Certainly in the information age, there is very little that is genuinely “underground” in the sense of completely beyond the scope of tracking, data, scraping, AI, and all that. They “know” just about anything they want to.
Nevertheless, the governments of the west are no longer for the people and by the people – for the most part.
The powers of the west are in large part captured by blackmail, money, and shadow figures that call the shots.
We have a choice with what’s left of our liberty, energy, time, and resources of how we will act in such an hour. The default answer of “compliance” does not have to be the response – though non-compliance is a gradient scale of pure cost.
At the very least we can match the deceptiveness of the state with our own shadow non-compliance. Yes we still pay our taxes, comply with every law we can stomach in our conscience and do our best avoiding being a stench as a plebian in a world controlled by caesar and his rivals.
In game theory, a power may move once or twice as a dominant and defiantly deceptive power, but the other party can bide their time and match the deception, despite not holding the cards. Like a pseudo-compliance. A praetorian guard saying “yes caesar” while they hold the spear.
This is a very long-winded way to say that the present state of things in the world is contrary to the ordinary prosperity of people who want to live in peace and be left alone to themselves.
Although every move is tracked, and every keystroke is a datapoint carefully weighed, it is necessary to be underground. To defy the order we cannot stomach.
That’s why we are proverbially “underground”.
Editor note: this is my own work, I am not affiliated with the content creator “S2Underground” and I do not claim to speak for him.