[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.