If your choices are more and more unregulated power in the hands of fewer and fewer or basically freezing further “progress” then anyone will take the latter choice.
I’m as progressive as I can imagine anyone being but I no longer have any faith that further innovation will help our world. I’m not in anyway disparaging the gains that humanity has made up to now. However if you are traveling
Dystopia A → In Between → Dystopia B
then there will always be some period where you have left the first dystopia behind and the second dystopia has not yet emerged.
Take advances in biology for instance. We have put some distance (though not nearly enough) between ourselves and the bad old days of starvation, infant mortality and rampaging disease. That’s progress. But further deregulated control of biology does not look so rosy.
If humans gain the ability to reprogram our genetics or create designer diseases then, currently, we don’t have any indication these new powers will be used for good. We were only a few Vasily Arkhipov short of nuclear annihilation and the jury is still out.
Its the same story for humanities use of oil — great progress but inability to regulate threatens the world. Financial innovation also seems to be suffering the same travel between dystopia pattern. Its great that you don’t have to be royalty to take a loan but not that deregulated inequality is threatening basic democracy.
Its not fun, sexy or likely to woo undecided voters but very tight regulation of nearly everything maybe our only chance at restoring hope. Nor does regulation have anything to do with so called “socialism”. I know it’s very popular to muddy the waters by conflating regulation with totalitarian government. The logic goes that regulation requires centralizing power and centralizing power results in dictatorship.
Bizarrely this is the same logic that causes so called “conservatives” to fail to conserve anything at all — including possibly even the survival of our species. I would argue that it is deregulated power that requires increasingly centralized control.
First you need centralized control to fund the research and innovation that gives people (or some people) the power to do what they want. Then you need centralized control to give access to enough of the world’s resources to make use of the breakthroughs that research and innovation produces. Finally you need very strong centralized control to let the people exercising that power continue to do so.
All of that control goes into producing drugs, weapons, cars, and oligarchs. To then turn around and claim that regulation won’t work is silly — it already is but only in the service of unlimited power.
Regulation will work but it won’t be fun. I don’t want to be conservative (in the true sense of the word). I’d much rather see all kinds of advances in my lifetime than spending our effort carefully controlling all research, industrial implementation and financial markets. Unfortunately it is TINA (there is no alternative) for the regulation that Thatcher claimed was wrong, if we want to avoid the ever looming dystopia B.
To a large extent the Ukraine war is about regulation. So called “sanctions” are really just regulations that should have been there all along. The free market idea that you don’t have to think about the governments you are funding when you buy a commodity has failed miserably. You do have to think about it and you have to have regulations that prevent helping a dictator invade a country. Everyone sees that now.
Unfortunately the same mechanisms are at play in all sectors of our economy. Unregulated anything eventually reaches its Ukraine, opioid, climate change, fake news, too big to fail, mass incarceration, George Floyd, etc. culmination.