Huh. This seems related to a hypothesis I had that saddens me a bit - that progress of civilization, both the real one we see and a hypothetical better one (as utopian as possible to achieve with how actual humans behave) - necessarily tries to eliminate individual autonomy and self-sufficiency. This creates a conflict similar to what the article describe - people want to both do sketchy shit and enjoy the benefits of civilization, except replace "sketchy shit" with meaningful autonomy.

Couple examples to anchor the intuition here:

1. Progress of technology seems to increase the amount of destruction a single individual can trivially inflict on others.

We live in an era of easy access to firearms and even easier access to knowledge for building DIY bombs (conventional or chemical kind), not to mention all the extremely vulnerable safety-critical infrastructure, from residential gas pipes to water treatment plants and the power grid. Today, any motivated individual could easily kill dozens or hundreds of people. 200+ years ago, the worst a random person could do was to grab a knife and get stabby. 20-50 years from today? You can replace "DIY bombs" with "DIY engineered pathogens". And don't get me started on the space program - if we ever seriously expand past Earth surface, your average space trucker will be flying around in a WMD. Better hope they're not aerobraking under influence.

Now, almost all people are nice and friendly and not murderous. But there are always some individuals who, for whatever reason, carry destructive intent. Keeping the society safe and the civilization functioning requires countering the threat of individual randos, in lock-step with the tools they have available. This seems to fundamentally require increased surveillance, more protocol, more red tape - all removing individual autonomy. E.g. there's plenty of chemicals you could easily procure 50 years ago that you can't today (and/or trying to do it will put your name on the top of terrorist watchlist).

2. Everything as a Service.

When you buy and own stuff, you have full control over it (and full responsibility for maintenance), at least within the limits of applicable laws, which mostly deal with concerns adjacent to point 1 above. However, there's a trend of replacing property with services, renting instead of buying. Each case of this, however, puts you in a relationship with some organization. Usually one involving recurring payments. There are various and perfectly good reasons one would prefer renting to owning, but their side effect is fixing your role in the modern economy. Instead of accumulating and spending resources, what you're really doing is more of securing and allocating cash flow. There's much less buffer here. If everything you use is rented, then you can't go off the grid, and temporarily losing your income source might make all your tools and amenities suddenly disappear.

The impact of that is, again, reduced autonomy. In an Everything-as-a-Service world, you need to advance on an optimal (effectively prescribed) path of a worker drone, producing value, collecting reward, and spending it in limited ways afforded by your civilization.

I could go on, but it's late, and I hope the two examples make it somewhat clear why I feel the future is "wonders of civilization vs. individual autonomy, pick one".