You are looking for a Great Man of history to pin this on. You’d rather believe someone nefarious is in charge and pulling the strings from an ocean away, than to see this for what it is; an empire with no real conscious oversight. A pile of self-interested businessmen, politicians, and militarists doing whatever they can to line their pockets, profits above all else.

The US has, per capita, the largest prison population and, outright, the biggest military on the planet. If there’s a road to ‘unfreedom’, we traveled down it a long time ago.

You’d rather believe Trump is result of foreign interference, that our own institutions would never result in this without being sullied from outside. It’s fan fic, it’s Cold War nonsense.

Trump is the consequence of our political systems, of our spiteful culture, of our economics that promises success and leaves people sick, broken, and in debt. So what if the Russians had a few hundred Facebook posts? That “seed” would not have taken if the soil weren’t already fertile. Frankly, I don’t think it made a difference. We were barrelling toward Trump with or without the oh so spooky slavs typing on a keyboard.

On the one hand, you can read it as a parody of late 20th century life - like, haha imagine a caveman clocking into work

but on the other hand, Flinstones and its far future counterpart Jestsons kinda suggest an inability to imagine anything different. Automobile-ized suburban development frequently gets presented an the human ‘default’. As though we just default to this, rather than it being one of many ways cities and society could be organized.

All hardware becomes legacy hardware in time. Even if we assume they’re eventually able to deliver on all those great big shiny promises, I’d rather not have to schedule an outpatient surgery just to keep up on emails. Pocket touchscreens being practically mandatory is bad enough…

It’s stripping out the copper wiring for cash. Buy a game studio, fire all the employees. Now their paychecks can be served up as profit to shareholders. Move all the files to your servers, it’s your “Intellectual Property”. Sell off the computers and the desks and anything else not nailed down. Do they own the building? Great, sell that too! Or, better yet, rent it out!

And your metaphor was a fun oversimplification.

Desertification has increased

Local flora has decreased

Rabbit populations have octupled

Deer populations have doubled

Micky Mouse entering public domain is historical benchmark. Cool, but also… that mouse is hollow. Good for a cheap horror game or thumbing your nose at the big theater conglomerate, but otherwise meh

Donald Duck going public domain will be a real treat

And there certainly wasn’t a neighborhood where your highway on-ramp currently is.

Corporations are an outdated means of organizing industry. While they can innovate upon existing technology, invention and discovery are avoided, as the length and uncertainties in such undertaking can eat into shareholder returns. While there are exceptions, this selective pressure is seldom overcome. This competitive evolutionary model forces participant companies into a race to the bottom. Corners are cut, labor stiffed, and customers squeezed in order to draw greater and greater profits – or else run the risk of loosing out to more ruthless competition.

In the same way large firms were able to stabilize disruptions in the supply chain through vertical and horizontal integration (thus outliving smaller, regionally managed businesses), mixed economies stabilize the shocks and disruptions of large firms, with the added benefit of re-focusing the output of industry to common goals, rather than to enrichment of a narrow few.

Overall, it is essential to see corporations as a phase in the conscious and unconscious evolution of human endeavor - a tool in the industrialized toolbox and not an end goal unto itself. It’s also important to learn to write for yourself, or you’ll be clowned on quite easily.

Yeah yeah, you see the individual and not the historical pattern.

Isn’t it funny that the US keeps doing this? The presidents are incidental, flitting in and out of office with the whim of the public. But the conflicts? Those last. Nuclear rockets parked in Yugoslavia one century, flooding Ukraine with weapons the next. You know children in Vietnam are, to this day, born with napalm induced complications?

Doesn’t this all ring a little too familiar to you? Do you think maybe our grandparents had cute little nicknames for Khrushchev, comparing him to Hitler, when they were our age?

Amazing, a century latter the blame is still squarely placed on Russia. Those people must not be capable of self-determination, am I right my good Cold Warrior? Good thing we had this stockpile of depleted uranium, by jingo! So what if it leaches into the groundwater? Canadian mining firms have been poisoning Ukrainian groundwater for decades now! What’s a little rare-earth-elements between allies, amiright?

They outlawed starting a conversation in Russian. It was criminal for a business not first say something in Ukrainian. Like, imagine if Arizona tried to pass a law that criminalized conducting business in Spanish.

Induced demand – the production of weapons necessitates the use of weapons in order to keep shares from crashing. Like a shoe factory regularly changing the design and fashion to keep from flooding the market, blood is spilled to keep the 401Ks safe.

Welcome to the Second Cold War, you’ve been here along.

That’s the interesting thing about empire, it’s self similar. A whole class of people may grow up geographically in or near the core, but their experience of life has more in common with someone in the semi- or outer periphery in terms of access to necessities or stability of life.

electrocuting an elephant to death, and for no better reason than tabloid advertising, kind of stands out in the historical record

that’s not to say Edison was PURE EVIL, just that I always remember the elephant alongside the more humanizing factoids. [Once, he asked a math student to find the volume of a lightbulb. The student started doing all kinds of caliper measurements and geometry calculations. Edison just filled the bulb with sand and tipped it out into a measuring cup]