Agree. I think social technology has been an unmitigated disaster. I appreciate the engineering technology that has improved our infrastructure and environment. Air is cleaner, pollution is lower, food is plentiful. Cars and almost all other machinery are more efficient and more reliable. Medicine is better; things that used to be death sentences are either managable or more treatable. But compared to the 1980s, I'd take the social environment then vs now without blinking.
Say theoretically everything was the same in this timeline EXCEPT there is no reddit, facebook, twitter, or 4chan.
QAnon has no platform available. Hell, maybe we still have blogs but you aren't plastered echo-chamber friendly messages you have to actually search for stuff to read or maybe go to a phpbb forum.
Trump without Twitter, QAnon, 4Chan would've probably played out differently. Without a way for society to constantly feed his narcissism would he have been so anti-mask - would anti-science even be so big if there weren't echo-chambers re-inforcing this?
That's just social media itself. It's literally poisoned our society as much as a social credit score in China probably has there among relationships. Piss someone off and now you're an enemy combatant and can't travel.
I think tech can also fix a lot, but it depends how we use it and what we do with it. I hope we can science our way out of Global Warming but I'm not very optimistic about us surviving into 2100s.
You don't need social media or high tech to attack and dismantle democracy, to exert racist police brutality, to mishandle a pandemic, or to flock together and storm a government building like the US Capitol. All of this happened in world history before, with less advanced technology, a century or even longer ago.
What was the actual importance of QAnon? Just a newsreel skevomorphism, an entity easy to defeat as it was easy to setup. Pretty much irrelevant, disenfranchised people still exist. QAnon and other crazy but promoted ideas have served as smokescreens hiding actual problems and at some point people will take their shot at going against some actual structural issues. No easy way out and who knows when that tipping point is but 2100 sounds very optimistic for those structures hold.
On the other hand Tech can work as a cheap social stabililty agent as seen successfully in China.
are airplanes tech? can a virus spread around the world easily without planes, trains, and automobiles?
Can people be super dependent on a financial system if it weren't digital?
Even government—people had more freedom under a low-tech monarchy than a high-tech democracy. Can't enforce too many laws when law enforcement doesn't have vehicles or phones.
You must be quite young. 2020 is a minor blip on the huge ups and downs over the past 2 centuries.
The only way I could fathom "society collapsing" is if I felt the interactions you see on the internet were an accurate reflection of society at large. It's not - not even close.