More like a consequence of capitalism, as big tech companies used their massive capital to instrumentalize and develop knowledge to keep mostly everyone dependent and addicted to their systems. Due to the way capitalism work, when a push back against it through public policies was staged, they bought their way out of regulation of their toxic platforms and were allowed to retain their monopolies.

There are pockets of this on the internet, but you really have to go out of your way to find it

The central platforms began before smart phones were common.

Tragedy of the Commons. It was around 2012 when my reactionary boomer relatives started trying to friend me on Facebook, wondering what the kids were all talking about.

Definitely the fish stinks from the head.

I'm also a bit confused about how the people on the top think this will play out.

A long time ago there was a french saying "noblesse oblige", or the german pendant "Wohlstand verpflichtet".

How reductionist.

It's not that the average CS grad can't expect to make 100k, it's that when that was the case 100k was a meaningful amount, now the same purchasing power requires 235k and almost nobody is making 235k in any job role, career pursuit, or field of study. Those that are making 235k aren't experiencing the same lifestyle because they don't exist in the same context, they exist in a context where they're surrounded by depression, scarcity, scrounging, and know that their time could be up at any moment.

The world is in a different place, and while it's funny to joke about how privileged tech people are, the net effect is that we've lost one of the most accessible refuges into a decent career for people. Many of us in tech, including myself, got into this without even a CS degree using free resources online and through libraries to learn about computers and build skills. It's basically inconceivable for anyone who is ambitious and a self-starter to build a career outside of extremely competitive, hierarchical, formal lines in 2026 except maybe as a social media influencer, which is probably why most people under 25 say their dream/goal is to become an influencer. It's their only shot at not being stuck in a state of permanent grinding misery to uphold wealthy elites.

It's not the end of the world though. Not everyone has to be a CS graduate. There's other professions out there.

It's significantly an Anglosphere thing. Look at the recent world happiness survey and all the English-speaking countries are taking a nose dive in relative ranking versus other countries. Meanwhile world GDP is increasing.

I have a handful of idiosyncratic hypotheses, that I view as stacking on top of the more general cause of inflation and inequality:

- Western hegemony is weakening. Russia is attacking, China is gaining in strength, and many former backwaters are gaining ground. This creates uncertainty. In 1991, the US was the supreme undisputed hegemon.

- Global Social media is significantly English, and the US is the center of the now globalized culture wars, so there's no linguistic barriers to the resulting pathologies. The online world feels borderless and chaotic.

- There is now sectarian strife within English-speaking countries due to different moral tribes (some of those tribes being recent immigrants) living in the same country when there wasn't before. This is a new phenomenon in living memory in the Anglosphere.

- Russia and Iran are running cognitive warfare and other operations to destabilize social cohesion in the Anglosphere. Examples: (i) online - Gucifer, Internet Research Agency, (ii) real world - paying local gangsters to attack minorities.

> what it is that you’re doing that puts you in a place where you are made to feel that way.

I live in the US, read the news, and have relationships with other people.

I lived through a global pandemic several years ago and know people who lost loved ones. Now the head of HHS in the US doesn't believe in vaccines. My kids go to school and we've had multiple lockdowns because of shootings nearby. My company and all of the similar companies I might work at have been doing rolling layoffs the past few years. A guy attempted an insurrection and then somehow got himself back in office. We started a pointless war in Iran. My tax dollars went to killing schoolchildren. I had to get air conditioning installed after being comfortable without it for a decade because of climate change. The ultra-rich have a larger fraction of wealth then we've seen at least since the era of robber barons. My daughter is trying to figure out where to go to college and I don't know what to tell her because I don't know what careers will exist after AI.

If you don't think the world is going through some shit right now, I don't know what to tell you.

You can feel how you feel and understand how and why people feel how they feel too.

Instead, reads like you're blaming the victim. Shoulda worked harder in school!