It's a sad story all round. I hope the world gets more decentralised, so that people get less caught up in the politics of others.
I can't remember the exact quote, about world war 1 or 2, but it was along the lines of "war is when people who don't know each other fight, for people who do know each other". Hits hard.
It's not looking too likely. You have Google's planned app developer verification, the UK's Online Safety Act, the EU's plans to interfere with E2EE, EU privacy rules causing sites to be riddled with popups, money laundering rules making banking increasingly more tedious, power concentrated in the hands of a few nation-state sized tech companies, countries becoming more authoritarian even in the West.
As an anecdotal example, I'm currently living/travelling between various EU countries, where a few years ago I would have expected a great deal of online freedom. Instead I now have to constantly change my VPN exit point to get around various restrictions depending on what site I'm using and what they have decided to block based on location.
If we can't even get these things right in the so-called free democracies of the West, what hope is there for the world in general? I'd like to be optimistic about this, but it's hard to find reasons to be.
