In reality, government makes the laws. They're an expression and codification of the ruler's will.
This is civics 101: There is no "one ruler". There are parliaments, with multiple, opposing fractions. Then, there are administrations (te "executive branch"), which are separate. Then, also separate: the judiciary.
Of course you already knew that, yet you chose to double down on OP's cynical take declaring democracy dead and asking people to stop trying to save and/or improve it. Why vote, if law has no power? And, for the odd politician that happens not to be corrupt: why bother, when your constituents are just going to spit and yell conspiracy theories in your face, with absolutely no attention being paid to your actual work?
Laws also survive governments; subsequent governments have at times tried to remove existing laws, and been shot down in the attempt. While there's a clear link twixt government and law, they're not (in many places) the same thing; they are separate.
I used "government" as meaning all branches of government as a whole. I don't disregard the advantages of dividing power between executive, legislative and judicial branches. That dilution of centralized power is important.
But at the end of the day, when the branches has come to agreement, it's still a sovereign entity that does whatever it wants.
To categorical discount the value of the rule of law, and to apparently consider that idea to be so obvious that just about half a paragraph of argumentation is given for it, strikes me as... just scary?
There are quite a few established democracies that have seen steady improvements in civil rights over their existence. There have been setbacks, such as World War Two. And the last five to ten years may well be similar. But it's still obviously true that "the long arch of history bends towards justice".
And, fwiw, technology alone is not capable to guarantee any meaningful rights when your own government is your adversary. The internet was praised as the killer tool to empower the individual against censorship. And yet there still is no technology that makes accessing Wikipedia in Shanghai as easy as it is in Billings, Montana. Bitcoin was hailed (by the conspiracy-minded) as a tool to overthrow democratically-established institutions. But, as it turned out, regulators were far less interested in shutting down Bitcoin than expected, and did not even break a sweat implementing KYC nad similar regulation across the cryptocurrency universe when needed.
I’d be interested for you to cite specific example of this. During the Cold War, the threat of the Soviet domination pushed some countries in the direction of greater equality and equanimity. But they seem uniformly in retreat following its collapse, and retreating on the basis of ever shoddier premises (first the War on Terror, now ethnonationalism). While it’s true that the ranks of the elite have diversified, the material reality and civil rights protections of almost everyone beneath them have worsened in many of these countries.
Taiwan? US-backed autocracy during the Cold War, now vibrant democracy with some issues.
In terms of steady improvement, while you're right that there have been some recent setbacks, I think you discount just how authoritarian Western governments were during the Cold War. This is a very difficult thing to summarize in a forum comment, so I suggest you look at something like Freedom House's reports (and yes, I know they aren't completely neutral, still think they're reasonable enough to be worth reading). Here's one:
The Civil Liberties Implications Of Counterterrorism Policies: https://freedomhouse.org/report/todays-american-how-free/civ...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_House
Eastern Europe is complicated because of the kleptocratic influence of both the US and Russia in the region, various civil conflicts, again rising ethnonationalism. Taiwan’s local trajectory is better from the KMT days, but is largely premised on elite exploitation of workers and resources in mainland China, which has put the country on a deeply unstable economic and political trajectory. Still not seeing a great record of progress versus reversion here.
And then you could rage about how these stupid people are ruining everything by not understanding privacy, but then again, "Stupid people are ruining my beautiful society!" has been a refrain since the days of Marx, probably earlier.
99% of people won't even understand PKI, ever. They have jobs and other things to worry about. You should structure your society with that assumption.