> No, bureaucracy and crime are awful.
My best friend is a sex worker. I use cannabis to control my anxiety. Neither of those are legal. Looking historically, virtually every human rights movement required illegal direct action. Where do we fit into your cashless panopticon society?
The worst crimes I'm worried about are the ones that will never be illegal, the ones that benefit the powerful and rich. At-scale invasion of privacy is only one such tremendous crime, one against against human rights and dignity, but barely against the law.
> Bear in mind this is the same country that bans Google Street View (and on the road to ban nuclear power and GM crops).
> People here support this ban because they think it's "harmful", but how long until they think some technology you rely on is also harmful? GPS? Phone cameras or Google Lens? Encryption - https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/2/2/stop-the-proposal-on-ma... ?
Some of those are genuinely harmful (street view in particular for its privacy invasion - note it is not banned but simply very unpopular) so I'm not sure what your point is. Also, you should send your ideas to the Mullvad blog authors and get their input. I think you'll find that the overlap between people who support universal end to end encryption and people who support an all-seeing police state is very small, as they are fundamentally incompatible ideas.
> Technology is the future, and we should embrace it wherever possible - crime prevention, education, healthcare, nuclear fusion, genetic engineering, etc.
Technology is not always good all of the time. The past century and even past decade are full of examples of net harms caused by technology that could have been avoided if we developed them in a more intentional controlled manner.
A eccentric example to make the point: If there is a technology that can trigger a supernova of the sun simply by mixing water, sugar, gasoline, and bleach together in a certain ratio, then it would be extremely important we not conduct research into that technology until we have other technology that allows us to survive a supernova or can prevent that mixture from being created anywhere on Earth. Even if there are advantages of the technology (maybe a different ratio causes all humans to have 5x longer lifespans and eliminates all disease and suffering, and we gain intelligence allowing us to begin colonizing other planets within 3 years) the risk is just too high that it will be misused accidentally or maliciously until we have a way to handle it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_technological_dev...