Well my pants aren't fancy at all thank you very much :p.
The show is great, and so are the books. Mostly I would start by watching the show which is, for the first season at least, much more polished imho (the writers of the book were also show runners). After that, the show ends at book 6 (there are 9 total) but several character arcs are tweaked so I would recommend reading at least books 3 to 6 before 7.
Well the belters have it pretty rough and Mars is basically totalitarian. And without spoiling anything I'd suggest you keep reading, it is worth it :).
I mean they do have universal basic income on earth but apart from that humanity is all kinds of fucked. And it doesn't exactly get better as the story progresses.
You mistake (best case scenario) a desire for privacy with perfect anonymity. It is perfectly sane to wish to engage in public discourse without being milked by ad companies. The fact that most platforms make this stupidly difficult is no reason to dismiss everything we say as nonsense. Do get a grip, please.
They defederated hexbear preemptively. Why not this one ? This needs to happen.