I share much of your grim assessment. It is such a vast indignity that so much of use, so much amazing awesome potential, has no where to go, while the demands to support ourselves remain so persistent & challenging.
I do have some areas of hope.
> Some of the reddit apologists claim telecommunications will free us all, but its mostly bringing us purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics.
The current status quo is that technology is a system for building products that consumers consume. Social media is another consumer device, another ready-made provided thing.
We don't have a very good established front for pro-humanistic technologism. Even though these social platforms are about content creation, they're through the narrow windows of what the tools provide, engagement is even more un-liberal, more constrained. The environments are artificial, we have only a small provided window of them that we can participate in, and our participation is prescriptive, via the defined channels of the software.
But that is not an inherent vice of technology nor information technology. This reliance upon adoption adoption adoption adoption, on onboarding as many as possible, as the means of measuring success has suppressed the other forms of technology that are available for us to explore: holistic technologies. Technologies that embrace all of our potential, that always leave the door open to examination & modification. Yes, this is a Free Software rant!! To quote Programming is Hard[1][2],
> No other science is as accessible as computer science, and most of its proceeds happen out in the open - computer science thrives on the internet, and although there are corners that do actual gatekeeping, most of content is freely accessible and thrives on this accessibility.
Science & code are replicable & experimental, always, it's just a question of how accessible science & creativity are. Software faces so few material constraints, so few connectivity limitations- software is malleable, and vast, and forever willing to let us explore our potential, to develop ourselves & grow ourselves. To ongoingly experiment with will & creation, all from a phone and bluetooth keyboard. If and when we are given access to participate, to find our potential!
The current facts on the ground are not nearly so sunny. The iron hold of big platform feels a prison, and virtually is, except that we can escape at any moment. Free Software missed the jump to the internet entirely. Instead Open Source became the underpinnings for great vast monoliths, huge corporate properties to emerge, that dictate digital spaces we might use, but which give us none of the libre liberty that software might so deeply let us enrich ourselves with.
So yeah, I think you're over-doing it, but sure, I think IT is playing a really crap role right now, and I think being trapped on these content-farms has made the natives do some really weird shit. Humankind can deploy none of their amazing perceptual skills, has only abstract potential on these limited, controlled, finite systems, and we never get to see the greater game as it's played: we only have what glimpses the platforms give us. "purity spirals, cancel culture, and identity politics" are not what trouble me, I am way way way more progressive, but I think there are all manners of cultural loops that society becomes bound up in, and our inability to see the knots stems from the consumeristic nature of these systems, from there not being an honest, potential-respecting, augmentative free technological basis from which to perceive, operate, & advance from, in a distributed decentralized pro-human manner.
It's not clear to me where we need to go to start changing things. Free software, not necessarily copyleft, but software made by people for people not for developers, needs to become internet relevant. It missed the connectivity revolution entirely. Social Media/Web Protocols[3] like ActivityPub give me hope, but there still feels like a great missing, that we're still on a too application-ized view of the world, trying to provide experiences, not seed the ground to allow us each to find & discover our own experiences, our own activities: too mechanistic, not computational enough. Systems like Yahoo Pipes were built more upon will & volition & watching & experimentation with computing itself, and I think that sort of componentry is key to starting to unravel some of the built up anti-humanity IT has become shrouded in.
In all, it's really down to Ursala Franklin's Prescriptive vs Holistic technologies[4]. The first, prescriptive, categorizes all technology which is definitive, which has well defined mechanisms that enact processes. These are used to control & process. For example, the control & process of gathering to a central place & then syndicating out posts people make to each other: that's a prescriptive technology. Holistic technologies are those in which the human has total control over means & materials to shape & create an outcome. In short, holistic technologies are technologies built with Free Software ethos, if not necessarily their hard copyleft politics. When humankind can share & exchange & experiment with the world about it, & learn, & form knowing exploring peers, humanity goes places: we explore our potentials, we find new things to get up to. Technology ought be a hotbed for this, for exploring our potentials, & it has gaps but it is already very far along de-pyramidizing the material/monetary order that pervades & so powerfully persists in our world, but this idea of free/pro-human software needs new initiatives & envigorated direction to maintain relevance amid our rising communicative capitalism.
[1] https://dorinlazar.ro/2021-02-programming-is-hard/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26711862
[3] https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...