At the EU council, the Italian representatives come one day and say: we have definitive proof that Romans were the most advanced civilization that ever lived! We have dug 20 meters under the current soil level and found copper, obvious proof that they had mastered DSL internet!
Next year, the same forum, a Frenchman comes up and declares: we have discovered evidence showing conclusively that the Galls had the most advanced early culture! We dug for 30 meters and found glass, so they had already mastered fiber glass-based internet!
One more year afterwards, the Romanian representative comes out and explains: previous claims by my colleagues have been investigated and found false. It was in fact the Dacians that the most advanced internet of the ancient world: we have dug for 20 meters, 30 meters, even 40 meters, and everywhere found nothing at all - uncontroversial proof that they had already mastered wireless communication!
What if there was no hierarchy in this proposed civilization? Or what if they developed the means to encode civilization-wide access rights to every object they handled by saying “the nth crystalline molecule from the top (read right-to-left) has your signature flaw embedded in it?”
We have no way of detecting that with our current tech level, and even if we could trivially detect the crystalline flaws it doesn’t mean we’d see or comprehend the scheme they employed. Working with a tech model that we understand (well, some of us, not including me), if you handed a hard drive to a Roman emperor and told them what it held, they wouldn’t be able to do anything with it or even examine it non-destructively even if they put the whole of the empire to the task.
Ain’t trying to say that it existed. I do like the remark in one of the Culture series that says technology is more like a rock face than a line: different sequences of discoveries lie along the path that a particular civilization travels. There’s lots of room for surprise, whether discussing ancient, contemporary, or future civilizations.
What to do about the rat-race/treadmill?
Of course artificial scarcity by ubiquitous DRM embedded at quantum-level in absolutely everything!
Which after a while of missed payments self-destroys into ecologically safe mono-fractions.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, gone with the wind...
edit: or instead of missed payment a simple countdown/timeout, because why have old things at all?