Imagine a future with total automation technologies. Everyone besides the wealthy robot-owners is permanently locked out of the labor pool/economic upward social mobility and any revolution would be effortlessly quashed by endless automated surveillance and hordes of kill-drones.

So the majority of humanity starves, then the survivors technologically and culturally backslides with a barter economy exchanging only the comparatively primitive goods people can make themselves. The technocrats become a sort of fair folk-style myth. Stay away from their manors or their robotic security will get you, don't speak disparagingly of them or autonomous keyword-checkers and ubiquitous micro-drone bugs will consider you as a potential subversive revolutionary, etc. Bonus if the technocrats have embraced transhumanism to the point where they're no longer immediately recognizable as human-derived.

Fortunately for everyone else, they increasingly stay isolated in their autonomous fortress-palaces.

The inevitable twist ending would be generations later when the machines to repair the machines to repair the machines, etc of the automated manor security systems finally broke down, the first steam-age explorers to enter would find billions of dormant holodecks filled with billions of mummified corpses, all with enormous smiles on their faces.