They are picking all the bad stuff from dystopian fiction and rolling it all at once. It’s like tech bros got the Cliff notes of all the scifi stories and turned to the page that explained what the protagonist was fighting against and said “yes, let’s do all that”.
Edit: I’ve never actually used Cliffsnotes so I am making an assumption that it breaks down the characters motives.
They somehow found a way to harvest more data to sell.
How much longer till we get ads in our sleep ala Futurama? SMH
As a kid I read all the William Gibson books and dreamed of a future of full sensory web immersion
Instead we got headphones that beam our interests directly to advertisers
Imagine getting malware in your brain, because that’s where we’re heading
In “Idoru” Gibson even predicted the AI influencers that humans fall in love and develop relationships with.
We managed to develop all the downsides of his imagined future dystopia, and few or none of the upsides.
To be fair, the upsides were relegated to the ultra wealthy corpos, just as they are IRL
AND we’ve developed our own dystopian facets on top of that like antimaskers and incel mass murderers
They are picking all the bad stuff from dystopian fiction and rolling it all at once. It’s like tech bros got the Cliff notes of all the scifi stories and turned to the page that explained what the protagonist was fighting against and said “yes, let’s do all that”.
Edit: I’ve never actually used Cliffsnotes so I am making an assumption that it breaks down the characters motives.