collapse of the old society

Tolkien warned us. Nobody can carry the ring, it must be destroyed. But nobody wants to destroy it.

Except a few anar.. ehm, some hobbits.

How do you destroy power without creating a power vacuum ready to be filled by someone else?

It would be like overthrowing the government/corporates and then placing hidden snipers around the government/corporate building, shooting down anyone staying there for too long.

Agreed. It's just that at some point some of that power, whoever is wielding it, really needs to be used for solutions and ones that are outside the current norm. So far, there's been absolutely none of that from anyone to any appreciable degree.

There is some path where collapse is enough to make people act but not enough to destroy civilization outright. Where the current system is overturned, and we all coordinate to survive. That's absolutely realistic. Not that it won't involve a whole lot of dead people, but the total decline would need a highly intense global event that crushes food output for a few years. A shallower version where food runs short enough to cause revolutions but not so much that a everyone dies quickly seems most pluasible. Obviously that will be choatic and whi knows what comes out, but not dying is very motivational, especially when you have glimpsed death.