Bartering also assumes, for your example, that the apple farmer wants oranges and the orange farmer wants apples. Consider that either one may not. And then consider how many other goods exist even in primitive agrarian society that people may or may not want at any given time.

Currency is whatever the agreed vehicle is for value exchange that solves this. The apple farmer can now sell apples for silver nuggets and use the silver to buy tools from someone else later, which the orange farmer either doesn’t have or is unwilling to part with. It allows for more complex transactions that then helped grow more complex societies.

Executive dysfunction go brrr

Even back then, once the public support died down a bit they just had the NYPD bulldoze the whole thing. Since then the police have only gotten more brazenly violent against protests that are not in the establishment’s interests.

Shit will get “wild” when instead of picket signs and bullhorns, people start bringing rifles and pipe bombs. Otherwise the outcome of any meaningful protest will be the same no matter how many people show up: an unforgiving police crackdown.

AI’s most successful accomplishment is going to be its ability to parse the astronomical amounts of personal data corporations and governments have been collecting for the last 20 years. Enshittification and the identification, surveillance, and targeting of dissidents.