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I think much of the decline is explained by the cost and time of travel being reduced. Disparate populations are still easy to reach, but before we had mass communications, information about unsavory individuals might propagate slowly.
Snake Oil Salesmen are a well known trope in Westerns, where it was possible to arrive in an isolated town, scam the relatively trusting townspeople, leave before they realized the scam, and arrive in another such town before word actually spread.
Even today, it can be hard to punish a scammer if they stay mobile. Or simply operate outside the jurisdiction of the people they're scamming (oh look, India again).
Dunbar's number is probably pretty closely correlated to the largest community you can operate the runs solely on trust, rather than introducing contracts, mediators, and other dispute resolution systems.
Still, there is something 'magical' about being able to leave your garage door open, your car unlocked, and expect to find your Amazon packages left unmolested on your doorstep, and likewise be pretty certain that if someone DID try to take your packages or steal your car the neighbors would either intervene or call the police, who would in fact take it seriously enough to try to catch the miscreant.
One thing that has really stuck in my craw in the modern era are TSA agents stealing items from luggage. It was (is?) an epidemic, and I really can't see how you maintain trust in a system when the people tasked with enforcing the rules are the ones violating them flagrantly. And, oh dear, I have to note that A Majority of the Security Screeners are nonwhite.
In 1987, 40 Heathrow baggage handlers were arrested in a single week for stealing from checked bags. There were also major problems in France and Italy through the 70s and 80s with this, back when their handlers would have been mostly indigenous.
But change is important in an interesting way. Technological advancement papers over the cracks in a failing society. So gang violence and drug crime increase, but huge advancements in emergency medicine mean that the homicide rate still falls. Ubiquitous CCTV, plate detection and cellphone tracking slightly reduce residential burglaries, even though the neighborhood as a whole seems shadier and less welcoming. The numbers on paper look good, but everything feels worse.
Yep.
Technology fixes social problems which, I would argue, allows social 'rot' to spread underneath since now certain traits that were selected against on the population level are now still present but less noticed since we just use the tech solution (apply this logic to AI if you wish, lol)
When I first moved to my current area, 10 years ago, I was in the cheapest apartment I could find that still allowed pets. This was my first apartment after living in a College Town.
After years of no problems with Amazon deliveries, I started getting about half of my packages swiped off my stoop. I wondered for a bit if it was Amazon Delivery driers being incompetent, but nope. I did the classic approach of filling a cardboard box with trash and leaving it out, and that, too got taken.
But a few months later, Amazon introduced An Amazon Locker at my local mall. So I could ship items there and pick them up at my leisure.
Problem solved! Except now it was a 15 minute round trip to pick up stuff, so I would have to schedule it around my other errands. The whole POINT of Amazon delivery is to NOT have to leave the house!!
And of course, I had to live with the knowledge that some of my neighbors were wanton thieves, which was the real issue. Can't leave my door or my car unlocked ever, knowing that. I did own a large dog at the time so I was relatively certain they'd not try to break into my unit.
(They've since added a locker at the convenience store w/in walking distance from that apartment. I have to assume they track package theft and use that as a basis for where they put the lockers).
Yes, I'm GLAD that technology solved a social problem... but it didn't actually solve the problem. Just routed around the symptom. I VASTLY prefer my current neighborhood, where not only can I leave Amazon packages sitting out for days, the Neighborhood facebook group will actively coordinate to find misdelivered packages and, if packages are going missing, immediately use the doorbell cameras to figure out if there's a thief about.
And we do that without using that classic bit of technology known as a gated community, so I can feel reasonably good that my neighbors are actually being neighborly.
One way to determine if a piece of tech is an 'unalloyed' good or if its just a hack borne of 'necessity' is whether people still choose to use it/pay for it when they genuinely don't have to do so. I never use Amazon lockers these days since the technology of bringing items to my doorstep in two days is the one I actually want.
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