[antiverse]

> owned by an ever richer and smaller [...] elite

This has been the case for a very, very, very long time. You're old enough now to see it for what it is. There are things around the owners that you are not allowed to say, perpetuated by culture and society writ large. The only two kinds of people unwilling to admit to this are either paid shills, or useful idiots. Everyone else is mum on the subject but they can see the world is orchestrated by powerful individuals who are in lockstep. They know they own things, and they are all chummy about it. The pie is divided among them.

You can file anyone who says "You're just old" under the "useful idiot" category. Anyone who believes they are a temporarily embarrassed millionaire is equally useful.

For everyone else:

Stop:

1) Reading news. 2) Watching streaming services. 3) Watching porn.

All three are owned by the same group of people and are designed to control what you see and what you think.

Instead:

1) Read books. 2) Socialize with like-minded people. 3) Lift heavy weights. 4) Help others and being kind. 5) Seek out nature - swim in lakes, eat in the mountains, and learn the sounds of birds. 6) Learn useful knots.

Lastly:

7) Escape clown world.

[moshun]

While I think there are some solid points made here, overall this feels reductive and almost isolationist. In particular, strongly agree that many wings of mass media have become a core problem, both as a vector of control and fountain of propaganda not often subject to critical thought.

The reality is that we live in an ever more complex technological environment and the true failure is that we have resisted evolving our laws and moral structures to match. Privacy laws should have been implemented more than a decade ago in the US, and likely will not be for another decade. We've allowed tech organizations to create entirely new economies, fundamentally disrupt existing ones and twist the idea of the web being a series of connected nodes to a structural trap for our minds and the minds of our children.

Disconnecting fully and abandoning the systems we helped build will allow them to slide deeper and faster into the dystopia that many of us feel is already here. If we do not find a way alter the direction of this, no one will.

It's always been interesting to me that in most science fiction that I'd classify as anti-dystopian, the reasons societies become that way is not because of technology solely, but because those societies gradually (or suddenly) changed their fundamental outlook and perspective to be communal and inclusive instead of individualistic and exclusive. Star Trek is probably the standard bearer for this idea, but I think it's worth analyzing, because there's an argument that we'll collectively face the same challenge and it's not hard to imagine that we're staring at it now.