I read a lot of dystopian sci-fi, used to be my favorite genre until life started imitating art. Now it's less fun to read because the way society responds to crisis in reality is dumber than most of my favorite stories imagined. The outliers that stand out tend to be in the cyberpunk vein, Ghost in the Shell and Cyberpunk 2077 specifically for how they predict that "the net" as we know and understand it is going to be ruined. In the case of cyberpunk it's by rogue, powerful AIs that will hijack anyone who dares to cross the firewall. In GiTS it's more of a general lawlessness that causes the wider net to become a battleground for hackers. In reality it does look like, at least for now, AI is going to ruin the net in the most asinine way possible, by generating exponentially more garbage, consuming it, and regurgitating it to the point that no one wants to bother logging in anymore. The AIs on the other side of the blackwall don't need to be terrifying actually, just boring, who would have guessed?
The other thing that they both get right is that corporations are going to supplant every government on earth (probably) and the only country that seems to recognize corpos as an existential threat is China, the US has been in bed with corporations forever, but before it was more like an unacknowledged "secret" affair, but this recent stuff with Elon Musk in the Whitehouse is like suddenly having the mistress paraded around in the open, holding hands in public even. Legacy media has no idea how to respond, they sort of laugh, a bit embarrassed, "who's really president here?", so shocked that all they can do is pretend this is normal, or proximate to it.
It is shocking though. The brazenness and arrogance. Personally I thought that they would wait until they had all of the tools in place to really lock things down. Fully cyberized police force, for one thing, and some sort of massive crisis that triggers the takeover, some sort of justification, because that's how it happens in sci-fi. In reality though they just grabbed the levers of power and dared anyone to stop them. By the time we wake up to really fight back they probably will have robo-cops at the ready to kick our teeth in.
The last part, and I guess the worst part if you're one of the 99% like me, is the continued stratification of the classes. A world where the lottery of birth is the only thing that determines the financial outlook of your entire life. We're creating a society where children will be born in massive debt and spend their whole lives trying to work it off (thanks to Black Mirror for that particularly dark episode) meanwhile the richest among us will be living a completely different life in a literal heaven on earth, all powered by everyone not wealthy enough to be a cloud capitalist. Imagine The Matrix except instead of the machines feeding off of us, it's billionaires.
Now that I've seen how quickly things can change I feel like it's time to choose sides and start taking action, otherwise I will run the risk of being caught flatfooted. I also think I have a moral compunction act in accordance to the level of perceived threat. The first thing I will do is start to "unplug" from the system by ending any subscriptions I'm paying to corpos. As I write this I realize it'll be easier said than done, so for now at least I'll pledge not to sign up for anything new. Next, I'll stop letting them use my data as a commodity by opting out of their free services.
After that I will rachet up my activism by increasing my participation in online open source communities that are devoted to building the tools we'll need to help others unplug and opt out. I think that anti-consumption and anticapitalism need to be supercharged with high technology in order for us to engage asymmetrically against what will probably be the most powerful control system ever imagined.