But what people are afraid of is how little it takes when the technology is there. And how Western governments seem to morph towards that. And how some bastions of freedom are falling
Even a Jew stuck in a ghetto in Nazi Germany enjoyed significantly better privacy at home from both the state and capital than a wealthy citizen in a typical western liberal nation today.
Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in fact prove the exact opposite of what point you think you're making. They were foremost in using the "magic tech" of their day - telecommunications and motorised vehicles.
Even then, they had several rebellions and uprisings that were able to develop thanks to lacking the degree of surveillance tech found today.
Prior to motorised vehicles and the telegraph for example, borders were almost impossible to enforce on the general population without significant leakage.
Ironically in spite of powered flight, freedom of movement is in a sense significantly less than even 200 years ago when it comes to movement between countries that do not already have diplomatic ties to one another allowing for state authorized travel.
Incidentally, this is part of why many punishments in the medieval age were so extreme - the actual ability of the state to enforce the law was so pathetically limited by today's standards that they needed a strong element of fear to attempt to control the population.
Borders in medieval Europe weren't nearly as necessary because the physical ability to travel was limited. Forget traveling from Germany to France - just going to the next town over was a life-threatening affair without assistance and wealth. Legally speaking, most peasant farmers were property of their lord's manor. But practically speaking, leaving the manor would be quite difficult on your own.
Many churches railed against motor vehicles because the extra freedom of movement they made possible also broke sexual mores - someone might use that car to engage in prostitution! You see similar arguments made today about birth control or abortion.
Prior to the Internet, American mass communication was effectively censored by the government under a series of legally odd excuses about public interest in efficiently-allocated spectrum. In other words, this was a technical limitation of radio, weaponized to make an end-run around the 1st Amendment. Getting rid of that technical limitation increased freedom. Even today, getting banned from Facebook for spouting too much right-wing nonsense isn't as censorious as, say, the FCC fining you millions of dollars for an accidental swear word.
Whether or not a technology actually winds up increasing or reducing freedom depends more on how it's distributed than on just how much of it there is. Technology doesn't care one way or the other about your freedom. However, freedom is intimately tied to another thing: equity. Systems that economically franchise their subjects, have low inequality, and keep their hierarchies in check, will see the "technology dividend" of increased freedom go to their subjects. Systems that impoverish people, have high inequality, and let their hierarchies grow without bound, will instead squander that dividend for themselves.
This is a feedback effect, too. Most technology is invented in systems with freedom and equality, and then that technology goes on to reinforce those freedoms. Unequal systems squander their subjects' ability to invent new technologies. We didn't see this with Nazi Germany, because the Allies wiped them off the map too quickly; but the Soviet Union lost their technological edge over time. The political hierarchy they had established to replace the prior capitalist one made technological innovation impractical. So, the more you use technology to restrict, censor, or oppress people, the more likely that your country falls behind economically and stagnates. The elites at the top of any hierarchical system - aside from the harshest dictatorships - absolutely do not want that happening.
Capitalism is completely compatible with hierarchies and censorship - indeed one could argue that capitalism is completely incompatible with a true flattening of hierarchies since it rests on the ability of an owner class holding a monopoly over the means of production. The majority of dictatorships around the world use capitalism as the basis of it's economy. Following the dissolving of the USSR, Russia continues to be authoritarian and arguably more so than the USSR was past the Stalin era.
Aside from that, I think it's a little premature to frame the internet's ultimate effect on the world as reducing the ability of the government to censor the population when it's only been around for less than 30 years and we are already seeing mass adoption and development of both censorship and surveillance tech that goes beyond even the wildest dreams of 20th century era dictators.
I don't really buy the argument that most technology is invented in systems with freedom and equality either. It just sounds more like something we want to believe than something borne out by data. The internet and rocket ships were the product of the military - an institution that has more to do with using force to enact the will of it's host nation on others and limiting their freedoms than preserving the freedoms of their own, especially for superpowers like the USA and the CCP, which are effectively immune to conquest by military force.
This is in fact the same for the Silicon Valley and most private industry, you only think all this tech is the product of your freedom and equality because all of the actual extreme inequality and lack of freedom is kept compartmentalised to the global south through long and convoluted supply chains. It's not really freedom if only 10% of the actual people involved in the sustaining of an economy have any semblance of it -leaving aside the observation that for even this 10% that represents the average US citizen, their actual democratic agency in the state or in their job is vanishingly low.
First, the Soviet Union didn't have a prior capitalist hierarchy; the whole reason for Leninism as such was that Russia was a feudal, agrarian society, which in Marx's theory had not progressed to the stage of capitalism and therefore could not progress to communism.
Second, food shortages and mass poverty did not end with the establishment of the Soviet Union; in fact, they became enormously worse. Even before being invaded by Germany in WWII, the Soviet system caused the Holodomor, a famine unprecedented in the history of the Ukraine.
Third, the internet has been around for 52 years, not less than 30. I've personally been using it for 29 years, and I can tell you that it already had a long history when I started using it. One of the founders of Y Combinator first became well-known as a result of breaking significant parts of the internet 33 years ago, an event which resulted in a criminal trial.
Fourth, the internet was the product of universities, although the universities were funded by ARPA. Rocket ships have a long evolution including not only militaries but also recreational fireworks, Tipu Sultan of Mysore, Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, the peaceful space agencies, H. G. Wells, and possibly Lagâri Hasan Çelebi.
Fifth, I don't think the argument is that the technology is necessarily produced by systems with freedom and equality, but that it is invented by them. This is somewhat dubious, but not as open-and-shut wrong as your misunderstanding of it. Goddard's rockets were put into mass production as the V2 in Nazi Germany using slave labor, but he invented them at WPI and Princeton. Tsiolkovsky lived in the Czar's Russia and then the USSR, and his daughter was arrested by the Czar's secret police, but he himself seems to have had considerable freedom to experiment with dirigibles and publish his research (but no slaves to build rockets for him), and indeed he was elected to the Socialist Academy.
I think we can make an excellent case that certain kinds of intellectual repression, whether grassroots or hierarchical, fall very heavily on the kinds of people who tend to invent things. William Kamkwamba's family thought he was insane, Galileo spent the last years of his life under house arrest, Newton was doing alchemical research that could have gotten him burned at the stake in Spain, Qin Shi Huang buried the Mohists alive, Giordano Bruno was in fact burned at the stake, and the repression of Lysenko's intellectual opposition was a major reason for the USSR's and PRC's economic troubles in the 01950s and 01960s.
Living in the so-called "global south" (a term which I have come to regard as useless for understanding the world system, if not actively counterproductive) I have to tell you that there's very little production of advanced technology going on here. But I live in Argentina, and the situation is different in different countries; Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, etc., have all done significant technical production for the world economy while in the grip of dictatorships, even though Argentina never has. But most countries don't. If tantalum cost ten times as much, we'd still have cellphones, and you probably wouldn't even be able to detect the price difference.
But bad people will always have power.
Something strikes me as odd; Why do you say “Russia” but not “Germany”? Why not say “Soviets” or something similar?
Is it because Russia is still portrayed as the bogeyman in the Anglosphere whereas the Germans are cool now?