The rise of surveillance society cannot be so narrowly attributed to a nation state. There are many stakeholders with much to gain from the mass collection of data, the advertising industry chief among them.
If cash stops being an option, it won’t be because anyone had been forced to stop using cash, but because the unthinking masses uncritically accepted the convenience of centralized digital currencies and digital payment methods.
I think there is a threshold number, say somewhere between 55-65%, wherein once that percentage of the overall population has accepted some fraud, it then becomes ‘reality’ because it has achieved enough inertia to become unquestionable doctrine. It then becomes propelled under its own weight without social engineers needing to run their narrative networks. For example, the surgeons masks and pharmaceutical products of the last four years.
It’s been a ride, and thanks for hosting for as long as you had.
I have only been haunting lemmy as a holdover until proper forums get their federation support straightened out. Lemmy inherits the same flaws that other link aggregators suffer from, much like how Mastodon suffers from the inherited design flaws of microblogs.
I tried doing my self ascribed duty to introduce ideas into lemmy that fall outside of the group consensus. But it is as you say, deviating from the accepted lines of thought just gets you disappeared.