Telecommunications have made EVERYONE better off. Previously people couldn't even coordinate with neighboring towns to figure out what they needed until they traveled there. A gold standard wasn't even needed except for trading with people you didn't know. The idea that undoing major tech advancements would make life better is COMPLETELY retarded. Technology generally empowers individuals & sets them free from their fellow man. While there are secondary effects that scale negative influences, direct and brutal slavery & most of the previously inescapable evils of individual tyrants are undone by technological progress. The major problem now is not that people don't have the capacity to say no to tyrants, it's just how many cowards & self loathing morons will work to destroy everything because they are too stupid to understand & appreciate what they have. You can set people free of others, but you can't set people free of themselves.
Discussion
If you think telecommunications didn't accelerate centralization and authoritarianism faster relative to overall human enrichment then you're out of your mind.
Also, you can't apply negative (or positive) traits to whole class of people by calling them all lazy and compliant to tyrants. You should make these judgements on individuals relative to humanity. A large enough group of people mostly has the same attributes as all of humanity. You're throwing shade on billions of people which is kind of anti-human.
History has been nothing but tribal wars, slavery, & grinding poverty for the overwhelming majority of history. Telecommunications & industrialization brought about the end of slavery & produced the greastest prosperity ever known. You can't whip a slave into doing skilled labor. The more skill & understanding is needed to produce things the more people have to learn to trade with one another if they want to be propersous.
Even fiat money, with all of its flaws, became dominant because the benefit of facilitating global trade was far more valuable to everyone involved than the costs.
I saw the below article in Odell's feed. It's very relevant and interesting. It doesn't take a hard position for or against what either of us are saying. It's long.
https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/after-the-state-the-coming-of-neo