Part of it is that these grifts get built up and then everyone realizes they're utterly hollow. There's no real enforcement mechanism on "Give me 25% of your future salary for 30 years" other than just sending you to collections for some nebulously defined amount of cash.

So the actual virtual oppression that comes out of this is going to be driven by People Bank owning $10T in speculative human assets and going tits up because they have no idea how to collect. And then the state coming in to "fix the problem" of banks not being able to efficiently garnish your wages.

we need to get more imaginative and hungry and inventive and idk how to do that

I'm seeing a lot more unionization and general collective action in the wake of COVID. There's a degree of "overthinking" that goes on in certain Leftist circles, wherein we think we need to come up with a new branding or a new strategy, when the old strategies are proven tools that mostly just need enough people to use them in order to be effective.

Grifts, by contrast, are always doomed to fail. They bait collective action in order to betray it.