Correct me if I'm wrong
You've asked for it now.
-lords and vassals ruling over the dumb, impoverished workers who serve no other purpose but to work
So what, like bosses or the government?
How do you expect a world without the clever leading the dumb to work without something like technology to take over the dumb's place? This is a human nature point that isn't meant to go away, as without it we'd not be such a group oriented species.
-control our water, food, medicine, safety
Considering, they're doing a damn good job.
I'd mostly update their food storage practices, and how much the FDA is a racket.
-“off with their head” cancel culture (cancel culture) by media
This isn't about an age, this has always been people.
What makes it different than ever before though? THE SHEER SPEED OF IT. Beyond that it's more about how people are modeling off of each other more now instead of off of their newspapers, magazines, and tv shows.
-news and media gossip
You expect a future era with less of it?
I'd actually say these signs are less "Dark Ages" and more modern in it's current form. This is the kind of shit Hitler must have seen in his head when he first saw the television.
-high levels of Christianity, Catholicism, lutheranism, baptism, etc.
It's lower than ever, and other religions are filling in the spaces (Paganism, Wicca, Buddhism, Pastafarianism, etc). Atheism's period of trending has otherwise been overlapped heavily with strong agnostic themes, and Existentialism is slowly catching on in the public sphere every year.
a large portion of society centered around god, the Bible, churches- however they dont’ actually *read* the Bible a lot of the time (in medieval days, people didn’t have access to bibles, just the lords did. So they could tell them do whatever they wanted and they’d do it as if it was scripture.)
This goes back to people inherently just wanting to know what they're "supposed" to do, like the bosses point above.
-politics and religion still mixing to this day. Nothings changed.
It's phasing out, mostly kept intact from threats made by the religious right.
-the bubonic plague (cov-19)
It's a dark plague every 100 years. That doesn't make this the dark ages, it makes it a centennial event.
-we never have any idea whats really going on with our governments, they’re always fighting with each other and making all sorts of deals but most of us hardly pay any attention.
We're supposed to not trust our government so that we can fear them. If they tried to look friendly, they'd look weak and approachable, and therefor able to be replaced.
Look at the party system, a third party is believed to be impossible through the two main parties working together to keep it that way. A two party system is the most efficient method of controlling the people from it immediately building an us vs them scenario with no other options, and plays perfectly into the Cult of Personality we've found ourselves wrapped into.
We however are also in an age where information flows much more freely than before, even incorrect information. As such, even with governments trying to control their people there's likely a means of finding the information elsewhere in the world being reported on in a different light.
Basically, we do have some idea what's going on with our government, but how much easier they are to figure out has them try harder to make people not want to learn about it for easier leading.
We've been raised through our food, media, and article clippings, to be too impatient to take over high ranking positions and just follow others who've found themselves there. It's always been this way, but we're speeding it up and making it more blatant.
To get real information you really have to dig for it, and, there are still a lot of secrets and interpersonal complications between governmental systems we don’t know about.
You don't even know if the info you ever find is "real" or simply "believable", that's the shroud of the modern era.
It's no longer about omission, but rather a barrage of differing versions making for a confusing end product.
If you really want to see who is and isn't in charge, see where the money is and who they're connected to/who their subsidiaries are. You can basically predict likely outcomes of a corporate scale by seeing their partnerships and who's the bigger fish.
For instance, the bottling industry is probably one of the strongest business components through how many other businesses they've found themselves bartering with, and hilariously enough it's illegal to do things like gather rainwater for drinking. The food industry in general's kind of a mindfuck, and they have strong political weight when it comes to US status quo.
-brothels and prostitutes
"The Oldest Profession", although we've now streamlined it towards pornographic content.
We're more of a voyeur culture than anything really.
-if you have nothing to offer large corporations, you’re useless in society and will likely be average or less than average socioeconomic status wise, and financially. with a few given exceptions of musicians.
People used to have more use before the internet streamlined the talent into a buzzword search. People are more replaceable now than ever, which would seem like a dangerous thing, high turnover rates, when it comes to job security.
It is, but once technology takes over all of our jobs we're going to have to radically redevelop what it means to be human, how society works, etc. Where we are now is largely a transitional stage that's trying to not go too deeply into this new world all at once, over a variety of risk fears.
-people dress dull and boring most of the time, except the extremely wealthy
Uh... people are designing their own clothes a lot more now than before, or they hire someone to make it for them. With things like eBay as well, and with many cheap alternatives to those clothes being made, you can look like almost anything at any income level within your price bracket, as how we dress now is more about individual expression.
Clothing has largely become a matter of self-advertising, and the absurdity of it's gone towards advertisement tattoos as rental space.
does none of this ring a bell to you (references history books)
You're heavily generalizing, and it's a boring point. You'd find cooler info reading science fiction novelists from former decades that inspired technology we otherwise have in the real world now.
TLDR: Times are different over how old needs are handled.
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