You just can't conflate today's RedPillers with that.
If you look at the Civil War, this was a conflict that rent families apart. Brothers faced down brothers across a battlefield. Fathers fought sons. The Civil War was the culmination of a political quarrel that steadily rose in tenor since the inception of the nation. It was a hundred years in the making, enough time for the sides involved to get real passionate about it.
The essence of fighting and violence are still there, the same deep inner chaos is driving these conflicts.
But what's missing is the ridiculous amount of zeal that both sides possessed. If you have that kind of zeal, these days the only way to fulfill it is to go join ISIL. And people do that. But most people aren't getting that bad. They find an outlet. Trump is that outlet. Brexit is that outlet. Before it was mob violence.
It's the same with advertising. The continuation and slow civilization of the new domain of the marketing of human attention. However bad it is now, it was worse before. Before machines did the dirty work, it was other humans acting in unbelievably shady manners to rip people off for as much as they could. And it was considered normal.
The question is, are those two climates really that different?
> people spying on me to actually literally control my behavior
You've essentially defined advertising industry. It's a very insidious form of control, but just because it doesn't involve threats of violence, doesn't mean it isn't there and isn't working.