We talk about authoritarianism as something that happens to you: a knock on the door, a lost job, a police caution for a tweet. But before any of that, there’s the version that happens inside your own head. You draft the post and delete it. You bite your tongue at the dinner table. You calculate what a client, a neighbour, or a local WhatsApp group might do with an honest opinion, and you decide it isn’t worth finding out.
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SOP for me though. Not because of what the overlord says, or what my neighbors or even fellow stackers think of me, but I like to evaluate "is this necessary?" (most of the time.) It's also why I dislike being angry because I subconsciously lower the bar of that necessity when that's the case.
So idk... yeah authoritarianism sucks. It's not just in the UK though, it's everywhere lately and polarization makes it worse. Who would have thought that having universal access to real time borderless comms would turn the world into such a shitshow? (We kind of knew back when there was only IRC and Usenet and only tens of millions of people on the internet, but wishful thinking has apparently made its mark on the expectations.)