History is not linear and all previous human civilizations are now relegated to the dustbin of history. It turns out that treating people like replaceable cogs in a global economic resource extraction machine is not a good way to organize society so these numbers are completely unsurprising.
I've personally checked out of the entire deal. There is nothing I can do that will make things any better at this point. Whatever job I can sign up for feeds into the machine that is destroying the biosphere so I've decided to not do that, it's pretty simple. It's not even about stress anymore, it's just the fact that most people are greedy assholes and couldn't care less about anything other than their own comfort and well-being.
Consider your day-to-day activities and then ponder whether your participation in the global apparatus is a net positive. You'll likely discover that it's not but you'll carry on doing what you're doing anyway because there are no other options. So if things keep going the way they are then the inevitable outcome is ecological and civilizational collapse. Most of the signs are all there but people just refuse to look at them [0][1][2].
How did you acquire the financial independence to "check out"? You'd need a farm, several solar/wind generators and backups and a way to pay for internet, surely?
It would be better to analyze what is broken about the current platforms before thinking about the ideal one. Current platforms are broken because they're centralized and motivated by profit. This means the mechanics of the platforms are designed to maximize profits at the expense of everything else. So the ideal platform must be a non-profit. If the new platform is still a business that must make money for its shareholders then it will inevitably end up in the same place as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram full of political grifters and scam artists.
Elon keeps saying that his goal is to make Twitter the source of truthful information but it's pretty obvious that the biggest cheerleaders on Twitter are not interested in truth, they're mostly interested in increasing their clout among the Twitterati. I guess that's another thing every good social media platform should try to avoid, constant navel gazing and meta-analysis of the platform itself because the goal should be to help people discover useful information instead of gaining followers and clout by meta-analysis of what is happening on the platform itself.
This is highly unlikely. The universe is a big place with an unfathomable number of habitable planets and full of materials necessary for life. The real sci-fi scenario is that our sector of the universe has been firewalled by more advanced civilizations until we figure out how not to kill each other.
I'm not sure if someone has discussed the firewall scenario before but I'm pretty sure I lifted it from somewhere, just can't remember where exactly. So someone out there has considered it seriously and if I was gonna bet on anything then I'd bet on the firewall scenario. The other options are a little too self-centered and are basically replacements for the geocentric model of the universe before people wised up and discovered that they were in fact not the center of the universe.
It's somewhat childish and conceited to think that in the entire universe humanity is the only civilization that has managed to set its sights on the stars.
It is a known hypothetical scenario I believe, and not too unrealistic, as far as I am concerned.
Still, the dark forest theory, which I first encountered through the book by the same name, is by far the most convincing I have ever read. I don't want to spoil anything in case you want to read the trilogy by Liu Cixin, which I can highly recommend. It might be the best work of science fiction since the culture series by Ian M. Banks imho.
Motivated thinking is a hell of a drug. The folks that thought bitcoin was going to usher in an ideal libertarian age of commerce did not understand the technology but simply wanted to use it as a wedge against the existing "elite" political structure. So they overpromised on crypto's potential and underdelivered.
The reality is always more complicated and it turns out people didn't much care about the political aspects and simply wanted to gamble. Turns out that gambling is not enough to sustain the ecosystem and so now it's all crashing down.
I've personally checked out of the entire deal. There is nothing I can do that will make things any better at this point. Whatever job I can sign up for feeds into the machine that is destroying the biosphere so I've decided to not do that, it's pretty simple. It's not even about stress anymore, it's just the fact that most people are greedy assholes and couldn't care less about anything other than their own comfort and well-being.
Consider your day-to-day activities and then ponder whether your participation in the global apparatus is a net positive. You'll likely discover that it's not but you'll carry on doing what you're doing anyway because there are no other options. So if things keep going the way they are then the inevitable outcome is ecological and civilizational collapse. Most of the signs are all there but people just refuse to look at them [0][1][2].
0: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
1: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
2: https://climate.nasa.gov/images-of-change/?id=809#809-dusty-...