We are hardwired for illusion

[Magical Realist]

Think about it. Would humans evolve the capacity as a species to perceive and know reality when it does not serve us in any way? If it should be something we should pursue for itself and not God forbid for some practical function or use to us? Wouldn't it be far easier to only think we know and to act on this fictional model or worldview in order to optimize our survival and reproductive success? Assuming an illusion can be just as survival-enhancing if not even moreso than knowing reality can be.

Societies evolved to remove the natural constraints of survival. To enhance reproduceability at the expense of individuality and consciousness itself. We don't need to hunt for prey or fight for mates or survive the harsh elements like we once did. Society's imperative is to just keep us minimally functional as members of itself, never acquiring any more knowledge of reality than what it is necessary to meet this standard. The creative quasi-experiential human is selected out of existence. It is the average and compliant and idle that typifies us today. Serve the system complacently and all your needs and comforts will be provided. Embrace this illusion of dead inanimate objects--of relics--of junk all around you. You yourself are nothing more than a mass-produced replicant, barely distinguishable from millions of others like a drone bee, drifting along on the hardwired program of living only for whatever saves us time and effort and thinking and keeps us amused.. Of what keeps us sleepy and robotic and barely awake. Of nothing even real anymore--a delirium of trite fantasies and distractions and rote gadgetry.

Then one day--the impossible happens. Something unexplainable that comes from left field and exposes the illusion we have all bought into. A stage light falls from the sky. A black cat walks past a door twice. A top keeps on spinning. "This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife." And we begin to wake up inside of the hive paradise. If we don't go mad from all the buzzing, from the ontological shock of nothing being real, we start to break out of the cocoon, and the fat lazy larva emerges as a miraculous butterfly. And inside the butterfly throbs "a signal from a star".

[C C]

[...] Societies evolved to remove the natural constraints of survival. To enhance reproduceability at the expense of individuality and consciousness itself. We don't need to hunt for prey or fight for mates or survive the harsh elements like we once did. Society's imperative is to just keep us minimally functional as members of itself, never acquiring any more knowledge of reality than what it is necessary to meet this standard. The creative quasi-experiential human is selected out of existence. It is the average and compliant and idle that typifies us today. Serve the system complacently and all your needs and comforts will be provided. [...]

Since governments themselves are worried enough about when The Machine Stops to initiate seed banks (etc), there should be extended focus and concern in maintaining almost wholly self-supporting plain people communities. To ensure a better chance of human survival (the shuffling zombies in the womb of the Machine won't make it).

While traditional population groups of plain people are prospering on their own (like the Amish), the current ones are increasingly compromised by incrementally accepting non-primitive technology and increasing dependence on factory goods produced especially for them. IOW, getting closer and closer to mimicking why it is unlikely that the typical off-grid families of survivalist culture would really last long-term, because most of the latter are actually reliant on industrial products that facilitate their lifestyle.

An ethical drawback of founding such new communities is that they will likewise require ideological beliefs to coax their members to remain in low-tech conditions -- either religious or politically collectivist doctrines.

Pessimistically, they would be vulnerable to the hordes of starving city dwellers descending upon them. Placing the communities in remote, shielded areas might help, but those spots would also be short of good farming land and water sources. Ultimately, it might require societies technologically regressing all the way back to original indigenous societies to survive. But there's no ideology that could coax people to voluntarily sacrifice to that level. Even most current Native Americans (now long pampered by Western developments) would be horrified of being a resident in a centuries spanning safeguard of that level.

[Magical Realist]

Finally, the Machine collapses, bringing 'civilization' down with it. Kuno comes to Vashti's ruined room. Before they both perish, they realise that humanity and its connection to the natural world are what truly matters, and that it will fall to the surface-dwellers who still exist to rebuild the human race and to prevent the mistake of the Machine from being repeated.

Not really that far off in terms of becoming real someday. We are all so dependent on this thing called the power grid that even brief outages quickly become crisis level disasters for millions of people.
A weapon like an electromagnetic pulse bomb could one day take out all sorts of technologies we daily rely on-- cars, computers, planes, TVs, cellphones, gas pumps, security systems, ATMs, anything with a micro chip that can be short-circuited by the wave of high EMF.. (see Hulu/ABC series "Paradise"). The whole Machine grinding to a halt in a matter of moments. The fat lazy larvas flopping and twitching around like the helpless and atrophied parasites they really are.

Tks for introducing me to this novel. Truly uncannily prescient of today's age of mass online disembodiment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoPzYnt0JkQ