Yeah he's fucking around. People tried the whole communism thing a few times, and even with the population needing to be starved, worked 14+ hours a day and living with a gun to the back of their heads to "accept" it there was always samizdat and a thriving black market. East Germany didn't need that wall to keep people out.
East Germany and most "socialist" countries in eastern Europe didn't work too differently from western Europe, and living there didn't feel too different.
You worked (8 hours, less for hard labor), you got paid, you bought what you needed to live (and since the prices were fixed and not decided by the market things always remained more or less affordable) rinse and repeat. Living standards-wise they weren't far from western Europe either, and certainly on par with southern Europe.
They weren't much less capitalist than the rest of Europe was, they're turned far too much into this Alien thing in the average American's mind when they weren't.
No pods, no unemployment, to be honest no mass starvation or depopulation. Fairly regular societies, except for the pointless cultural closure which bit them hardly in the back in the end.
My problem with modern gig economies and with a post-Reset world, as a communist, is that they're in an uncanny valley.
Post-capitalist, but not the post-capitalism I want.
I say social ownership of means of production, they give me corporate ownership of them
and consumer goods, which I have to rent. Maybe this is where it's really in the uncanny valley, you hear "you will own nothing" and you immediately think "communism", but someone owns all that in this scenario, and it isn't either you or an abstractly-defined society which means everyone and nobody.
I say no currency, they digitalize it to track my transations and deny me access to essentials if I'm a bad goy. And even if there wouldn't be currency, if things would be "free", they would still not be mine. I can't emphasise things hardly enough on the propertarian aspect of this system.
I say no more city or country, even distribution of the population over both, and they lock me in a plastic ultra-surveilled urban hellscape.
I say classless society, I get a technofeudalism with a tiny minority of corporate owners and a ultra-majority of soulless gmo humans, that's their idea of equality.
Etc etc, it's a fucked up Corrupt-a-wish game to communists.
On top of this, they're post-industrial societies where no new wealth is produced by anyone, they're automated circular economies where everything is recycled, even your piss and shit are turned into water and food. Communism is an association of producers, of working people, and it can only emerge from an industrial society.
This isn't anything a communist would sign up for, but I wont blame you because Americans were engineered into seeing everything bad as communism. You don't lack the critical thinking, just the language to express it.
I wish I could be as optimistic as you are about the possibility of engaging in what would be illegal activity to mitigate the loss of dignity in a system like this, but I don't think it'll be possible.
Black markets complemented the state-backed one in "socialist" countries, they patched their inefficiency, but how are you going to have a black market in the first place when everyone needs to have a fucking chip in their hand and production of everything is centralized in their hands?
Illegal literature? Everything locked behind a firewall that makes China's internet look like the library of Alexandria, and the Deep Web as a whole glows in the dark if you look into it, especially TOR. It'll be shut down and you'll find nothing but what they want you to find, enjoy your trans-lesbian poetry.
There'll generally be no room for dissent because we'll be socially engineered and chemically altered to be anthropologically uncapable of it. Every instinct, every ability to find patterns, gone, you'll never have a soul, you'll never even be human.
What's terrifying about all this is that it can't possibly fail, ever. It'll be their world forever.
If you think you can prepare something against what's coming, good for you, because otherwise I don't think anything less than the end of the world can stop this, and you really want to start praying for it.