The world we ended up in today, and the world we could end up with if we get into a dystopia, is mainly the result of normal people total lack of ownership in thinking the future. politicians lie, you can't even blame them, it's in their genes for the ones who succeed the most. You are not telling me you can be surprised by a politician lying. The same way tech people plotting to sell the vision of a bright future to get funding, CEOs pushing complete nonsense to inflate the hype and get more attention thus money and make investors happy. Said investors hop on every train because tech has become casino: All of these are just grifters running their agendas it's not surprising they mostly don't care about mankind future well-being. But the power they hold comes from the belief of people who failed to see their schemes. Science used to be the most important thing in the past, scientist were the rockstar and normal people really carefully made efforts to understand where we were going and why it's important.. but today ? It's crazy how everyone just lost their critical thinking ability and makes zero effort to take ownership into humanity future , most people genuinely acts likes they are not concerned by all of that and are too busy spying on celebrities, simping of singers, having debates over pointless VC funded movies... i'm not saying all of these are bad they can be masterpieces but i really feel how true "attention is the new oil" is and how putting it in things that do not matters really ruined everything if people were critically thinking they would use linux not even the hardcore distros but the balanced ones that offers what they need , more importantly it's not even that the problem the problem is the complete lack of interest there was at the time, if simply people were a bit more interested in the matter the rational concensius would have recognized microsoft scheming and friendly opensource easy to use operating systems would have had their chance, microsoft had this thing called VB6 you could use it to create an app with visual programming in minutes and it would generate an exe that could run on any windows machine, they removed it from future windows versions for obvious reasons (how the hell are we going to sell microsoft software licences man), there are so many example of things like this like even in programming todays apps are awfully bloated and cosmically inneficient because of a long string of events that just trace back to the fact that some guy created javascript in 10days then corporate management forced it to be backed into Netscape browser and added Java in the name to ride the java hype of the time and then it spread by the pure power of marketing and vision selling (marc andreessen was netscape cofounder btw) and we ended up with today environment with chat apps that takes gigabytes of RAM just because at the time, marketing was stronger than the sum of everyone brain critical thinking power combined, and when careful and pragmatic people like linus thorvalds steps in to warn and say the truth about how to handle things, they are called boring, boomers, visionless, spineless... magnificent guys continue like this. There is so much long stories like this about literally every pieces of tech we used today in the consumer space but briefly: Consumer tech isn't NASA the best most efficient and elegant solutions almost never wins; only the one with enough marketing and "Vision"