Flame Boy Ant Pip

The United States has not recently "taken an us-versus-them turn" in its political discourse through natural evolution. Instead of being a natural & passing tide, the observed tribalization may be a synthetic behavioral-change strategy, actualized by surveillance-capitalist third parties working outside the spotlight. Does not each year of human suffering without changes in power provide us more evidence that our world is unfolding as Shoshana Zuboff outlined in "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" (2019)?

A pattern: "What appears as B versus C is, in fact, B subdivided into {B and C} or {B and C and D...}, such that the relationship becomes A versus (B versus C...), where A represents those who can modify behavior among members of the original B." The merging of GNU/free software with the fabricated "open source movement" – rather than the conflict itself being entirely fabricated–seems like an inverse variatant of the same con.

To what extent should we factor when modeling threats to free software currently neutral but possibly adversarial in future A's?