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I wonder to what extent this is simply because cultures were more effectively separated at the time. It's easy for culture and politics to be separated when everyone that you're talking politics with is either the same culture or a known, geographically adjacent culture. A huge problem with the internet is that there's no easy way to discern the culture of the person you're talking to. Talking gun control with a backwoods Alabaman man is a fundamentally different exercise than with a Canadian woman from Ontario. On the internet, you don't get to know which one you're talking with. More importantly, even if you do, you're likely to experience culturally-mediated political opinions that are fundamentally contrary to your way of life, which is much less likely in person.
If I live in Xtopia, a city where the only mode of travel is bicycles, and I see some tax supportive discussion about taxing and registering bicycles online, I might look at the discussion as anti-Xtopian. They hate bicycles! They hate the way I live! They care nothing for me, my family or my friends! This may or may not be true (it often is, such is the nature of cultural differences) but either way it's very different than talking to my Xtopian neighbor. If he supports the tax, surely there must be a more rational reason for him doing so. He likely enjoys bikes, or he wouldn't live here. I can at least hear him out, maybe learn something. It's just a totally different activity, and frankly it's a shame the same English words are used for both. If I hear someone from Y-ville (city where bicycles are banned) talk about the bike tax, I can be certain that they hate bikes and probably my bike-centric existence, but it really doesn't matter that much. I already knew that, it was priced in. If I'm talking to them in the first place I've already decided they have enough other qualities that outweigh their opinion on bikes.
When I was growing up you couldn’t really help it. Culture moved slower then than it does today and even slower the further in time you go back. I’m younger than the typical cohort here and grew up at the intersection of new changes that were rapidly developing but I was still very beholden to my upbringing of the previous generation fortunately, so trendy new influences never pushed me around in the storm of things very much. I was always a very strong willed kid who was proud to have remained stable in a sea of chaos. People tend to look down on others who haven’t changed throughout in their lives. I haven’t changed one bit since I was 16 years old. Very few people would be able to distinguish the me of then and the me of 2025, but for me, refusing to change has been one of the proudest achievements of my life. A handful of good people I knew growing up and today all the worse because they left their good sense behind them to go down roads they shouldn’t have travelled. My foundational roots had already been solidified for good.
The experience of the world back then was also far more local and felt much smaller than it does today. When I was extremely young, if we went 2-3 hours out of our way for a family event, it felt like I was living at the edge of the known world without much to explore beyond it. Today the whole world can be knocking on your doorstep, demanding and competing for your attention which leaves a lot of people feeling burnt out on life. I can play the whole social media game if I want but it has no appeal to me and I have little desire for it. I have an enormous love for technology, just none of its popular uses. What’s popular is almost guaranteed to be wrong, per Heinlein’s maxim:
“Does history record any case in which the majority was right?”
Or if you like, the quote often misattributed to Henry Ford:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
People carry around a lot of standard knowledge for the time in which they live but very few have any truly useful insight to impart with others. Coupled with Sturgeon’s Law, nobody has me convinced that I’m missing out on anything here. Not being a narcissist driving everywhere with a selfie stick in the back of my car is more than enough of a win for me. I hope future anthropologists one day can cite that item as the defining characteristic that marked the downfall of American civilization. It’s pathological.
The Internet in its infancy was a kind of refuge for misfits who could connect and talk to each other and do funny things over BBS boards, among other stuff. Cyberspace then was a form of digital dumpster diving for the curious. Nowadays it’s just another form of crass commercialism. Another marked out district for the display of wealth without culture. Just mindless consumerism.
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