Like life, technology always finds a way. Much of the talk back in the day was not based on reality because it was not based on what tech could practically do. The compute and storage weren’t there.
But it was pretty obvious by the late aughts that all the pieces for panopticon were coming together nicely. Tech finds a way.
When you can surveil and blackmail the entire world, including your political taskmasters, what sort of person will that role attract?
I use a stronger (more specific) form of that heuristic that seems to hold up well in practice:
If something evil is within technological possibility, and there is economic gain to be had from doing it, someone will end up doing it.
(Note, by "within technological possibility" I don't mean "there are COTS tools available for doing that", but closer to "physics doesn't prohibit it, and we have a good grasp on how it could be done in theory".)
I actually first figured out this phrasing of my intuition during Snowden revelations, to explain to myself why my initial reaction was a complete lack of surprise.
What snowden did was provide independently verifiable content and details of their activities. His leaks were outdates by half a decade by the time they were public too. Everyone sort of accepted the IC will do shady stuff to stop terrorists after 9/11 because "american lives" so it was a solid conspiracy theory backed (not proven) by facts at the time. We sort of hoped they didn't care enough to snoop into our boring lives.