In retrospect, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that Wolf’s vaccine passport messaging struck such a chord. When she focused in on tech and surveillance, she began tapping into deep and latent cultural fears about the many ways that previously private parts of our lives have become profit centers for all-seeing Silicon Valley giants. … It was as if she had taken everybody’s cumulative tech terrors—about being tracked by our cell phones, monitored by our search engines, eavesdropped on by our smart speakers, spied on by our doorbells—bundled them all together, and projected them onto these relatively anodyne vaccine apps, which, to hear Wolf tell it, took every creepy surveillance abuse perpetrated by Big Government and Big Tech and programmed them into one QR code, on “the back end.”

XREF: Connects to broader research on moral panic, scapegoating, and how diffuse anxieties get focalized onto specific targets.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 266