This is a perfect example of why so XXI-century-flavored electronic services (electronic money, electronic medical recipe, passport in smartphone etc) sucks goat's dick and I will never betray the paper during my life. Imagine a young guy who just wanted to visit a football match or to pay bills online. He goes to Gosuslugi (literally government service if translate to English), successfully uses the app for some time as intended, and now the app make you to chose whether you want to die for Putin or just go to jail.

European digital autocracy does not want to kill you yet but I do not see any powerful stoppers for that. Autocracy is always bad even if it is just digital.

You're underestimating the power of both paper and computers.

Napoleon started civil registries with birth/mariage/death and an obligatiry first and last name, to know how many subjects he had available to tax and send to war. Germany used paper tax records in the Netherlands to decide who was and was not a jew. No computers needed.

The USA is another interesting case. In theory, people have no required ID and there is no civil registry as understood in the rest of the first world. Yet there are drivers licenses and public but secret social security numbers as pseudo identity proofs. Taxes are paid, somehow. People provide proof of residency with utility bills (or is that a myth? I can't even tell). The USA WW2 draft was executed with an even more primitive system. Basically, people and gov do an elaborate, expensive, work intensive charade to keep the illusion of freedom from gov interference alive, while a fully computerized system of private companies provides parallell construction, resulting in less actual privacy overall.

I'm not going to claim everything is perfect outside the USA, but it surely isn't worse. I do claim 1) you don't need computers, paper is enough and 2) You are in enough computer databases anyway,supposing you live in the first or second world or otherwise reasonably modern country.

Your example sound close to reality. COVID also helped get people on there. And now I hear they also made it near impossible to close your account too. Which of course.

I think this denies your average citizen their agency. That Russian and his family voted for Putin. Just as their parents voted for their Soviet representative and their grandparents fought against the White Army. Same as the Western Europeans voted for a state that "does not want to kill them."

Its not true that we are powerless against some too-powerful to stop state. Or that were at the mercy of some cabal at the top.

The answer, as always, isn't to reject the benefits of technology because were scared. It's to demand responsibility from the citizenry.

It's not some cabal at the top. It's a cabal that also controls the media, censors access to information and zombificates the majority of your fellow citizens. Revolting against the state is great but not if your fellow citizens are the ones who fight you first. By the way, they include some of your friends and family.