I'll have to split this post, apparently there's a 16KB limit in replies..

We would like to know everything about everyone else while simultaneously ensuring nobody knows anything about us.

Not really. I don't care to know that much about mostly anyone, and yes, I don't want others that I don't know and don't choose to share with to know all that much about me and my activities/thoughts/inclinations.

We want the right to demand others forget us, but we want to remember everything we can about everyone else.

I don't want that right. I prefer not sharing things that ought not to be shared in the first place, for they belong to the realm of the private and not the realm of the public.

I also don't care all that much about remembering everything about everyone else. Why would I do that ?! While I wish no one no harm, fact of the matter is there's perhaps 200 other people on this planet I actually truly care about; how could it be otherwise? And of all of those I truly care about, I don't wish to remember everything about any and everything they ever did/say/do, either. That seems.. obscene.

Knowledge is power, especially against someone without equal access to knowledge.

Applied knowledge is power.

Therefore, in our natural pursuit of personal power we desire to simultaneously increase our own privacy while gathering as much information about others as we can.

Power is a tricky word, often misused, I say.
The way you use it here, it seems that you mean and imply power over others.

Again using my personal example,

1. I have no desire for power over others, but I do have a very strong desire for power over my own life. Those are two very different sorts of power.

2. Following from point 1, I really have very little incentive to gather any information about anyone, for the purpose of acquiring power over them. A reasonable exception can be made about informing myself about those who would seek to oppress and control me and those I care about, but it's not that I want to have power over them, it's that I want them to stop having power over me, so that I can carry on doing what matters: living life on my own terms.

This self-inflicted hypocrisy is reflected in our governments which seek to maximize their knowledge about everyone while keeping everyone else in the dark.

I agree with the conclusion but I question the rest.

There is, I believe, very little doubt that indeed, modern western (surely others as well, and a few are especially prolific at this, but I'll keep this about western governments since 1. I live in the West and 2. we are supposed to be the bastion of freedom™) governments suffer from a serious illness:

1. Any thought or opinion that cannot be surveilled by the state is automatically suspicious.

2. Any monetary transaction that is outside of the all-seeing-eye of the state is automatically suspicious (money laundering or tax evasion)

Following from these two, we (should?!) see clearly in context why there is an ongoing war on privacy, and why there is an ongoing war on physical cash.

If we take it a step further we can also see why having bloody transparent blockchains is a fine idea (sarcasm).

It only makes their job easier.

I can't tell you the reasons why the state of government in modern society has decayed to this extent, but I can tell you with certainty that a world where you have to think twice about everything you say or type out loud and a world where you have to consider who might be monitoring all of your financial transactions is not a very livable world to live in.

Ultimately it is our desire for privacy and the right to be forgotten that turn us against one another.

Strongly disagree.

I don't think there is any single reason, but artificially multicultural societies, individualism taken a little bit too far, manufactured antagonism between the sexes and the logically resulting destruction of the nuclear family, and over-reliance on consuming are all reasons that, in my opinion, have much more to do with why people turn against each other.

We are taught to distrust our neighbor but to trust a power hungry bureaucracy.

Are we taught to distrust our neighbor though?

As for trusting a power hungry bureaucracy, I offer little to no insight or opinion, other than sadly concurring that this does indeed appear to be the case for the vast majority of people;

I have thought about this long and hard before, I suppose a major reason could be that people simply don't want to believe that the system they live in (and are forced to contribute to by threat of massive fines and imprisonment) is really that corrupt.

We demand governments use their universal knowledge to track down criminals, but the power we give them is turned against us when they make everyone a criminal.

Have to sadly agree once again, but at least to me it was always obvious that you cannot go around and demand that the government has full demigod power while reasonably expecting that your own life and those you care about will not, eventually, be negatively affected as well.

Clearly we have some genuinely bad people in this world, of the sort that perhaps you or me have a hard time even imagining.

This is rather unfortunate, and of course we want them removed from society.

Most people are good people, or society simply would not function.

But there are a few bad apples, of this there can be little doubt.

I have just always said that we have to be very careful with the power we give these big institutions, for one day their power will be too big for the citizenry to reasonably contain.

We cannot have an all-seing, omniscient, omnipresent government.

This will be the downfall of civilization.

There has to be a balance, and that balance is not "let's record everything just in case".

Governments use their knowledge of every detail of our lives to track us, tax us, and intimidate us into complying with their arbitrary and abusive laws.

This we have collectively allowed.

There are less than 100,000 of them.

There are billions of us.

It is only natural that peaceful freedom loving individuals would like to have complete privacy from the government.

Complete is unreasonable.

But by the same token, absolute lack of privacy in finance and communication under the guise of preventing money laundering and protecting us from terrorism ...

Look, I get it, legit money laundering (see what I did there?) and terrorism are undoubtfully bad things.

But you know what else is bad? The attempt to 100% eliminate such things.

The only way to do that is by maximally restricting freedom, and exposing everyone to the people in power.

By virtue of being in power, the power balance is already very tilted in their direction.

This should be a theorical advantage only, for we the citizenry have the power to remove those in power in democratic western societies.

But the modern world is a complicated, fast-paced and busy place.

We have created cognitive environments where most of us struggle to get by.

I don't think this is a bad thing™ per se, just something to consider.

The average person has little understanding of public policy, economics, statistics, finance, cryptography, technology, computer science, programming, networking, history, etc.

@dan, I have been reading you for a long time (as you know), so I know you are a highly intelligent individual, so I know that you know that you know just how little about everything you actually know.

I wish I had more answers, and I respect what you are doing here, which is why I am taking what so far has been more than half an hour of my time to put my thoughts in writing as well.

**What I want the reader to understand is that a world without privacy will be a nightmare to live in. We need space to breathe, we need to be with our own thoughts, we need to be unencumbered by the presence and judgment of others to create, explore, grow. **

Carrying on..

Meanwhile, governments of the world are doing everything they can to make privacy-from-government illegal. Simultaneously they are working to make privacy from each other mandatory.

I believe the privacy-from-government angle comes from the sort of people who are attracted to that sort of work.

They want the total control, they believe they can make society/the system work the way it should™, if only they have complete and total access to all the variables, and then, only then, it will what it should™.

This seems to me a grave mistake, for it will destroy the very thing it wanted to preserve.

Look, I get it. Tax evasion (assuming your government is legitimate and moral) is a bad thing.

It must be fought, no doubt, but it must also be allowed to exist. The only way to completely extinguish it is to control everything (FACTA, CRS)

Terrorism is a bad thing, no doubt, and security is precious, yes.

Anyone who can read my words here probably lives a decently peaceful life.

But the only way to truly make you 100% safe is monitoring, controlling, cataloging and recording everything.

And once this apparatus is in full-force, it will be abused, for this is human nature.