Imo, the basic problem with how the internet has played out so far is that what began as a sparse network that required co-operation via some mutual dependency on things like a base level of competence and intelligence, collegiality, respect for certain individual boundaries like pseudonymity, and other conventions has, by making it user friendly, become a battle ground for people who are incapable of those necessary things. These are just eternal september problems.

However, the necessary condition for all these kinds of total social surveillance controls is a network of authorities who have physical impunity from the people they ostensiby serve, govern, or rule, and I'd bet this decade will be defined by resolving that question of how far are they willing to go. We're already post-truth in public and political discourse, so there is no basis for mutual trust, and the real world conventions about basic freedoms have been largely recast as privileges, as though they are both somehow granted by critics and subject to their political schemes. Some very clever people are still trying to find alternatives to a civil confrontation that seems both catastrophic and inevitable, and they're doing it in the form of growing new platforms, cryptocurrencies, privacy and security technologies, energy storage and efficiency techs, even vulnerability research as a hedge, but what I can only now call the leviathanists are co-ordinating to bar any and all exits for people, and in particular minds, that would generate any value they cannot subdue and spend themselves.

Indeed, meaningful anonymity is just probably just about done online, but what I don't think authorities understand is that they think people misbehave when they are anonymous. The trouble is, what they may be about to discover is that it was the anonymity that was the civility, and what is left without it is something altogether more serious.