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upstart [soylentnews.org] writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Are We Already Living in a Tech Dystopia? [gizmodo.com]:

For the most part, fictional characters rarely recognize when they’re trapped in a dystopia. Watching their neighbors get carted off for harboring subversive thoughts, they almost never say, “I wish we weren’t living in this dystopia.” To them, that dystopia is just life. Which suggests that—were we, at this moment, living in a dystopia ourselves—we might not even notice it. We might call this or that policy/data-harvesting technique “dystopian,” but, at least on some level, we believe we aren’t totally there yet—that there is still room, in our world, for a modicum of personal freedom/happiness. Is this a laughable delusion? Is our free will merely a fragile illusion enjoyed at the provisional discretion of five or six unaccountable technology companies? Is this, right here, the tech-dystopia we were worried about? For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of experts with differing opinions.

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