While the fallout from responses to the COVID-19 pandemic has further eroded people's trust in institutions like government, media, and business, that hasn't prevented politicians from further cultivating a technocratic authoritarian state that once was left to the authors of science fiction to explore. Since COVID hysteria first emerged, skeptics have been proven correct time and time again with their forecasts of initiatives that the declared state of emergency which followed the viruses spread would advance. Vaccine passports, medical segregation, gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and other supposed "conspiracy theories" have turned out to be literal facts. Digital...