This is another retreat into passing the buck to a non-entity that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33982377 alludes to in talking about where "software" went wrong. Society doesn't exist in a practical sense, it's just a word that refers to a collection of individuals (and the culture/etc that those individuals share).

Individuals can do things like donate to free open source projects to keep incentives aligned with their users.

Tangentially...

> Governments exists to regulate society and set rewards and punishments, we currently reward data gathering so it is what we get.

I'd say governments exist to regulate specifically violence (e.g. punish citizens who use it in an unauthorized manner against each other). Other stuff like interstate highways are cool too, but they're easier to negotiate in a federated way than e.g. regulation of violence between states would be (short of just having states go to war with each other).

Towards the end of regulating violence, surveillance is super useful. And this is why we cannot leave tech decisions in the hands of government either, because they have incentives going to the very core essence of government to build a surveillance state.