one of the things that made the 2010s era make more sense to me in retrospect is realizing it can be understood through the lens of the "democratization of surveillance". I knew this on some level, but never saw it as the defining feature until recently.
Reverse image search, GoogleDorking (the extra stuff you put on search queries to get hyperspecific results), data mongers, email as primary login, being able to correlate across sites easily.
Satellite imagery became cheap enough, partially from Google maps creating a huge demand, with an accuracy such that you and 80 colleagues could pool a reasonably low amount of money individually to buy enough satellite images to use a blink comparator script to hunt north korean mobile nuclear missile launches and test sites as a long running hobby.
KF couldn't exist without it.
twenty people can effectively run an intelligence agency for monitoring an entire social group.
people could just Google you and figure a lot out, because no one bothered with robots.txt for user profiles.
employers started checking up on you in social media when you applied.
gamergate couldn't have taken-off without it.
hell, private equity wouldn't know who to vulture nearly as well without it.
antifascists couldn't have stemmed the bleeding 2016-present without it.
etc.
