This isn't defeatism. I just think there is a wave coming that's really hard to stop and I don't see anything in the current political structure that's willing to stop it.
Getting younger people who give a shit to vote, and to become immune to the bogus fear mongering.
Hope the baby boomers die off of old age before the panopticon is built.
The current builders of the panopticon are very young and work for Google, Facebook and others. This has nothing to do with age.
The panopticon is being requested and purchased by municipalities, which are predominantly governed by those from the baby boomer generation. Start-up 101. Build what the Users want.
Everything feels scary, try walking around at 2 a.m. and not feeling it. People are tired of it.
I don't think that all the surveillance will work. You always find the most amount of sketchy people around police stations. The cameras will make things worse. Good people will flee to other neighborhoods, were they are not being watched.
Fundamentally, why arn't things safe?
Also though the kids at the moment seem to understand better the risk/reward benefits of some technologies and have a better idea what actual risks they take. You see this in voting patterns.
City and state level political change is very malleable.
Corporations have already figured this out, e.g. ALEC [1] writes laws, then gets sympathetic minions to enact them, but city politics still operate on a human scale in many places. I'd bet that a motivated campaign could reverse this move in San Diego, or at least figure out who pushed for it. I don't think there was massive popular support for cameras in streetlights.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...