It's WWIV and it may have started on 9/11/01, which I have started wondering might have been a proxy attack. Don't know but it seems possible. WWIII was the cold war with all its proxy battles.

Full scale hot wars between major powers have been too Pyrrhic a scenario even for the winner since the bomb, so now they are a mix of propaganda, espionage, proxies, terrorism, and economic warfare. The meme stuff you mention is just newer propaganda techniques. Terror is really another propaganda technique.

As others have noted in my OP I perhaps made it sound too conspiracy-ish and organized. There is surely a bit of that but it's mostly people behaving in a short sighted, selfish, and reactive way.

I don't think tech will collapse. I think as nature collapses we may grow more reliant on it. Space is on the table too. It's another place to go, and very strategically powerful.

This future looks a ton like cyberpunk. The prophecies of William Gibson continue to unfold.

It sucks in that there were and are much better options, but collectively I am not convinced humans are intelligent or conscious enough to override the brain stem yet and choose them.

Oh well time to go fry up some krill wafers and jack back into the matrix.