Think about modeling phenomena, modeling situations, simulating models, gaining a common-sense intuition for nonlinear dynamic processes. Then think about a society in which every educated person does these things, in the computational medium, as easily and naturally as we today read and write complex logical arguments in the written medium.
Reading used to be reserved for the clergy, to hand down unquestionable Revealed Truths to the masses. Today, it's just what everyone does. Think about a society in which science is not reserved for the clergy, to hand down unquestionable Revealed Truths to the masses, but is just what everyone does.
Next, from a post on the Dark Futurology subreddit I learned about philosopher Nick Land, whose writing is almost incomprehensible. From Meltdown:
Capital-history's machinic spine is coded, axiomatized, and diagrammed, by a disequilibrium technoscience of irreversible, indeterministic, and increasingly nonlinear processes, associated sucessively with thermotechnics, signaletics, cybernetics, complex systems dynamics, and artificial life. Modernity marks itself out as hot culture, captured by a spiralling involvement with entropy deviations camouflaging an invasion from the future, launched back out of terminated security against everything that inhibits the meltdown process.
If I read his stuff carefully, I think he's actually saying something, but he's deliberately making it hard to read, and if he made it easy to read it would be easier to see where he's wrong.
And a techno-design movie review, Why Her Will Dominate UI Design Even More Than Minority Report. The idea is, instead of technology being all in your face, it will "fade into the background" and the world will look superfically low-tech.
He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.
Now the state must either ignore the example of living the truth, or crush it. But crushing it just drives it underground, where eventually it reaches a critical mass and drives sudden changes that seem to come out of nowhere: "The Prague Spring wasn't the birth of something promising that was then cut down, but the above-ground blooming of something that continues to flourish underground."
How can we apply these insights to America, or to global technological civilization in general? This is a hard question and I'm leaving it open. But I will suggest how to frame it. The question is not what the system forces us to do that we hate, but what we feel like we should be doing, and not doing it feels both dangerous and liberating.