Our corporate/political overlords are only powerful because we give them power. If we just choosed to ignore them, I mean everyone, they would become utterly irrelevant. Of course thats the ideal. The vast majority would have to make the same decision. But thats all it would take, one decision, one refusal to obey. Unfortunately most people in this world are divided and consequently conquered and many more actually want to follow the rules.
That decision would have to be made simultaneously by the vast majority of the people, and they would have to fight for it. Those who currently hold our wealth captive won't give it up without bloodshed.
It kind of happened in the 60s and they got very very frightened, so much so that they introduced a piece of legislation, can't remember the name, which gives extra judicial powers to the army and police force in the event of widespread disobediance. It happened with Ghandi in a way too. If you have a few obeyers ie the army who don't think independently, just follow the orders of their political masters as this is their cognitive set up (I'm generalizing here), even so, if the vast majority just refuse to cow down, who is going win? Yes the majority will have to stand up and fight but the elites are nothing without people who recognize them as such. Therefore they need the populace to attribute that value to them. So genocide is unlikely as they would be killing the very people they need.
But aren't elites people like you and me? Yep, I don't think theres a big conspiracy against us, its a collective irrationality, the way this pyramid scheme is set up. But as we know many humans are profoundly irrational.
I think there may be a weak tenuous link between technology and human development. The internet allows freer dissemination of info, which means we're more interconnected than ever before. This could reduce the prospect of racism for example. Technology is a human construct, its part of evolution so its not unreasonable to suppose that it can affect it and with more sophisticated tech it may not be unreasonable to argue that it will lead to more sophisticated humans, ergo primitive authoritarian driven cultures as exemplified by politics, corporate syndicates and religion in many cases may die out.
The strength of capitalism resides in its flexibility owing to its own internal complexity as manifested in the markets. However an alternate social libertarian scheme would imo, be more in keeping with our nature as we are social empathic creatures as opposed to the pathological consumers we're indoctrinated to become. Such a system would be equally complex as it necessitates the dissolution of centralized authoritarian institutions.
The internet can be considered an expression of anarchism. No one has any real control yet. The emphasis being on yet as net neutrality is a serious issue. But the genie is out of the bottle so to speak. Even if corporations got their way with it, our net nerd heros could in theory set up alternative internets using the technology available to them. In fact all it would take would be for one company not to participate and offer the service we have now, thereby generating huge profits.
Ultimately there seems to be a major struggle between where we'r'e going and where we've come from. Authoritarian structures which worked in the past as we were evolving are conflicting with where we are now. This struggle will resolve itself as everything in nature tries to reach equilibrium.
