In the 1990s, it was common to ridicule the government for being technologically backward.

We were all gaining access to fabulous things, including the web, apps, search tools and social media. But governments at all levels were stuck in the past using IBM mainframes and large floppy disks.

I recall the days of thinking government would never catch up to the glories and might of the market itself. I wrote several books on it, full of techno-optimism.

The new tech sector had a libertarian ethos about it. They didn't care about the government and its bureaucrats. They didn't have lobbyists in Washington. They were the new technologies of freedom and didn't care much about the old analogue world of command and control. They'd usher in a new age of people power.

Here we sit a quarter-century later with documented evidence that the opposite happened. The private sector collects the data that the government buys and uses as a tool of control.