Https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0......lisation

Our world is strange and often fake and corrupt. But we think it’s normal because we can’t see anything else. HyperNormalisation - the story of how we got here.

Our New York friends might find the first few minutes interesting.

I would have excluded the word 'often'...

It seems like I can't access it here in the US. But I did take a look at the trailer and some of the comments.

If it's what I think it is, it's the sort of thing which is interesting and flashy, but misses the point. Those are the more interesting symptoms but not the cause. The one essential truth about the world:

The entire world is organized under the same economic system (yes, including the "socialist" ones which must compete in the world market for resources), and that fact has material and spiritual consequences. Follow that thread, and see where it leads you. Otherwise you're just dazzled at the weird epiphenonmena, and missing what's at the root.

Without the latter, there can be no attempt at a real solution--then it just becomes a spectator sport. Which is okay if you can afford it.

Script perhaps

https://www.scripts.com/script/hypernormalisation_10432

Skip down to New York 1975 and see the bit about how the bankers took control of your city.

A story as old as Plato's cave.

Yes, Plato talked about the Guardians, the Elite, the Aristocracy and the its.

Big Data is participating
https://www.apple.com/covid19/mobility

We've been in what Umbert Eco called Hyperrealtity for quite a while now - since television offered idealized life in Leave it to Beaver, Hazel, ... and social satire started leaking out of comedy into our accepted language. In the words of the immortal Bart, "I didn't do it".

It's not all bad. Our language managed to adopt "ain't", enjoy William Carlos Williams' poems about the number five and the red wheel barrow, and start exploring emoji. We're moving along.

It reminds me of our magic, where people go along with the patter, the fictional nonsense, for their amusement, knowing it is not true and they are then thrown into a dilemma by the facts of magic proving it true.