data storage to put their dreams into action. The threat that they purport to be protecting against isn't real. The threat that the state poses, sadly, is.
As evidence I can point to the fact that dramatic increases of power increased after 9/11. Much of which was spent in security theater and clear power grabs with proven ineffectiveness. (cough TSA *cough) Anyone who was around in tech knows about the dramatic drop in costs for data storage, and knows how it has driven big data in general.
- Individuals can communicate in secrecy, thanks to encryption and the internet, much more easily than before. This means that wiretapping as we used to know it is nearly impossible for some categories of conversations.
- Surveillance is nearly omnipresent, partly as a way to combat the above.
I don't like the erosions of liberty that you mention, or the militarization of police, but I can see why some of the things we take for granted (instant secret communications, encrypted volumes, thumb drives that can be hidden) and consider to be valuable can also frustrate law enforcement doing what we have told them is their mandate (catch bad actors).
My admittedly anecdotal evidence shows that individuals are feeling more impotent with voices washed out in a wave a noise and an inability to affect anything.
Add in the fact that information with which you might build a coherent argument was siloed and generally unavailable, that you had limited resources to gain any sort of expertise outside of your job, and individual "power" in previous ages appears more like the mirage of nostalgia than anything else.
This, of course, is assuming that you are a white male. If not then you had no individual power at all and were severely limited just in terms of your individual autonomy.
Back before there was social media and other online "new media" (which , together with the remaining "old media", is concentrated in fewer and larger vested interests than the media was a generation or two ago) people shared ideas person to person (the term "viral" that's been adopted in social media actually drew on a use that referred to non-media person-to-person information transmittal before the explosion of "new media").
People outside of the media establishment had voices before modern "new media".
I think your point that there is so much noise (aka "other people trying to be persuasive") that voices find it hard to get an audience is fair, but I don't see any evidence that it is harder to speak widely now and all evidence seems to point in the other direction.
Didn't say you couldn't, though for large segments of the population in-person direct communication has been to a significant extent replaced by communication mediated by (and potentially censored by) major centralized media firms.