I’m deliberately going to keep my response limited to a couple of examples because the topic is a broad disturbing one that conjures up the worst dystopian visions and I want to avoid politics for obvious reasons.
Once I retired from full time practice, I taught part-time. I still do and enjoy it immensely. The students and faculty carried a heavy burden during Covid last year in trying to navigate what would be an ordinary day through work arounds involving lots of Zoom meetings. (It doesn’t have to be Zoom, it could be Team or any other platform of this type).
There was a disconnect on a fundamental level between what goes on via tele or video-cast in real time and what happens in the classroom with real people sitting in the seats.
By the peak of Covid, and particularly after a vicious cold snap down here that left us without power, heat, etc. (my faith in the Texas grid is not yet fully restored), the students had that 1,000 yard stare- like they had seen the horror of war and it changed them. At best, faculty could entertain questions from remote audience members, repeat the question for the benefit of the audience at large and attempt to answer it. But that was pretty much it. The interpersonal interaction of being in the same room was missing; something that almost always proved true in meetings v. telephone or video conferences. In person was better.
Are all in person interactions good? No.
But an advantage of the impersonal "you will view this video feed" is almost zero accountability. Information imparted, program over, full stop. Not just scripted but there is really no one there to talk to.
Ever talk to "customer service"? Like most else in the modern world, it means exactly the opposite of the term- these are the folks that fend off complaints with the aim of getting rid of your complaint with the minimum of cost to the company (and its personnel- I suspect that first tier customer service personnel get docked for even allowing a call with a supervisor in some places because the object is to avoid, not address, the problem that initiated the customer’s dissatisfaction, call for support, etc).
That to me, simply as a consumer, is where this is obviously heading; you won’t be able to converse with real people and get solid info, the parts you actually need or whatever other satisfaction is required, with a simply phone call. Except perhaps for the "bespoke" high dollar clients. Wanna rent a jet? Bet you can talk to a very nice human.
The rest, the impact on culture at large, how we humans interact as a species and the impact of what could be considered The Great Disconnect™ as a post-Covid function raises so many other questions that are fascinating but beyond the appropriate scope of this board as subject matter.
In some ways, in audio, we have it "good." A lot of the companies are smaller, and though dependent on the parts and supply chain, there is a person there, sometimes the actual designer/builder.
I know that in the past, this has been a generational thing where older people like me disdain what the world has become, and seem to prefer the old days with rose colored glasses firmly in place. At the same time, the youngins coming up say "You don’t get our experience so how can you judge" and I think they are correct in that.
I wonder, in the turning of epochs, whether people in the midst of them--while change is in flux --are more prone to this; to take that a step further, what if this process of change is really a constant state of flux so that people are always on one side or another of a divide in time/and the culture/thinking associated with it.
Most speculative fiction I’ve read doesn’t answer the harder questions -- instead, the stories usually revert to safe ground with villains, heroes and the usual tropes associated with thrillers and dramatic story telling. Reading about ancient civilizations-- ones that pre-date the Roman Empire for example, flourished and expired (and aren’t even on the list of attractions for tourists, they are simply forgotten unless one digs into history) seem to be a matter of course in the ancient world. I’m not sure if the "modern" world is different.
