Just ten years ago the people I would meet would have so many different things they’re into even if they’re in the same broader work or hobby group. Like we could all be into roasting coffee, and then we all have our unique individual interests.
Now people just discuss the stuff that’s trending on social media or other tools that aggregate data. They disregard the advice or inputs of people around them, preferring to get an answer from the collective recommendations. It seems to make people act and behave kind of the same, and honestly it’s kind of scary.
You could use the example of when the pandemic started and how literally everyone did the same things on the same timetable. It was like hey you're all into making bread right so everyone's making bread now and now everyone's bread people for some reason.
I would more rather blame working and lack of personal time. I think it's employment and overworking that is leading people to not know themselves not have any downtime to meditate on themselves and if they are doing these things they are doing it for image reasons rather than actually wanting to perform any sort of self-discovery. It's rare that anyone actually knows what kind of hobby they want to be into or what kind of thing that they want to do to fill time other than scroll this device in their hand.
The self-deception about reality of things (physical, emotional, civic, societal, etc) are in fact rewarded, they carry advantages to those who engage in it (implicitly or even explicitly). Empty activism, proper slogans, proper hate against the 'right' group of people, or pretend solidarity with the right people is what counts today. (As you say, we are scripted by social media). On the other hand, calling it out directly, or even voicing skepticism, or rejecting binary/hypocritical world views are punished (quite severely in many instances, no grant money, institutional shunning, etc). In other words, western way nowadays is to proceed on a moral/political plane such being wrong ideologically is a 'sin' of much severe kind than being factually wrong (reality error). Not realizing that being in error per se is not the danger, the danger lies in not allowing corrective feedbacks to reality. We are in a dangerous process of (collectively) sealing ourselves off from feed-backs to reality.
Has these processes ever been different in kind or only in degree for civilization at this phase of evolution?
At the same time Im not sure that this should be considered as a problem-and-solution issue. This is our culture at this point, it has been going on for quite some time, there is a large 'momentum' already gained. As I mentioned, even academia is for the most part infected by these parasitic processes (and academia is in-fact the very source of most of these trends-in-ideas. As I said, it is a convergence of interests, factors, and conditions, a natural process).
Taking a step back to this view for a larger field of view: ... has there ever been a different progress in evolution of civilization (from any starting conditions) than to totalitarian regime as the asymptote we move towards? [This is just a symptom - implicit or explicit mono-culture, the least variability of opinion. How did Christianity begin in Roman times and to which it evolved by ? How different are ideals of a rising peoples from poverty to prosperity and toward which they evolve? Another terms for this is borrowed from physics, unless one can export properly cultural/social entropy a given civilization in a given territory will 'undergo' a cycle. This is necessary as physics of life abhor fully correlated systems -- they are infinitely fragile (at the same time diversity has also several kinds -- variance in non-linear systems is not an absolute good). Of cause Im borrowing from physics for these analogies, but they give a notion of proper characteristics and constraints of a model of the world in which we live in. To be patient and bear each other's delusions without zealotry and fundamentalist attitudes).