Optimism vs. Pessimism: "Ready Player One"

I finally read Ready Player One and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I was and am bothered, however, by an oddness in the book.  The future it paints is far more bleak than hopeful, but there is a very real and strong optimism throughout.  The oddness is that, while the pessimistic side of the book seems real enough to be prescient: I wouldn't be surprised if a world like that exists several decades into the future (though I think/hope it is further off than in the book), the optimistic side is...well, another matter.

At one level the optimism is individual in nature and I very much share it.  In order for it to have a greater (global) presence, however, it relies on some institutional (governmental and corporate) footings that--in our real world--are already eroding, and even gone and which seem far more likely to be anachronisms in the future (in particular the absolute privacy enjoyed in OASIS).  It feels like a throwback to the 80's even more in this way: the characters are able to enjoy a level of privacy that was much closer to reality 30 years ago.

I hope I'm wrong, but as things are today, IOI is the reality we are going to face.  GSS--no matter how well intended people may be--is a fantasy.

Reading

I read and enjoyed the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson, which makes me want to read the Wheel of Time (I know, this is probably backwards for a lot of people, but meh).  I just saw that he has a new Mistborn novel.  Now I have to get up to date with A Song of Ice and Fire so I can read it.

Animal Farm

Generally taught as an anti-Communism book.  Orwell didn't necessarily see it as that simple:

...I did mean it to have a wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters. I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.

I'm not sure it doesn't even apply more broadly (i.e. to non-violent revolution).  I can see definite parallels to Obama's presidency, where he came in on Hope and Change and lots of people supported him as a major turning away from past policy and once he got into office he broadly adopted that past policy that many (most) of his supporters had been railing against.  More, when he did that, rather than immediately decry the behavior, most people just accepted it, and him.