The dream is over. Technology, technology companies, and integrated sociopolitical communication systems are not coming to save us. They were never neutral, and they failed at the first serious encounter with technically mediated political extremism. Not accidentally. Voluntarily.
They did not merely look away. They amplified, rewarded, and normalised it, all while their balance sheets swelled beyond any plausible claim of social value. In doing so, they abandoned moral responsibility for the political, economic, and lived ecological costs of their systems. Worse, they actively accelerated those costs.
What they appear unable, or unwilling, to grasp is that they have been consuming the very substrate that sustains them. Social trust, cultural coherence, institutional legitimacy, and shared reality are not externalities. They are load-bearing. Strip them for profit and the system does not adapt. It collapses.
A civilisation cannot support a newly minted billionaire class atop a degraded social field without catastrophic failure. The platforms do not outgrow the societies they hollow out. They fall with them. On this point, history is not subtle.
This is not cleverness mistaken for cynicism. It is folly mistaken for inevitability.
Daedelus Kite 