Sorry I know somebody already kinda explained it but I’d like to weigh in on the concept. :)
All the cautionary sci-fi warned us dystopia would involve nanotech and cyber arms and robot overlords, flying cars, climate wars, mind-jacking hackers, a realistic meta-universe underlying our reality, militarized corporations, pizza delivery being one of the most dangerous jobs in America…
It seemed insane and over the top.
…Our reality is a “boring dystopia” because we have a lot of those hallmarks of that dystopian worldbuilding, but most advancements in technology aren’t even interesting, mainly because they’re immediately used to let bosses and corpos fill our lives with more dull drudgery and economic downslide.
…Tech is evolving rapidly even though societal advancement as a whole has perceptually stagnated.
It’s like living in 2008 forever, but there’s electric cars now, and computers read your emotions to sell your identity to advertisers and rat you out to your boss.
Computers are faster than ever but they’re used to consume the energy of a small country to generate make-believe speculative gambling currency or ugly monkey bitmaps, and now threaten creatives’ livlihoods or automate the scam industry.
It all boils down to it being harder to make a living and the rich keep adding zeroes to their net worths.
Our world is controlled by people so stupidly evil they make four-color comic-book villains look nuanced. And we don’t even get cool synthwave neon streets or rag-tag resistance cells who (effectively) fight back.
I think we all hoped that by the time it got that bad, we’d have some good folks with nano-augments or “L337 H4X1NG $k!115”…but we’re repeatedly crushed to the sound of our coworkers’ moaning “It is what it is. Ya do what you gotta do.” And we go back to work.