There's a way to reverse the trend and start moving in a better direction but we've got to work together to do it and right now I just don't see it, people are too blinded by short term gain.
It reminds me of "Meditations on Moloch":
> Every single citizen hates the system, but for lack of a good coordination mechanism it endures. From a god’s-eye-view, we can optimize the system to “everyone agrees to stop doing this at once”, but no one within the system is able to effect the transition without great risk to themselves.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
You can get a programming capable computer for free since most people consider a 5 year old computer (with 4-8 cores and 8-16GB RAM) to be ancient useless garbage. You have choices of form factor at $100. Everyone could buy a $70 old office liquidation computer that’s perfectly capable of servicing their emailing and document editing needs. But instead they buy $1200 phones. I think Steve Jobses most powerful idea was that other things should be computing devices too. Computers haven’t gone anywhere. You can buy one at the big grocery stores.
One example: When I encounter a word I don't know, in my native tongue or another language, how can I find out what it means? I can copy it to some service like google translate or an online dictionary. Maybe I even think of looking for a browser extension? But all these things are work and complicated. So I probably just read on. On my kobo reader, I can long press a word and get the dictionary entry. So I use that regularly to look up and learn new words which I would not if I always had to take out my phone and go online. Back in the day, google+ had a translate button, that would instantly translate text inline, which made it super easy to follow or even talk to people who wrote in a different language.
These kind of features are empowering! They use computers at what they are good at and they benefit most users who don't want to learn to program or customize their system. But they are few and far between in commercial systems or open source alternatives. An empowering system is not just one that you can customize, but also one that enhances the users own capabilities in meaningful ways. And there is a plethora of low hanging fruit there, we sadly are just too often stuck between "good enough" and "works for me"
We need government and money to become an integrated high technology deploying on decentralized technologies (which are the best way we have of creating large scale systems that are both holistic and evolutionary).