It depends how large your definition of "cabal" is. There are plenty of corporations who are misaligned with societal positives, consisting of people individually acting in the interest of the corporation as part of their day jobs. When your job's long term success requires helping your company get an edge over the competition and you're willing to be expedient with long term thinking, in aggregate bad things can happen.

It's something of a mix of both - the world is a web of cabals executing conspiracies but simultaneously most people are so bad at systems thinking that they can't identify the conspiracies from people acting individually in their own interests.

For example, in this instance the fall of the web to commercial interests is more or less inevitable if you look at the basics, regardless of conspiracies (people getting paid produce more & better quality stuff than people making a hobby of it). But if you look at the execution of that dynamic there are always going to be small highly motivated groups of people trying to achieve specific goals on the sly.

It is unusual for any individual cabal to be powerful enough to control a situation.

It's still not a conspiracy. Those are all local responses to incentives. The incentive structure, the system, is what determines the outcome, not the players.

In a basketball game who wins may vary but you know balls will go through hoops because that's what the rule set of the game incentivizes.

Investors want returns so number must go up. Eventually companies and their executives exhaust the basic honest core business so they have to start scraping for more revenue growth. Eventually this leads to the familiar process of enshittification where the company flips the script and sells the customers as the product and nickel and dimes people. This eventually ruins the product but number must still go up, so who else can pay? Criminals, scammers, government propagandists, political influence operations, intelligence agencies, militaries, etc.

We get what I just described for the same reason basketball makes balls go through hoops.

Why does number have to go up? Because you want to retire. Your pension funds and banks and such hire financial experts to invest. Those experts invest in things that make number go up because that's their job.

That's why this is hard. You are a player. We are all both hurt by the system and benefit by the system. It feeds us and protects us and enslaves us. Everything is paradoxes and feedback loops. When you get a job you want things like benefits and union wages, but when you go shopping you pick the cheapest product which means you want to break unions.

Conspiracism is a cop out from trying to understand this. It's easier to just pick a single scapegoat (often a make believe one) and blame them.

I'm not saying all the people in all the links you posted are great people, just that they're not the architect of this. There is no architect. The game was designed by the mad blind idiot gods of complexity and evolution.

I've had the thesis for a long time that humans are not actually intelligent. We are merely clever. A clever organism can deploy local intelligence to maximize its outcome in a game. A truly intelligent organism would understand the game and become the architect. We might not have the cognitive capacity for this. Maybe ASI can, or can help us.

Maybe that's why the aliens aren't talking to us. Anyone capable of star travel is the latter. They take a look and think "interesting fauna down there but nothing intelligent yet. They only try to win games."

I don't think the stuff the GP is describing was made by a cabal. But yeah, it's undeniable that there is a cabal controlling tech.