Carlin's actual view is a lot more nuanced than that. Big Tech (along with Walmart, Visa and more) have gotten to where they are by employing illegal business practices such as price discrimination and exclusive dealing. These tactics laid the groundwork for the mass mergers and rollups and the monopolies and oligopolies that dominate America today. The laws on the books which prohibit them, like Robinson-Patman and the Clayton Act, have gone largely unenforced since Reagan. Software sped up how quickly businesses can exploit these criminal tactics but this has become a problem across all sectors of the economy.
This shocking degree of negligence has required complicity from both political parties, but there's a deeper issue which is that this stuff is just too arcane to be linked meaningfully to a popular vote in today's democracy. We're talking about a nation where 1 in 5 people are now illiterate and that number is rising. There are two parties and a vanishingly small number of candidates presented to them every couple of years, meanwhile the media bombards them with a dozen supposed crises every day. This system is never going to produce a consensus that the most important priority is enforcing some law from 1914. Popular sentiment is more likely to be expressed through the rise of more guys like Luigi Mangione.
The ever-increasing flood of information (crises, as you call them) will, I believe, eventually become the downfall of our political system. There is already so much to read in a single day that you probably couldn't consume it all in your remaining lifetime if you tried. LLMs will only make this worse. Eventually, super-powers—whether political or economic—will send out so much misinformation about everything that no one can really follow it or distinguish truth from falsehood. People will simply stop participating in the global conversation, and their votes will become obsolete and guided by the most intruiging stories.
This shocking degree of negligence has required complicity from both political parties, but there's a deeper issue which is that this stuff is just too arcane to be linked meaningfully to a popular vote in today's democracy. We're talking about a nation where 1 in 5 people are now illiterate and that number is rising. There are two parties and a vanishingly small number of candidates presented to them every couple of years, meanwhile the media bombards them with a dozen supposed crises every day. This system is never going to produce a consensus that the most important priority is enforcing some law from 1914. Popular sentiment is more likely to be expressed through the rise of more guys like Luigi Mangione.