Have you seen Nick Bostrom's "Vulnerable World" hypothesis? It lines up with a lot of things you've said in the past about how higher tech necessitates greater authoritarianism:Look up the backstory of the webcomic GENOCIDE Man, we're right up in that setting's backstory for better or for worse. Read that up, it's a doozy.
People forget that, at the end of the day, technology determines rights, freedoms, and even forms of government. Always has been, and always will be. Why do people think things like slavery and serfdom lasted for so long? Because technology doesn't support any other system (at least, for long), especially when a vast amount of the population needs to scrap into the dirt in subsistence farming. People would rather ignore papers like the 1996 MIT paper Electronic Communities: World Village or Cyber Balkans (and, spoilers for everyone that hasn't read it, we're in the 'Cyber Balkans' portion of the paper) than accept the fact that it's sadly factual/prophetic.
... and, the world is coming to an end because *THASF* is agreeing with me.
I think we come at the same problem from opposite sides, though. I don't think the real threat comes from violent non-state actors or basement wackos assembling bioreactors and PCR machines from scraps off eBay, like Nick asserts. I think the real threat to humanity comes from corporations and nation-states. They're the ones with the financial resources and human capital to make the big breakthroughs, and there's always a risk that they'll unleash something on the planet that they have no ability to safely harness, or that they'll intentionally overstep ethical and safety boundaries for the sake of greater control.