You might be right, but I think you shouldn't be focusing your resentment at standups themselves, you should be focusing on the managerial or corporate culture.
I've worked in places that did standups and places that didn't, and found that the lack of trust / constant surveillance / psychological pressure can be there regardless of whether standups are used.
What does change, though, is that with standups, a manager has the reassurance that they are checking up on their developers every day, and the developers in return get the reassurance that their boss is only going to interrupt them once per day at a fixed time (or at least there's a better chance this is how it works out).
I see "agile" as being a set of compromises and helpful cultural patterns which were designed by taking into account all the weird cognitive biases that brains get forced into by the group dynamics of working in a team on a project.
I've worked in places that did standups and places that didn't, and found that the lack of trust / constant surveillance / psychological pressure can be there regardless of whether standups are used.
What does change, though, is that with standups, a manager has the reassurance that they are checking up on their developers every day, and the developers in return get the reassurance that their boss is only going to interrupt them once per day at a fixed time (or at least there's a better chance this is how it works out).
I see "agile" as being a set of compromises and helpful cultural patterns which were designed by taking into account all the weird cognitive biases that brains get forced into by the group dynamics of working in a team on a project.