Regarding your point that "I used to question how it happened in WWI/II, but now I see it first hand", not to say it is identical, but consider from: "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" by Milton Mayer https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
""What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap ... between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with... And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing. "What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. ... "This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ... "To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no [patriotic citizen] could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head. How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice — ‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might. ... And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident ... collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way." ..."

One antidote to hate and fear is laughter and play; see for example Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga, author of "Homo Ludens" (who was eventually held in detention by the Nazis):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens

And playfulness and laughter can be regained:
https://myshrink.com/dont-laugh-anymore/ "If your nervous system activation increases over your lifetime, chances are you'll lose your capacity for spontaneous laughter. Those folks who notice the difference in themselves might say they are "tapped out" or "I don't feel like myself". Indeed, there's some folks who've never had the ability for a good laugh to begin with. Don't despair. Just because you don't laugh anymore doesn't mean that can't be changed - it's temporary - unless you decide to do nothing about it."

I've started watching the original "The Prisoner" series again ( https://archive.org/details/The_Prisoner ) and reading comments on it. It is becoming clearer that ultimately, fifty years after that series first aired, we are all part of a global village now... For good or bad, we are part of that system -- and there is essentially no possibility of "escape" because that system in some form is everywhere.

And seeing the Prisoner series again decades later -- informed by some comments -- it is also clearer the series does not take an absolutist stand on one side or the other of the free-seeming individual or the structured-seeming community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner
"A major theme of the series is individualism, as represented by Number Six, versus collectivism, as represented by Number Two and the others in the Village. McGoohan stated that the series aimed to demonstrate a balance between the two points."

From the second Prisoner episode, "The Chimes of Big Ben" which I re-watched today: https://subslikescript.com/series/The_Prisoner-61287/season-...

Number Six: You're just as much a prisoner as I am.
Number Two: Of course, I know too much - we're both lifers. I am an optimist. It doesn't matter who Number One is. It doesn't matter which side runs the Village. It's run by one side. But both sides are becoming identical. What has been created is an international community, a blueprint for world order. When both sides realise they're the same, they'll see this is the pattern for the future.
Number Six: The whole earth as the Village?
Number Two: That is my hope. What's yours?
Number Size: To be the first man on the moon.

As parts of that now essentially inescapable Global Village system built by all sides over the last half century, we can do what we can when we can to make it better somehow. As in the coincidentally written ~1932-1933 prayer by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer "Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other."

For example, the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek is essentially a surveillance state where the computer knows everything everyone is doing all the time -- but somehow we don't see the series through that surveillance state lens. Perhaps that is in part because of the amazing opportunities that cheap energy, matter replicators, space travel, holographic simulations, and so on make possible through widespread abundance for all Federation citizens in that (still) fictional universe? Or perhaps also it is because the surveillance is somehow behind some sort of assumed legitimate authority of access and (virtual) privacy?

See also on the issue of surveillance and power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
"The Transparent Society (1998) is a non-fiction book by the science-fiction author David Brin in which he forecasts social transparency and some degree of erosion of privacy, as it is overtaken by low-cost surveillance, communication and database technology, and proposes new institutions and practices that he believes would provide benefits that would more than compensate for lost privacy."

The recent unrest in the USA is emerging not from surveillance by the police of the citizenry but (via cell phones) from surveillance by the citizenry of the police (and what some specific police officers did to George Floyd).

A related touchstone by Manuel De Landa: "Meshworks, Hierachies, and Interfaces": http://netbase.org/delanda/meshwork.htm "To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."

Theodore Sturgeon's 1956 short story "The Skills of Xanadu"(which inspired Ted Nelson to work on hypertext, and in a way eventually led to the World Wide Web) also has an interesting take on privacy in a world where people are surrounded with networked technology. Audio: https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3830.08 Text: https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1956-07/Galaxy_195...