Hm, sounds a lot like Barack Obama's defense of the establishment of surveillance, namely that the concerns are purely paranoia and that the government is responsible and trustworthy. Let's rip these ideas into shreds.

First, your claim that we "aren't being actually spied on" is utterly false, given that the NSA has a multitude of programs which explicitly harvest and analyze the "metadata" (telemetry content) and also body content of all American electronic communications. They lied about this, then were refuted-- check the Snowden files online at the Intercept website. They have a dossier on every last one of us.

This brings me to your next point, that they can't spy on all of us. It's all automated, idiot. They have enough hardware to do it, and they've spent years making sure it's all done without any hands on from their analysts. This is also in the Snowden files. They don't need to "totally reconstruct your life", they already have it right there, with every shred documented electronically. Sure, they probably haven't integrated all the times you popped up on a CCTV or dashcam, but they have the data from your phone, which is even better.

Your emails are stored indefinitely and are in a searchable database, tagged by keyword, topic, you name it. Nobody will actively read them, but it doesn't even matter since the computer system has read them already. They know you aren't up to anything because they automatically checked as soon as the email left your outbox.

Your discussion of the tree in the forest is irrelevant; people react differently to events when they know that they are being watched, which is now the case on a societal level. I will say this again because it is critical for the next section: people react differently when they know that they are being monitored.

There is actual impact to people because of this aspect of human behavior. Investigative journalism is moribund because sources are afraid to come forward, meaning that the public has one less (of very few) way of understanding what the government (and corporations) is doing in their name.

Then there's the problem of the intelligence agencies spying on the political organizations that are supposed to oversee them. They capture all of the political communications too, after all. Remember when Dianne Feinstein publically claimed that the CIA was surveilling her and threatening her as a result of the torture report that was being put together? Think about all of the times that you never even heard about that because the blackmail was successful.

Speech has been chilled, with people afraid of saying what they really think for fear of ending up "on a list". Anyone who runs for office is sure to be already on the list, and frankly, if they're running on a left wing platform, may have already been targeted for disruption via JTRIG or an equivalent US group.

To speak a bit more about JTRIG, I want to emphasize that JTRIG is an active platform out of GCHQ that is currently operating whose mission is to disrupt, degrade, and encourage obedience among nonviolent, legal groups. They likely target public dissenters and protesters. This is not acceptable, and it isn't something that an actual democracy would partake in, but hey, we found it in the NSA's slide decks.

Moving on, I agree that Big Brother 2.0 takes a lot of data from the big tech companies-- the difference being that it's optional to participate. You can opt out, and shut out their tracking or spying, if you want. Can't do that with the NSA.

In conclusion, the actual impact is invisible to the public, but certainly present. The impact takes the form of things not said, blackmail in private, and disruption via proxies.