What's being described here lines up with what Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt warned about decades ago. Habermas, for instance, wrote about the "colonization of the lifeworld", where large systems eat into the small, everyday spaces in which people actually build meaning and trust. Arendt, likewise, warned about the fragility of such "space of appearance", where people gather, talk, and act together. The result is "alienation, loneliness, and cynicism or pessimism about the ability to influence future events".

(I really recommend reading Arendt especially regarding how these happen.)

This topic - autonomy - may sound unfamiliar, but it is the essence of democracy and should not be treated as separate from it. They are two sides of the same coin: autonomy is natural small-scale democracy, and democracy is institutionalized large-scale autonomy. While the notion of autonomy is nothing new, revitalizing it in the modern IT era is a bit of an emerging topic. At least that's how I see it.