When your choices are "use a service and be monitored" or "don't use the service", it can be quite limiting if you really need that service to, say, do your job and feed your family. Yes I know there are alternative services, but often they either 1) don't work well enough to really be a viable alternative and/or 2) don't provide any more confidence that they are not monitoring you also.
Of course all of this is made worse by the fact that the monitoring is mostly happening in the background, so it isn't "in your face" all of the time. I think most people who are aware of it have chosen to just ignore it as best they can, because there doesn't appear to be any practical way of avoiding it.
Actually, that is exactly, literally what it means. Perhaps you mean that just because we find something acceptable, we don't deem it moral, or optimal, or desirable. The distressing reality presented in the interview is that we accept non-benevolent, non-ideal options because they are good enough to be accepted, and not bad enough to be rejected. But accepting something, by definition, means you consider it accept-able, or, "able to be accepted."
Words have subtle meanings. If you paid attention to my post, I was clearly drawing a line between the fact that people accept the fact that they really don't have a good alternative to using, say, Google. But they may not find it acceptable that Google data mines their searches to sell their info to advertisers.
So while they "accept" their situation, they clearly don't find it "acceptable". Much as you might accept the fact that you have to work for a boss who is a jerk, because you have no other employment options. So you don't find the situation acceptable, but you have to accept it anyway.
The issues of unacceptable mass surveillance can and will, eventually, cause some kind of response by people who don't accept it. If there are a lot of those people, I doubt the response will be pretty.
Also, while it is true that people do often respond to unacceptable situations in extreme ways, it is most definitely not the case that people always do so. There is a such thing as patience and perseverance, and people do often accept that they are in an unacceptable situation for a time (often a very long time), while actively seeking to change the situation. People can overcome adversity.
The phrase "People trapped in situations they find unacceptable don't suffer in silence; they become pathological, dangerous people." is most definitely not universally true. It does happen yes, but many people also just press on and keep looking for a way out until they find it.
And yes, some of them do suffer in silence without becoming "pathological, dangerous people". One common example is a case where an unacceptable situation permits them to achieve something that is more important to them. For instance, people work some pretty nasty jobs (either due to jerk employers/employees, or just the necessary work conditions of the job -- some jobs are hot/smelly/hard-on-the-body, etc). But there are people who take and/or keep these kind of jobs in order to feed their families. Often they have tried to find other work, but lack the necessary skills, or there just isn't any other work available. So these people work under these conditions only because that's the only route to feeding their families. It is an admirable thing to do, and I find it sad that so many people don't respect others who make that kind of sacrifice in order to take care of others.
>and have grudgingly accepted that being monitored by corporations and even governments is just a fact of modern life.
I wonder which is the more "shocking" or "surprising" that society deems it acceptable - monitoring by corporations, or monitoring by governments?