Can you see it?  Can you see the big picture anymore?  There’s a shrinking resource pie, instead of a growing one.  There’s a crazy schism, between those who have access to everything they want and technological marvels and the instruments of privacy and oppression, and the grubby little peasants who are going to go back to digging in the dirt for a living.

So, you have a choice.  You can join the slave class for the technocratic elites, and gain enough access to resources to pay for your kids’ cancer treatments, or you can fuck off and die, homeless and alone.  To join the slave class, you must adhere to the humiliating rituals.  All of them.  You must profess that you are a privileged person who is trying to check your own privilege.  You must proclaim loudly that you are virtuous.  If you don’t, you will be automated out of existence.  That’s the squeeze, the con, the play.  Except . . . not really.  We are meant to be fighting over critical race theory, and over masks and vaccines, and over access to education, but those are not the things that matter.

In a world where the resources are dwindling, civility wanes, cruelty increases.  Sure, we can automate jobs.  For now.  For how long, though?  I’m uncertain.  I think it depends on the scale.  There’s nuclear power the size of a basketball, or maybe a city block, and it can run for, I don’t know, decades or hundreds of years.  So if you wanted to know how the electricity will run without coal or oil for the mines for the solar panel raw material, I’d say the new electrics are going to allow the elite to continue to use electricity for at least my lifetime, and the lifetime of my children.  It isn’t a world made by hand, but it’s still dystopian.

You understand that there has always been an oppressive elite, running things from the shadows as well as out in the open.  What they want, they will get, for the most part.  They won’t get everything, but they’ll get enough.  There will always be an oppressive elite.  That’s how humans work, you know.  Humans are distrustful of outsiders (these days that’s called racist) and are wired that way for their survival.  Humans are hierarchical yet also anarchical.

Fascism is inevitable on the resource downslope.  Do you agree to be tracked and traced in exchange for access to resources stolen by the public private partnership stakeholders?  Some people will, and some people won’t.  What are some good tactics to survive fascism?  The usual, fawn, fight, or flight.  Some people do it alone.  Some people join armies.  Some people leave with a group and wander to find better opportunities to be left alone in peace.  Some people can’t beat ‘em and join ‘em and become jackboots.  A lot of people live double lives.  Is anybody even capable of pushing Ms. Fitts’ big red button?  I don’t see how.  The Beck Brothers are in charge of programming the algorithms.