Institutions made of people have limited reach. Human resources are finite, there's a physical limit on the scale of what they can do. A computerized society is limitless. A state might want to spy on everybody but it's impossible to do so due to limited manpower. Computers remove those limits and allow states to implement global surveillance.
Computerized societies are still limited by their resources. We are all seeing now the effects of a society that thinks it can print money without ruining its money supply.
