Here in Portugal the legal requirement is 1€ for an LLC (lda) and it took me a few hundred euros in fees only, all in morning to take care of everything.
And I'd argue that an important colour to make this work is black. By this I mean that only information that needs to be displayed is displayed (in all the colours you listed). Everything else is omitted.
I don't hate putting a lot of blame on social media, just as much as I blame the tobacco companies for a lot of lung cancer. Put differently, social media companies are the tobacco companies of the mind.
I won't answer your questions, but I think you'll find a lot of answers in Sapiens and Nexus, both books from Yuval Noah Harari. They explain a lot about the fantastic questions that you are posing.
Billionaires ultimately go hand in hand with fascists (Ford, Musk, ...) and the only threat to democracy and freedom that competes with those is communism.
Adding to my previous answer, here's a reading suggestion: Hot, Flat and Crowded, by Thomas Friedman. The book was written almost 2 decades ago and it has aged really well.
I like the expressionn "if you look at the boom of the middle classes in the mid 20th century", when incidentally it was precisely during that period that the marginal tax rate in the US was something between 94% and 70%. It might seem unrelated, but the main question is related to who benefits the most from tech, just a few or everyone?
"renewable and battery tech is just getting to be the economic best option". This also didn't happen in a vacuum. The place where they are evolving the most is in China, where government policies have been a huge incentive, with huge government investments made in the sector.
In my own country, Portugal, the adoption of renewal energy, was largely the result of government policies that kicked off the market. Now, it seems to have become self-sustaining in the sense that the market is now carrying on regardless of any incentives. I suspect that we might be reaching a point of no-return, if we haven't reached it already. We're still very far away from becoming energy independent, but we're much better than a couple of decades ago.
Moreover, the internet itself didn't just happen because the market led to its creation. It was a result of the cold war. The IP protocol was born in DARPA.
Still, the previous examples I gave were about the government (which is a form of us "as a collective society") spawning new tech or its adoption. Going in the reverse direction, here are examples where it required collective society to "tame" a technology:
- Nuclear weapons: Eventually the most dangerous tech ever invented by mankind. Maybe the reason we're still here is because of the numerous treaties we've been making to curb them. The SALT agreements, the START agreements, and so on.
- TV, Radio and the printing press: All of these are technologies, which we tend to see as forces for good (well, I at least still do), but also with incredible potential for destruction - radio was used by the guys running Germany in the 30s. It required very careful rule making to strike a balance (and the balance varies a lot from democracy to democracy) between freedom of speech and the misuse of this tech for unethical purposes like defamation, intentional misinformation and so on.
- Car Safety: While seat belts were the invention of the market, governments have been regulating cars to make them safer, not only for occupants, but for pedestrians.
Indeed, if I were proposing contributions to the Linux kernel, or any other kind of systems development, I'd probably be considering Rust. For backend services, the decision is between C# and Go (with the latter being the favourite).
Go was never about being easy to write (thought it is), but it was always about being easy to read and it is, by far, the easiest language to read that I've ever used (and throughout the decades, I went through Basic, Pascal, C, Java, JavaScript, C#, TypeScript, Ruby and Python). That becomes even more important if you are not writing the code yourself...
My side projects have landed me new real paying customers by giving me the skills in stacks on which I wasn't getting experience from existing customers.