re: It all sounds positively dreadful to me.
Did you ever read any Clifford D. Simak?
Simak posits a final end not of fearsome horrible ruination, but simply of loneliness. Much of humanity becomes so lost in isolation that it inevitably dies off.
In "City", Simak envisions a work of architecture in Geneva, where a last small group of humans sleep in suspended animation, existing in a pure dreamworld.
These images call to mind your thoughts about the virtual world. And to bridge over to the "Current Events" section, it also calls to mind Oswald Spengler, who stated that cultures ultimately die because they suicide, not because of any external force.