In the series, corporations get a bailout when things get bad, collude to make it worse with profits over people and then basically buy off world governments in a reverse bail out to take control of the system. With a “Corporate Congress” and all people having a “life debt”.
Oh, and the time travel aspect of it is pretty cool too.
The apes figured out how to make tools out of stone. They knew how to make fire and knew which plants they could and couldn’t eat. People today aren’t smarter than their ancestors because they have access to sophisticated tech.
A lot of people conflate “knowledge” and “intelligence.” Not the guy you replied to, they seem like a troll; but still, a lot of people.
Our ancestors had intelligence in spades. They figured out an insane amount of stuff just to survive; and it’s not too far back in the grand scheme of things that they had to remember it all because they had no way to record it. The first caveman to make a handaxe had absolutely no idea what he was doing, but they figured it out. Wheels, bows, fire, the entire concept of agriculture… They figured out how all of that worked from scratch, with no reference material.
Modern humanity builds on that with knowledge. We’ve figured out how to record everything our ancestors discovered, and all of our new discoveries as well. We’ve put men on the moon, figured out how to make electricity from things like waterfalls and glowing rocks, and almost everyone has a tiny computer in their pocket.
None of that means that we’re more intelligent now, though. All of that knowledge is iterative, so we’ve just been applying that same intelligence at a continually higher level throughout history.
The idea of “surviving” doesn’t even come into play in the evaluation of other species. Stupid as hell species survive for hundreds of thousands of years on Earth, that’s how conducive it is to life. You seem to have some unfounded civilized cavemen POV on our ancestors when really we’re still all apes + advanced language.
The dawn of civilization wasn’t us going from some lone person survival style steam game where we came into the world solo dolo in a pair of underwear.
Try this story about ‘intelligence’
https://ebookslib.org/sf/12898-eurema-s-dam.html