One of the beliefs of technology was that it's inherently decentralizing. McLuhan actually believed electricity itself was inherently decentralizing. Enabling things that once needed to be consolidated under some central control to become more dispersed, available to more people, enabling more people.

Generally, I think this is true. However, a plot twist on this occurred to me. 

Technology enables more power to the individual. Which enables single individuals to compete against larger collectives. Which enables a kind of consolidating around a novel set of centralizing controls. As not everyone ends up being able to wield technology to a comparable degree. Those few individuals who can wield it better end up with greater potential for reach, control and power.

Technology also disrupts the relevance of physical strength in power. Now someone manipulating the media, or economic systems, or who has access to highly accurate AI or predictive models can use that to effect geopolitics as much as an army.  Which is further disrupting to the collective because one of the threats of the larger collective is its greater threat of physical force.

Technology, while decentralizing of prior control structures may ultimately be centralizing under a new set of control structures that could be even more pervasive. 

Of course, people could just not let themselves be herded into this, but part of the complication of the new control structures is the media is a part of it. The media which dictates people's reality, and the lanes and constraints in which they feel it is appropriate to think. Technology enables a fewer set of people to broadcast messages, and dictate people's reality, with greater reach, precision and real-time analytics feedback than ever before. So, it's not even really possible for people to not be herded along because their framing and perspective on everything is being set up in such a way where they don't even know what else there is to do. 

Somewhere in the back of my mind I do still hope VR and Social VR is major antidote. Because the virtual face-to-face social interaction at a large, rapid, scale which it enables is so much harder to interject algorithmic control into to steer people's predispositions. But that could easily end up worse. Way way way worse. If you end up with people's biometric data being streamed up into some centralized AI to automate how to more precisely affect and control people. Which some people probably think is just nuts to presume will happen, but things are currently happening which 20 years ago would have had masses people settings thing on fire in the streets. 

One of them is the complete destruction of financial privacy. That in some manner, in some way, everything you do financially with technology can be watched or tracked or is being directly reported to government. If in 1995 the president came and announced everyone's bank account, and all wired transactions, would be under continual surveillance, people who would flip some serious shit. But they managed to gradually dissolve that so slowly that kids today don't even realize it happened and think it's supposed to be that way. 

So, when you come to the notion of feeding your biometric data into a big centralized corporate AI to validate thought processes that you aren't a volatile and potentially threatening individual. I fully believe that could be normalized over a number of decades. Where people just think, "What are you? A criminal? Why do you care so much that your biometrics are under surveillance? It's what keeps us all safe."