MLK’s era did not have CCTVs everywhere. His supporters did not carry cell phones that could be remotely activated and record video and audio. AI Facial recognition did not exist.

Hoover was intent on planting bugs around civil rights leaders — including King — because he thought communists had infiltrated the civil rights movement, says Weiner. Hoover had his intelligence chief bug King’s bedroom, and then sent the civil rights leader a copy of the sex recordings his intelligence chief had taken of King — along with an anonymous letter from the FBI.

And this is a fairly generous (NPR-style whitewashed) reading of Hoover’s deeply bigoted attitude towards civil rights leaders. The FBI spent much of its early existence stamping out nascent communist parties, labor movements, and civil rights organizations. To say the 1960s organizers weren’t heavily surveilled or that city and state police as well as organizations like the Conservative Citizens Council and the Ford Foundation didn’t work hand-in-glove with state agencies to spy and report on black civil rights activists is wildly ahistorical.

TLDR: If the monarchies of the world has access to our modern technology before the wave of revolutions started, we’d all be living in a world of absolute monarchies, with mass surveillance everywhere.

The absolute monarchies of the 18th and 19th centuries were heavily predicated on large networks of spies, public indoctrination against insurrection through the politically aligned churches, and cartels of merchant princes who dictated employment and property ownership among the working class.

Modern mass surveillance offers the ability for fewer people to police larger and potentially more restive populations. And it is undeniable that - particularly in the post-industrial world - we’ve seen successful mass indoctrination and suppression of division. But we also have a significantly larger professional police/military and an enormous outcropping of surveillance technology companies and contracting firms. A huge chunk of US GDP (around $1.4T/year) goes towards “national security” in the form of physical policing, military readiness, and public-sector surveillance. Another $47B goes to private security services in the US annually.

These are non-trivial sums that continue to escalate year-over-year as political and business leadership grow more paranoid and less confident of the future. Historically, empires like the Bourbon (French), Hapsburg, Solomonic, Incan, and Qing Dynasties had nowhere near the capital/labor to expend at this scale, yet managed far more exhaustive and oppressive regimes.

The modernization of individualized military capacity - the proliferation of modern firearms, the democratization of air power, the anonymous nature of mass communication and mass transit - has made policing significantly more expensive and less reliable. That’s why colonial rule cracked up in the wake of WW2. That’s why uprisings like the US Civil Rights Movement, the Cuban Revolution, the Indian and Vietnam Revolutions, and the mass labor revolts in Latin America were even possible after centuries of what amounted to chattel slavery.

Technology has improved our ability to find and kill singular individuals. But modern economics relies on a significantly large flow of unpoliced information and human action. Large populations, complex social patterns, and oblique methods of communication make policing harder than ever.

That’s also why genocide is becoming an increasingly popular method for dealing with restive populations. Why bother trying to police German Jews or Mexican border workers or Gazan Palestinians when you can just wipe them off the face of the Earth?

Conditions are different, perhaps even more difficult, but that doesn’t make real change impossible.

Power wants us to believe it’s absolute and eternal, but it’s not. Every so often the mask of omnipotence slips to show that the people driving the train are just as lost as the rest of us.