A resource-driven society where technological advancements allow humans to offset work with newer innovations.
Or a financially-driven society where technological advancements put humans into unemployment and make a few guys at the very top extremely wealthy.
I'm not saying get rid of corporations. I'm saying we don't need them. They fight to maintain the status quo.
Blaming corporations does nothing. Trying to FIX corporations, yes. Trying to REMOVE them is ignorant and short-sighted.
From this springs every horror and alienation in the 20th century pop culture.
Upside: it's a passing technological phase, and we're nearly all the way through.
People like everything but fair and detailed reporting. News reflects this. Same with culture. People like buying vast amounts of worthless things. It doesn't matter what field it's in. Geeks collect as much as rifle hunters, they just collect different things. That's led to an industry that specializes in creating excess.
I say it's a passing phase because where tech is headed is: auto-generated completely personal everything. The limit of "the few" is "the one", and the mass production dynamic breaks down at that limit.
The problem with that concept is that it assumes we know exactly what it is that we like, and that it's easy to communicate that. Neither assumption is correct. As we learn, we constantly adjust what we like, at a fairly extreme rate, and it tends to be impossible to express in any way other than the extremely specific.
My prediction is that the United States won't stick around for too long (if you take a history textbook perspective on this, which you can see other failed societies have made the same mistakes that we are now repeating).
I think we have a fighting chance to create the desirable society that eliminates corporatocracy. Did you know the planet contains 13,000 zettajoules of geothermal energy? The entire world uses 0.5 zettajoules of energy per year. And we can harvest this, but there are patent wars to suppress this from easily happening.
Let's look at the other resources available, which cost us nothing at all. Wind? 3 states of wind energy can power the entire United States. Water? The UK alone could be powered by water/tide energy alone. Solar? One hour of thermal energy in the day could power the United States for an entire year if we harvested it properly.
Travel by plane? Who does that when you could travel by AT3's mag-lev trains, which can reach speeds up to 4,000 MPH with zero moving parts and zero emissions. Oh, and it uses about 10% of the energy of an airplane. Yes, they work in land and water.
What happens when technology replaces humans? You no longer need to work. In our capitalistic society, it's called unemployment. If you look into the Venus Project, it's called you get bored and start thinking about space exploration.
Once people figure out that we don't really need these corporations, we'll never have this type of problem come up again. The corporations are holding us back and creating scarcity (real or perceived) at every opportunity. Like I said, I don't think the United States is going to get it right, we're in far too deep over our heads. And the attitudes and apathy of the American people never ceases to amaze me (in a bad way) as an undergraduate.