First of all, welcome to the club. You've noticed that we arguably do not live in the best of all possible worlds, to put it mildly. Let's get you a membership card and a tee-shirt. "We accept you, we accept you. One of us, one of us."

Second, yeah, kiss your ass goodbye, it's too late, and you should probably move into the woods and learn to make fire with sticks and hunt and gather. You're still going to be fucked when the climate goes wonky, but at least you'll be happy and more-or-less bullshit-free until then (unless you wind up needing a dentist or surgeon! Brush your teeth and don't jump around too much.)

Third, and this is general advice, try not to go by what the masses are doing. Humans are only really intelligent as individuals or small groups. Above a certain size (roughly 25) groups of humans are actually pretty dumb. If you predicate your emotions and outlook on the mass behaviour of humanity "you're gonna have a bad time."

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With the preliminaries out of the way, let's get down to brass tacks.

We do have already all the technology we need to live well on this planet even with a few billion more people. We can reduce our fossil fuel use by 100x-1000x without sacrificing quality of life. Look into applied ecology (Permaculture, Syntropic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, etc.), and passive solar design et. al. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design ),

We also already have technology for dealing with our psychological and emotional issues. Things like Nonviolent Communication ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication ) and weirder stuff like Core Transformation Process ( https://www.coretransformation.org/ ).

But you seem to be much more concerned with the effects of the Internet on people and culture.

> The internet is like an opiate or stimulant for the masses and a vampire, feeding off of and feeding into emotions and mass popular delusions allowing people to be manipulated as sheep and resulting in time and energy being wasted by literally billions.

Pretty much. I mean, my neighbor is into NFTs.

I don't know what you and I as individuals can do about it. To me it seems like billions of people are happy to be reduced to peasants in a newfangled techno-plantation. The lure of convenience seems to overwhelm all other principles and values.

The wedge is that most of them aren't happy, so there may yet be room to get in there and pry people from their digital thralldom. I have no idea how, though. :(

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The one concrete idea I do have is something I call "A Machine for Easy Living". It's sort of like a vertically integrated real estate development company that build (ecologically harmonious) neighborhoods and rents homes at a drastically reduced rate (like 10% of market value) with the covenant that the residents use some of their free time (freed up by lowered cost of living) to "pay it forward" culturally and economically.

My hope is that folks would spend more time doing things like participating in local government or volunteering for elder care or whatever rather than vegging out on their screens.

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I think we're seeing the emergence of vast AIs that have humans as neurons. I don't mean in the future, I mean now, right in front of us. These corporations with their unprecedented insight into the daily lives of billions of people are like nothing we've ever seen before.