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Forgive me if I exaggerate, but you sound a chef who is appalled by the lack of variety in fruits and vegetables distributed at a shelter.

Billions of people can communicate and learn in ways never before possible. This is overall A Very Good Thing.

I think it's good on balance, but am also scared about the dangers ahead, and around us.

I'm sure when the tractor was invented, some bright minds realized this was going to be the end of small farms, and that some day we'd be eating manufactured food product out of a tube, having long forgotten the art of cultivating a rich breadbasket for your family.

They would've been right, of course, we've lost our health and our knowledge of the earth, somewhat catastrophically.

Which isn't to say we should've skipped the tractor. But just that "it's net good" won't be the end of the story.

So... Can I assume you are doing something about this? Like are you going to buy a farm and start "cultivating rich breadbaskets"? If answer is anything, but: "Yes" followed by a planned date, then you are just blowing out air. It's easy to say "hurdur we used to be close to earth and things were so much better" from your yoga mat using latest MacBook Pro, but unless you are actually getting up at the crack of dawn to work on fields you have no idea how much work goes into farming.

Yes. No I won't buy a farm, as distant intentional communities seem to inevitably stagnate in isolation.

My MacBook is a 2011 MacBook Air.

I think you might be pretty interested in how I see the path back. It won't be retreading the path we came in on. And things will be very different when we get there.

Don't be lame with the Facebook tease. Tell us or don't, and for the record, I am interested.

I think we'll implement the basic functions of capitalism in software, and learn to use them on a smaller and smaller scale, to the point where you could issue a bond to buy a burrito and sell your burrito farts, someone else could buy the bond, the burrito gets eaten, and dividends paid in the span of an hour.

As that technology diffuses, large corporations will lose their competitive advantage over individuals, and we'll switch over to voluntary contracts for all commerce, instead of coercive employment and property regimes. There will rarely be a time when you think "well, this deal isn't great but I don't have a lot of other choices". You'll be able to just decompose the deal and bid out its parts to an effectively infinite network of contractors, and bond it out in tiny increments. Any business plan which makes sense will be immediately implementable.

Simultaneous with this, we will also develop softwares for other political organizations besides capitalism, including communism, monarchism, fascism, etc, which we will all participate in voluntarily in the same way. Anarcho-syndicalism will be notable among these, because it is the only one with a mechanical basis in consent and a morality grounded in self-defense.

In this new regime, where people are no longer dependent on large cultural institutions for basic sustenance, consent will become a much more valuable marketing tool. People won't be used to being pushed around, so pull-based institutions will start to work better. Anarcho-syndicalism will have a powerful advantage in this market, and people will shift over to using it for most of their daily transactions. These will have to be mirrored with capital-based accounting in order to be legal in capitalist states, but the actual people involved will think less and less in terms of capital. You will come to my bakery and ask for some bread, and depending on the rules of the syndicate, I'll give it to you. In the background AIs will note a "sale", a bond if necessary, and file tax forms, but you and I won't look at them. Anarcho-syndicalism will be how we make decisions, capitalism will just be an accounting method required to not be put in jail for illegal distribution of bread.

Eventually the capital accounting will be ignored for most things, certainly basic healthcare concerns like housing, food, mental health, maintenance of sacred lands, etc. The capital contracts will still be used in the entertainment industry, which will make up the vast majority of GDP. And even within that industry, corporations will be a minority. Most work will happen inside small partnerships of 2-10 people who are working directly together, said partnerships also contracting out to the individuals as sole proprietors. Full time employment will be extremely rare.

The economics of this are based on the presumption that human health is inherently valuable, so bonding it is no problem.

In this way capitalism will "die", still existing but no longer being a central conduit of resources and power.

The above example might as well serve to reassure you that dystopia is a long ways off. Because whoever saw the first "tractors" and had such worries, died long before the first hints of "tube food" appeared --- or certainly before such became daily standard fare for the majority, rather than the odd diversionary rare "treat" / entertainment for an urban minority..

Agricultural examples are also tricky analogies here. Replacing beasts of burden with fossil fuels for one always carried the siren song of "we can feed more people for lowered costs --- think of the many hungry ones" (of course reproduction rates always outran such promises then til now) and certainly none of these inventions had the potential to so profoundly rewire brains and actual human consciousness as the always-on, easy-to-use, always-connected, full-mobility "smart" screens that spreaded slowly less than a decade ago.

I tried not to make value judgement in my comment, because, well, I don't really know wether this whole thing is good or bad. I'm just observing the phenomena - seems like confluence of power is unavoidable, a law of nature if you will, so it would have gotten to this regardless.

The fact that billions of people can do something they couldn't do before is commendable, but it also raises the bar for everyone - just like reading and spelling did 100 years ago and now it becomes obligatory for everyone to learn and communicate or be left behind.

In other words, we have super powers compared to past generations, but it doesn't matter because everyone has them now.

I think what good we have now is that there is more information access parity. Note I specified 'access', not true information parity. This is but a single aspect of what transformation would be required for there to be true equality that is self-sustaining and antifragile. I can access most information that I truly desire, some with more work than others, but the information ecosystem I live in is vastly different than the one that, say, Mark Zuckerberg lives in. There are numerous different information ecosystems, and certainly some class inequality separating many of them. I could go on, but as I typed this I realized I agree with some of your analysis, but I see it from a different slant. I think confluence of power is inevitable, but a weak point in the armor of that power has developed due to these technologies. Those at the top know this, but are also simultaneously using new tools much more powerful and more effectively than the masses know, so are comfortable with the weak point right now. I do not think as things stand that inequality would ever be addressed, but I do think we live in a time where there are possible chains of events moving forward that could disassemble that armor in ways that are only imagination right now.

