Maybe they got sucked into the cool tech?

I remember my first pass reading of Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Diamond Age, I was bedazzled by some of the tech … it was later readings that the comments like “biomass” (the recent echo in AI “meat proxy”), or how the Primer was ultimately a failure sank in later readings.

Heck, we're living Idiocracy right now.

It's basically the Torment Nexus meme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus

... but I guess some people took this as positive reinforcement.