there is no such thing as a zero-trust society (although I now want to write that scifi story and tease that idea out). As such, the cost of living in a society will always be some amount of infringement of privacy beyond complete anonymity. Even you were comfortable giving your address and name to 4 other parties (under the presumption that only they would use that information), and even then how many individuals within those organizations have access to that information?

Thus privacy cannot be thought of as an all-or-nothing battle. Privacy is a compromise between total anonymity (un-people) and convenience (you can’t get public utilities to your house if they don’t know where you live). The fact is that we have the level of privacy we do right now because of a lot of resistance and hard work. If it wasn’t for all the survivalists and conspiracy theorists and paranoid software devs and whistleblowers and tech journos and anti-authoritarian content creators and anti-surveillance artists and even ordinary joes like me who just want to use online services withouth the digital equivalent of the weird kid in class who stood over your shoulder and watched everything you did (x1000), things could and would be much worse.

If you must think of it as a war, consider it to be analogous to state-vs-collective wars of history: our “opponents” are organizations that are constrained by their hierarchical nature to certain unspoken rules of engagement, and we are a guerilla collective bound only by our shared value(s). Think the Texas Revolution, Vietnam, African National Congress, Zapatistas, IRA, Black Panthers or pretty much anything the Romans did with northern European Barbarians. I won’t sit here and lie to you that the devastation that happened to these peoples and their homelands was “winning,” but I can tell you that the dominators certainly didn’t get their way either.