No, I don’t see a path out. History doesn’t show any path out as far as I can tell. The power of change for the masses is in mass actions. It isn’t coincidence that we are distracted all the time, that we lack strong community, that our attention is grabbed at every moment, that life is too expensive for free time. It’s to prevent mass actions. If not by manufactured distraction then by criminalization or propaganda.

I watched the masses pay companies to put cameras in their homes, microphones in their pockets and tracker their devices. I watched them put all the details of their lives and their social connections on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter to be surveilled. I watched them click yes on every TOS without reading, agree to give up anonymity and privacy not just for themselves, but for everyone. Now we are watching people tell LLMs their thoughts, feelings, fears and inner most identities. All that information get collated, catalogued and analyzed. A dossier on every citizen. A prediction algorithm for every cohort. The greatest surveillance, social mapping, propaganda and behavior prediction system ever devised by human beings, all in the hands of genuine psychopaths who run the companies and run for office.

The only times things have gotten better for the masses is when circumstances, technology or calamity, destabilize the existing power structures and allow the oppressed to reclaim the space. That only lasts long enough for the ambitious to reconcentrate power again into the hands of the few. Whatever path you see is one built of faith alone, not evidence of how humans organize ourselves when the destabilizing force dissipates and life returns to a static state. We are living through that reconsolidation of power, watching our communities turned into fascism.

All because the masses can be bought with toys.