Skype and Hangouts were forbidden for sensitive research at some German universities:

https://www.cms.hu-berlin.de/de/dl/multimedia/bereiche/tele/...

Now everyone leaks everything by using AI even for mundane things like file format conversions.

The person who gets the credit is just the person who wrote the grant. They are usually _capable_ of doing good science but the demands of being a PI mean they are mostly just grant writers and administrators. Huge teams of unknown postdocs, grad students etc. are doing most of the work.

But from the outside, it's just a bunch of people turning into a blob we don't care about as a whole. We still care about the individual humans who haven't jumped into that gravity well. Humans care about their ancestors, their neighbours, authors and audiences. The people who don't can't fathom that, it's a sort of blind spot for them, but we are completely untouched and unmoved by that. The ideas in your head about the bonds between other people doesn't affect those bonds.