Do you find yourself an active participant in any of this, or more of a passive observer?

Your comparison is flawed because the majority of those in said shelter are people who didn't need a shelter in the first place and most of those in need are not in the shelter.

As for whether this is a good thing: Who is president in the US again? How did this come about?

The comparison with lack of blah at a shelter is telling, don't you think, when you think about how shelters are usually a place where people are "doled" out stuff? It is not merely a patronizing suggestion (which the billions of people are already aware of and accustomed to), but it is also taking a lot of people down a path where their choices will become severely restricted in the future. How is that "A Very Good Thing"?

Also, think about what companies start doing when they start failing. And don't make implicit assumptions that these megaliths will never fail or stumble. What would you, as the CEO who is supposed to "maximize shareholder value" do? Are you going to say "Well, we could do some shady things to exploit the data we have and buy ourselves some more time, but it is a better idea to declare bankruptcy and close the company"? Imagine a company like Facebook nearing bankruptcy. You can bet on your life that they will offer the appropriate third parties greater control of their data mining prowess in return for a bailout. Is that also overall a Very Good Thing?

Also, notice how the 2008 financial crisis unfolded. None of the offending parties got anything more than a slap on the wrist, because they had the keys to an engineering construct of extraordinary complexity (the financial system). It was just "heads I win, tails you lose". The way our lives are becoming intertwined with these tech behemoths is no different, and I don't see it playing out any differently if there is a similar crisis in the tech sector. How can that be overall a Very Good Thing?

just look at the number of 'zombies' on the streets

Get used to the zombies...they are going to become far more prevalent. When Neuralink or whatever technologies converge to directly project experiences mind-to-mind, people will not be broadcasting selfies...they will be broadcasting self, as in their current, total sensate experience. People will tune in and live the most exciting virtual life that they need...while their physical sits decaying with saliva dripping from their half-opened mouths. The drug wars will come nowhere near as close to the holo-virtual experience tune-out that's rather near.

Zuck looks pretty happy about it http://imgur.com/a/UL7HX

That picture is so sad.

To be honest, many people live lives of "quiet desperation" so to them this doesn't sound much more dystopic than the cards they were already dealt.

My statement was not meant to be taken as a judgement insomuch as a prediction of what's shortly to come.

When there was Windows 98 and ME 'we' thought the Microsoft's proprietary systems are the dominant platform. Maayybe Linux would win but being so difficult to even install, little chance someone outside of the IT world could productively use it, like install an Application, print something.

Fast forward 15 years: many surprises happened, non-IT people don't even think of buying desktop computers. Laptops are borderline geek-devices, most of the stuff is going on cell-phones of which most are Linux-powered.

Windows as a growing platform is more or less dead. (There are serious efforts to reanimate it, but who knows...)

Maybe the example is too geeky, and one may argue that Windows didn't have so many users as Facebook and Google now. Instead think of Televisions, at least in Germany they are dead. Most of my friends don't have a TV and even among those people who have one, many argue that it's bad for you.

So yeah, think positive. ;)

Bit hard to think positive when all of the bad things have been replaced by worse things.

If things continue on this trajectory its going to be even worse,

I mean Windows 9x/XP, was this for me: my CD-ROM drive one time stopped working for 3 weeks, then, without doing anything it worked again. Or I had this weird boot error that also over the course of weeks, the boot process would be faster when opening and closing the CD-ROM drive during the Windows splash.

Oh man, or like you edit something in Office or, say Paintshop Pro, and the program just crashes, all data lost. Haha, or you boot and the filesystem is corrupt and you need to run chkdsk or whatever the name was. My god, Windows used to be such a bad operation environment. The worst where Microsoft's world domination tactics, pushing vendor lock to the limit and at the same time making the competion's life so hard that even international courts go to action.

Seriously, computing has become soooooo much become since Windows is not the dominant OS anymore. Many people are so lucky to have never used Windows, others like me might have stopped using it when it refused booting for good. (Becoming sentimental, thinking of my Windows XP/Ubuntu dual boot. The XP just showed a blue screen at some point. After that I stopped using Windows for almost 10 years. :-D)

  > while being subjected to constant brainwashing into
  > behaving in predictable ways - purchasing, thinking,
  > liking, voting, etc.

I'd say the open web is not solution for this, because that's not the problem of specific technology. As you note:

  > So I don't think there's anything to 'do' about it
  > - just be aware of it and try to stay away from large 
  > crowds.

Indeed, efforts to solve sociological/any-other-non-tech problems with different/more/less technology rarely if ever are successful. Fix society, not technology or medium.

You have expressed my current assessment of the situation so well, mad props.

To the OP, "combating" these tsunamis-that-already-happened is akin to various other (past or ongoing) "wars on intents"/ideas (won't name them here to not derail but insert any of the various "war on XYZ" memes that have been floated for the past century+ where XYZ is not a specifically identifiably nation or group) --- unwinnable.

It seems weird to assume that people will continue not caring about this 50 years from now, given the power conferred and stakes at hand for democracies to function.