Hi there. All good points again. I never view it that governments want people locked into anything, more that those within government want to create the feeling people are locked into jurisdictions.

Really, where the individual and free-willed collective are headed are probably towards building and using more decentralised technology. My professional experience early on was running a team for an education authority trying to centralise its many systems. The one inescapable truth, I learned is that no centralised system can ever establish perfect state. Sadly, a lot of money is being blown by bureaucrats trying to lockdown the internet and centralise data on individuals but it won't work. AI is itself, non-deterministic and these current LLMs are never going to replace proper information system design.

A really good way to think of it is centralised social media platforms. Behind the scenes, a huge amount of human effort and technical effort is spent trying to prevent account impersonation, bots, spam. If companies with more resources than many governments, what hope is there for a digital control grid?

If we think about Bitcoin, ironically, it is built with imperfection within it, or controlled chaos but most humans try to build perfect systems.

Where will it end? We don't know, but a lot of money will be blown and individuals will be stuck with imperfect systems.