This is an interesting dilemma. I'd rather have no technology than live under oppression powered by it.
All we can really do is make sure that technology, and knowledge about it, is more evenly distributed, so that central control is more difficult: make sure it isn't seen as kind of magic to people that they deem is impossible to understand and out of reach to them. Technology is simply a set of tools and should be regarded as such.
Centralized technologies with easily controlled, single points of failure are by far the most dangerous, and the most attractive for oppression. This is why DRM, for example, is really bad. It lives by obfuscation and being hard and/or undesirable to understand.
DRM, the cloud, closed source software, unified communications (commercial and government internet control) and surveillance already are enslaving us.
What I proposed was something we (as in people with intimate knowledge about these things) could do to make this better. A lot of technical people are content with being high priests, and a lot of "consumers" content with not understanding what is going on. It may be possible to change that, albeit slowly.
Looking beneath the surface level hyper commercialized pooha, there are quite active developments by in distributed protocols, mesh networks, cryptocurrencies, and people working on technology that is open and can meet basic human needs (for example see http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Constructio...), and so on.
Another thing is that centralization makes things fragile. Even though centralization may be more efficient at first glance, once centralized systems collapse enough, people will look for more decentralized solutions.
Centralized technologies are not dangerous because they can be easily broken by revolutions. That's why DRM does not work. It's being hacked all the time.
And ofcrouse you always have a choice. You can put down the stick, or disconnect. But the choice is becoming harder as we rely (too) much on technology.
There is a DRM system with a very high success rate , it's called SaaS.
That's a little bit different and in most cases for consumer SaaS (facebook,gmail etc) there is no way to get at the software itself. All the consumer gets is a thin client layer.
I don't understand what you mean by "easily broken by revolutions". I also don't see what is bad with a wider perspective, unless it is somehow restricted to "bad people" (the classical panopticon?), but that'd require a very centralized system.
1. I would suggest the term “glibertarian” because a significant majority of people who talk about libertarianism do so without demonstrating awareness of how much government support their current lifestyle and success requires.
Technology doesn't cause these problems, it magnifies them.
Technology does more than simple magnification.
North Korea on the other hand, manages perfectly well to oppress it's people without technology. Imagine what would happen if those people had an internet connection.
However, all advantages are lost the moment someone legislates always in favor of the rulers which is what happened in the UK. Now we're tied and gagged with permanent threat of imprisonment for having an opinion (this has happened a LOT recently).
I'd say magnify is the wrong term. It empowers people who have disingenuous motives.
There is an established, reasonable position (e.g. Watchmen) that it is bad to increase the power of individuals, because when large power can only be wielded by large societies this limits the damage it can do, compared to the same power in the hands of a single individual.