We’ve had inequality throughout history it’s not unique to 2021.
I'm not "trying hard to be woke" and I'm not missing the point. I've been through this whole techno-utopia, all the way to the end, and without fail technology has its blind adherents whose overconfident pronouncements mean the rest of us have to eat the dust of this never-ending rollercoaster ride. I've been around long enough to tell you exactly what is in store for you. Future shock. Long years of struggling as every skill you have is rendered utterly obsolete by change; every fond memory of places and people you knew is chewed up and spit out by change, and the world, the physical world--how it works, how you go about life, will keep changing and changing and changing, and you'll end up old, surrounded by kids who literally have no memory of the past, who cannot understand your pining for a walk in the forests obliterated to put in a subdivision, for empty fields overrun by this--this technology. And yeah, it's technology. It's all technology. It's a machine eating all of us up.
Technology is not just some nicer drugs and cancer treatments. Technology is our entire society revolutionizing itself because we have made change itself our only value. Technology is a helpless 80 year old person who can't do damn thing because their dead-simple phone has been replaced with some new-fangled machine that they simply cannot comprehend, and shouldn't have to.
And yeah, that's great technology has improved so many billions of lives. But the number of people on this Earth has doubled in my lifetime. It's crowded. And I don't know most of these people. But their waste products are all over this planet, not just in the air. You'll find out. Have fun until those kids grow up and revolutionize the world you like to be some dumb arcade.
Inequality is essential to the idea of social progress so if it's exacerbated in degree, it challenges the idea that we have progressed whatsoever.
In the case of the 20th century there was a brief period where we developed a large middle class, and then post-1971 ended losing much of our gains in equity-per-capita along with stagnant wages. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Many luxuries have become cheaper, which raises the overall standard of living for those people integrated into the global economy (a large number to be sure, still dwarfed by the number of people that need to be lifted out of poverty).
But as seen on that first chart in the link above, the ability to capture the wealth of the economy on a whole has diminished for the individual (without resorting to measures that exacerbate inequality further, like inheritances or usury). In the long-run this reverses many of the gains made in having a middle class.
