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Imagine you're out and about in the city, suddenly you hear a noise, you turn to see a truck heading right for you. Maybe you were too distracted, maybe the driver is drunk, either way you never had a chance.
Next thing you know, you wake up in a hospital, and the year is 2122. Turns out someone close to you signed you up to one of those cryonics experiments, where they unfreeze you when the state of medicine is advanced enough that they can help you. You grieve to loss of everyone you knew and loved, and given no other options, you move on with your life. You've made some friends, and one day as you're all chilling out, you find yourself in the middle of a discussion, reminiscent of the ones that happen on The Motte every once in a while: progressives always win... or do they? You hear your friends exchanging the usual arguments about whether or not eugenics was a progressive idea, when you realize you haven't really seen anything about trans issues, since you got revived. You bring it up, but no one knows what you're talking about. You check the current history books, and there's something about gay marriage, but nothing really about trans issues. You check Wikipedia, there's more details there, and while to coverage is not unsympathetic to the 21st century trans narrative, it's oddly terse. Your friends go "huh, the more you know..." and move on with the conversation, but you feel unsatisfied with being unable to show just how big the issue used to be.
There's a decent archive of the early 21st century. You can access articles in the NYT, the Atlantic, Washington Post, Vox, etc, and you can retrieve any academic paper from our current era. What would you try to use, to show how important the issue was in 2022?
A couple weeks ago I dropped a couple of names on some people whose ages ranged between mid-30s and mid-60s and I was met with blank stares. Even after explaining who the people were, everyone was still drawing a blank. The names were Chandra Levy and Gary Condit. For those who are unaware, Chandra Levy was a US Department of Corrections employee who disappeared in the spring of 2001. Her disappearance made national news when it was revealed that she had previously been an intern for California Congressman Gary Condit, and there was evidence that they had had an affair. There was never anything approaching evidence that he was involved in her disappearance, but his continued denial of any intimate relationship in the face of nearly overwhelming evidence gave him the aura of a man who wasn't telling the truth, and speculation ensued.
If you're too young to remember the case, I'm bringing it up because it was huge at the time. The New York Times ran over 50 stories about it between May and September. To put this in context, the other big news stories during that period were the Microsoft antitrust suit, the Bush tax cuts, the Andrea Yates child-drowning case, and the president's monthlong August vacation. It's hard to gauge the coverage of most of these, but Yates merited fewer than 20 articles, and the rest of these weren't exactly corkers. The Levy disappearance was easily the biggest news story of that summer, until 9/11 pushed it off of the front page. Even then, it had enough staying power to remain in the background for years afterward, as new developments arose. Condit sought reelection but lost the primary in March. The body was found in May. A man who had previously been convicted of attacking other women in the area where the body was found was convicted in 2006, but was released ten years later after appeals revealed that the prosecution's case was terrible. As recently as last year, the Times was still following the case, this time about how the prosecutors are facing malicious prosecution charges.
It was a big story. It may have only dominated the public consciousness because it was the only interesting thing in an otherwise uninteresting time, but it dominated nonetheless. It's no longer front-page news, but developments still merit mention by the Newspaper of Record. And yet plenty of people who were certainly old enough to remember draw a blank 20 years later. The same is true of the 1979 Ogaden War, or the Bhopal disaster; it seems to have vanished from the collective consciousness, apart from the aforementioned updates and the occasional podcast dedicated to these sorts of things. Now imagine trying to explain to someone how big a news story was a hundred years after the fact. Are you familiar with the Hall-Mills murder? It was easily the biggest murder story in American history until the Lindbergh Kidnapping, and was much bigger than any popular crime story since the OJ Trial. Yet today it only gets a mention in true crime books and podcasts and such. If someone frozen in 1922 were to wake up today and asked about the resolution of the case, he may be incredulous to find out that no one has any idea what he's talking about. Even big political events barely merit discussion. Teapot Dome may be mentioned in every US history book, but good luck finding anyone who can explain what the scandal was (and it was one that jeopardized Harding's presidency, though he would die before it was resolved). So no, there's no one article you can point to that will fully express the magnitude of an issue to someone 100 years in the future.
I have been wanting to do an effort post on the Culture War clashes of yesteryear that have since fizzled for various reasons. This is a couple of good examples, to which I might add turn-of-the-century hysteria over carpal tunnel disabling knowledge workers at keyboards and file sharing vs. the RIAA and MPAA.
I'm curious if anyone has any other battles-gone-cold they can remember.
I don't think "thing which people argue about" is by definition culture war. What makes it culture war is that there's no room for disagreement.
Carpal tunnel syndrome isn't culture war unless saying "I doubt that carpal tunnel syndrome is very common" is, not only thought to be wrong, but considered by the other side to condemn you as a person and to justify retaliation against you.
This was specifically a reference to the battles over policies the late 2000 Clinton administration promulgated via OSHA, only to be reversed by the incoming Bush administration in 2001 [1] [2] [3]. In a quieter era, this was a reasonably sized political fight that was largely pushed aside by events in the fall of 2001.
Ultimately I feel like the Clinton policies (explicit focus on ergonomics) have largely won out on, if not by OSHA fiat, then economics: workplaces like assembly lines are typically designed to minimize short- and long-term injury risks and office workers can generally get standing desks and such. But we're not all using 2000s-vintage ergonomic keyboards either, nor are office workers on these newfangled "computers" getting benched with career-ending typing injuries regularly: rates of carpal tunnel have been largely flat.
I'd still say that it's not culture war for the reason I gave: You're not a bad person if you disagree over it.
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