Reread The Martian Chronicles awhile back and I love how it captured an era of blurred lines, where tech and fantasy bled into each other and made the dream of Mars accessible to everyone. There was faith, that something meaningful would be derived from that future. Whether you were directly a part of it or not, you were certain value would be added to your life.
But technology has flipped. The grand innovations of today promise, with much more certainty, to take from your life! Every advancement is an imposition. People don't have a choice. Software updates are coerced through loose promises of advancement and tighter threats of reduction. AI adoption is literally framed as: "Use it, or Die!" Crypto will leave you destitute if you don't invest, and arguably worse off if you do. And the metaverse, with its featureless, pallid avatars, perfectly capture the tragedy of the whole thing. None of it was meant to willingly improve lives, just layer on more lies for middling, extractable complexity.
We used to at least have "cope," which was cool. It was enough to let us fill inconsistencies with our imagination. Blaring adverts of Sony Y2K graphics and aesthetic curves on the hardware were sufficient for users to not feel too beat up about how crap the product was. They can't even do that right anymore. Now we get corporate memphis and an extra subscription and all of our data stolen. Then they expect us to respond with gratitude.
Okay, rant over. I am mostly upset there has been a theft of our dreams.