I think it is quite rational to be cynical about it, but before you completely write it off, consider what the cynics said about email when it was small. Basically email was characterized as a way for nerds to exchange jokes that either everyone had already heard, or nobody understood.

I recall that in 1979 exactly nobody in my family (except me) had a network email account (on USC-ECLC no less) and they didn't care. What my family had worked for them and it was just sillyness on my part to think that email added anything to the mix.

What mattered though was that enough people had email accounts that they could get more done, more efficiently, than people without email. Every year that converted more and more people to the idea that email was something they should have, by 1999 everyone thought they should have one even if they weren't sure why.

I see similar thinks with a reconstructed email system that is free from surveillance. People being able to joke about things or discuss things and not find themselves unable to board a flight because they joked about something the TSA considered suspicious. You and I may not have had that experience yet but folks have, and it is getting more common not less common. We just had a law enforcement officer drive up and shoot a kid dead because he was carrying a toy gun. He thought the gun might be real. I say that "Clubs in NYC are the bomb!" I don't want someone detaining me for four hours asking me what exactly I meant by that.

As few as 3 years ago I would not have considered a system like this something that "regular" people would want to use, and that would inhibit adoption and use. But now I am not so sure about that.

I agree that the 'outrage' is a minority, but it is coming from more people than it ever has before. At some point the minority is large enough to be a 'useful subset' and once it becomes self supporting I've seen otherwise "useless" products become part of everyday life. It is that change, that I wonder about here.