[goldenbikeshed]

Or maybe our western liberal democratic capitalist societies have long degenerated to a point of complete and utter directionlessnes.

Your conspiracy would have the west fucking themselves over.

How about this: a plutocratic elite has accumulated enough capital to be no longer accountable to anyone as almost each and every actor with power in society has been bought out - they don't care about you being able to afford a GPU for your world changing machine learning project for a fair price. They care about themselves and themselves only, and doing so are molding the rest of society into the same myopic egotistical form.

The recent pandemic and the sheer amount of people not willing or able to comply with simplest (masking, vaccinating, etc.) mitigation measures due to what boils down to a kind of malicious dumbness or idiocy driven by mass and social media reminds me of the kind of spirit that allowed the nazi party to come to power in Germany.

This doesn't bode well for ongoing crises like the destruction of the ecological support system of our species' home planet driven by greed and an endless appetite for convenience.