”lets just see what happens"

Not even "further". They are driving to as many splits as possible, as opposed to ideological differences.

Difference is good, because two different systems can, eh, have kids. One can disassemble them, mix them, see how it works, make thought experiments, discuss again and again. A split doesn't involve the kids making process.

A split is different from a discussion in the sense that you use a prepared set of shibbolets to tell friend from foe, not leaving any room for synthesis.

When you have that split mentality, you punish attempts at discussion by others by interpreting it always as the biggest split possible, - as if it were worse than actually being a foe applying the same split approach, just like you.

Totalitarian societies usually poison and punish and implicitly tax discussion, but they are always welcoming to splits. And that split mentality endures far longer than the original totalitarian regime, usually. Look at Germans, not the eastern ones, but all of them, - their political and group thinking still reminisces Nazi propaganda. Israel and Palestine are one good example, but this can be seen in many other things.

Which is also why I don't entirely align with the idea of "new middle ages". The mechanisms we are seeing are from 1930s, not 1330s and not even 1630s.

Nazis were a bunch of tough but dumb veterans and their conservative sponsors, doing things the way obvious for these groups.

Bolsheviks were a bunch of thieves and college dropouts and their small-noble and intelligentsia sympathizers, doing things the ways obvious for them (that crappy Soviet elitism existed because the sympathizer layer wanted some sort of Plato's state with a "better" subset of society, ya knaw, the right kind of professors, the right kind of poets, the right kind of journalists, necessarily social sciences as you see, teaching everyone else to live (if you've read "Heart of a dog", professor Preobrazhensky is very clearly that, he's not a positive character in any way, he's one of those people who liked social inequality, just felt markets are a wrong way to decide who is where in the hierarchy), and ex-Soviet societies still are divided into "the popular Bolshevik" view of taking everything from the "enemies of the people" and dividing it as the main solution to every problem, and "the elitist Bolshevik" view of "the wrong people that can't be allowed to make democratic decisions", the funniest part is that these mostly intersect in the same people, these are two sides of the same coin). They too did things the was obvious for these groups. By the way, thieves and murderers are usually the same kind of personality, and failures tend to use power they have to take revenge, and intelligentsia of the described kind.

These modern idiots are a bunch of piss-smelling mommy's cheats like Zuckerberg or Bezos who managed to capture a new industry, and their (kinda elitist) professor-cultured predecessors who think that the treatment of the industry that allowed mommy's cheats to do that should be maintained, and all of them willingly reinforcing the hierarchy of them, a relatively small group of "founders and visionaries", deciding where it'll go, but I beg your pardon, there's no technical reason for any decisions to depend on what they want. I'm certain most of these people are actually not technically more competent or understanding of the domain areas than many other people who've never were anywhere close to that "Silicon Valley society".

But still all of them used different, but similar in effects and covered areas, means of propaganda. Eh, I think I've recently seen a wonderful article about various ways in which human psyche adapts for totalitarianism and abuse, except I suspect it was in Russian.

So - IMHO one can draw an analogy between early USSR with Bolsheviks like Stalin (the thief kind) and Bolsheviks like Lenin (the elitist intelligentsia kind) and the tech industry, where Zuckerberg, Brin and Bezos would be like the former, while Linus Torvalds, big people of Microsoft, and so on - all very different people, it's about culture of the resulting "elite", - would be the latter. But combined together, as some community with a vision of the future, they are pigs. They look at the world as if it were their place to decide what it will be.

So all I have to say is - in the last ~30 years we have evolved paternalism of a very harmful kind, combined with the split mentality, combined with a structure where paternalists are in power in a hierarchical system. It doesn't matter that those paternalists employ anti-paternalist slogans and say anti-paternalist words. What matters is what they do.

In any case - in 2012 the former group were in appearances very "liberal", now they are the opposite thing, and some known FOSS personalities have more right-wing views than you'd expect from their public appearances (which are very liberal). But all this doesn't matter.

What matters is that for a sane discussion about politics, for example, you should have participants equally ready to accept ancap, fascism, ancom, Confucian monarchy, Buddhist theocracy, direct democracy for every decision, Trotskyist Soviet system (no professional state bureaucrats, all state apparatus roles are filled with random citizens elected\sortitioned by councils, perpetually rotated, no professional military commanders\sergeants, the same thing, and the problem of expertise is solved by good enough common education), I can go on.

Point is that you don't get into an argument in order to tell friend from foe, you get into an argument to synthesize something new and wonderful. An argument is like a blind date. Why the hell even spend your time on telling friends from foes, unless you are taking notes for a very big kill list, but that wouldn't be good faith behavior.

So if you think something, you might think differently after the argument.

Except this good faith behavior I described is dangerous when there are a lot of cowards in the society and the legal protections don't work (you sort of irritate people who'd like a hierarchical society with non-transparent concentrated power, because power is concentrated by groups, and those groups accept new people of their kind, and thus such people have a chance of getting a piece of that power and don't like you dogfooding mechanisms for preventing such a system).