That blew my mind. We have so much sci-fi depicting the evil mega-corp that's it has become a trope, yet we're just lumbering along towards that exact future.
There's probably books on that exact topic published by them and only possible to legally consume by purchasing it from them and reading it on their hardware.
Why suppress the revolution when you can just sell the revolution in episodic form as escapism to be consumed from the safety of your own home.
There's an argument that progressive political comedy shows are actually detrimental because they give the viewer the feeling of having "solved" the problems presented by the mere act of watching. Instead of facing the problem directly and trying to do something about it, we consume the problem as entertainment in a small neat (time)box and can then just go on ignoring it.
There have been recent findings that support for BLM and its causes among "white allies" drastically rose throughout the protests but is now as low or even lower than before (and also corporations not following through with their promises of donating money towards relevant causes because it is no longer profitable for them to signal support). This would fit the same model: most white people who supported BLM only developed an awareness for the problems due to the protests and then supported the protests (and hashtag campaigns) but as soon as the protests were over and minimal reforms (including non-reforms that actually did the opposite, e.g. police funding bills) the problem was "solved" in their mind and they abandoned the movement and maybe even felt personally attacked by anyone claiming nothing had changed fundamentally.
Basically we all see ourselves as the main character and don't think boring (i.e. systemic) problems will affect us. I'm not going to die from COVID like the rest because I'm special -- I'll die in an important way when it's narratively convenient, not like an extra killed off in act one to establish the stakes. Evil mega corps won't creep up on me, they'll introduce themselves spectacularly in a way that directly challenges me personally in a way that still allows me to defeat them and complete my hero's journey.
Maybe I'm in the minority but I definitely see the rise of mega corps as directly affecting me. They funnel obscene amount of wealth and resources(and thus political power) to a few individuals, lessening my democratic impact; they aren't beholden to any particular community and thus often are worse for workers and demonstrate worse negative externalities (such as environmentally); and so on...
The thing is I just feel helpless to do much about it. I can shop locally, but that feels pretty insignificant. Lately it's not even useful to vote any particular way (in the US), since it seems bigcorps have essentially captured both major parties.
Oh, it's absolutely affecting everyone. It just does it in a way that feels too trivial and non-dramatic to be a genuine threat to "the main character". Quoth Thanos, "I don't even know who you are" -- except unlike Thanos it's a faceless megacorp and every single person you ever interact with is an underpaid contractor working for a sub-subcontractor you likely never even heard of.
We understand individual problems ("I have cancer", "I lost my job", "My car broke down") intuitively. Systemic problems (pandemics, climate change, capitalism) not so much. Plus we've spent over a century increasingly framing every systemic problem as an individual problem and training us to think only of individual solutions ("boycott Amazon", "buy organic", "take shorter showers" -- note how many of these are explicitly about individual consumption rather than active collaboration).
