Reading this makes me think a very little bit of the Paris Commune [0], well in its early days perhaps.
In recent times it seems there is a pushback towards less.
Fly abroad without getting our crotches checked?
Walk around the city without companies/governments tracking our location?
Less surveillance in everything?
Don't have corporations police what we can and cannot say on this era's popular platforms (doesn't matter if we can still open a personal blog in 2019, since those are not where the discussion is today - whereas they were in the early 00s, and they did matter back then).
Have a mainstream without moral panics? We used to have the easily triggered persons of the right back in the day, now we have the same of the left, but there was a point (late 60s/early 70s) where people could be more radical than today.
Buy a program without a subscription and use it for the next 10 years or so the same price you know pay for 1 to 3 years of use! (Like people are still using ancient Photoshop in Windows today, or how people like RR Martin still use something like Wordstar 20+ years after its last release -- with subscriptions it would be impossible).
Widespread free sharing of commercial music, films etc like in late 90s/early 00s without all major outlets being crushed like they are being now?
Tons of government regulations (from building codes, to "food safety" BS meant to crush smaller producers) that affect every aspect of business and everyday life, for things that people could freely do 20-30-50 years ago...
Tracking of your data and recording of what you have done. It seems many governments have access to this data.
Recording of biometric data by governments
Common methods of communication are less private now than previously and a a record is kept. Obviously communication is now way easier, but that has had a price.
Media is more concentrated in the hands of fewer companies and their independence is questionable. There are dark patterns here with state actors involved.
The perverse way adverts are tracking and recording. This isn’t fitting with a traditional definition of ‘authoritarian’, but it’s somewhere bad on that continuum.
A larger portion of money is held by a very small controlling group.
National firewalls and restriction of access to certain data is becoming increasingly acceptable.
Not commenting on its validity but thought it was an interesting perspective to share.
When you're on the streets with the protests, it feels extremely primeval. The micro-scale interactions of the protest movement is like looking into a microscope at microorganisms, blobs of life that just kind of move around and sometimes eat others but most of the time just float there.
It's a decentralized, rather polite mob. Angry, yes. Scary, sometimes. But otherwise, just a lot of yelling, a lot of "tactics" - like retreat, advance, wall off here, go here, go there, run. It feels like there's no real goal or direction of the protest except to exist, and I think the author captures that feeling very, very well.
The police also have that same feeling on a micro-level, not much thought or control, just an instinctual reaction or set of rules to follow.
One party existing to express concerns and vent anger. The other party existing to restrain and disperse.
Of course, on the real level, the two parties have deeply rooted goals and feelings. The police want the protestors to stop protesting. The political party wants the people to be absorbed into China. And the protestors want to preserve the unique individuality of HK and to allow it to grow and thrive.