Privacy

      Government's oppressiveness change based on the material conditions of the time. State power is a constant variable that is in direct conflict with popular power. You could look at history analytically and pick apart the reasons why some states are more powerful at different times, but for the individuals that live in those nations it just boils down to luck. If you are comparatively lucky you might live in an orderly and peaceful Patagonian Gaucho town, far away from any authority. But if you lived just 40 years ago during the Guerra Sucia period in an urban center of Argentina or Chile you would be under the thumb of American backed dictatorships responsible for the disappearance of thousands. It can be hard to predict when a government will decide to crack down on its people, or when a capitalist economy will reach one of its inevitable crises.
      The one thing that is inevitable and can be predicted is that the state will develop and use new technologies to spy on its population. This leads to the creation of the surveillance state. I would define a surveillance state as a nation that uses surveillance as its main deterrent to crime. By this definition the Party of 1984 is an obvious surveillance state. America and other industrialized nations are frequently called surveillance states, but surveillance today is far from being more than marginally effective. The problem is that cameras and audio recording technology is not cheap yet. The cost of the labor it would take to actually have an omnipresent surveillance state is even more expensive than that. The real world cost to create the kind of surveillance seen in the Truman Show would be astronomical, and that level is really what would be needed to create a surveillance state.
      Every year that cost is decreasing. At some point in the future it might actually be viable to abolish privacy. Computers could advance to the point that people wont even need to monitor the video cameras that have become omnipresent. Voice recognition and comprehension software could one day be able to understand a phrase like "lets go on a country-wide shoplifting spree" and alert police.
      The only thing that could keep this from happening is if people fight back for their privacy before it is too late. Instances of privacy being violated should be exposed and fought in every battlefield possible. This means legal obstruction and suits, protest and disobedience, and vandalism and destruction of the equipment itself. If we don't act quickly a panopticon will be built that will be as hard to destroy as the Party of Airstrip One.