This anonymity is pretty recent, though - on some levels only since WW2 and arguable that anonymity was very limited for a long time before. Try moving around France in the 30s with no papers.
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The scale, the cost, the asymmetry, the actors who can play... Sure, central governments always tried to make people “legible” a la James Scott—in some ways, that’s the project of modernity—but it was costly and ineffective. Limited in practice. Boom, it’s now cheap and accurate.
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I think your original point is valid and this is an important historic transition with great implications. The correct reaction to the invention of nuclear fission isn’t pointing out we always had aggression and used flint arrows during the Pleistocene.

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True enough, but it would be equally unhelpful to say war is new. When we’re trying to work out what we think about something new, it’s worth working out what parts really are new, and how we reacted to comparable changes in the past (cf ‘databases destroy freedom’ in the 70s)
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More than that: Why compare ourselves with 1930s France v. all kinds of other times and places? And having papers was not the same as having biometrics tracked all the time. People survived the war because of forged papers.
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