Originally it was going to be “over the last twenty years” but I decided to be more flexible.
A lot of discussions about how society has changed or how the world is different always circle around to smartphones, social media, “no one talks to each other in person, they’re on their phones always” and the like.
Outside of those topics, what else has changed, by your perception?
There’s not as many people outside just…existing. I’m not that old but I remember just going outside and seeing people just not doing anything in particular everywhere, now it seems like everyone always has some place to rush to and no one is allowed to just exist in public places anymore. Maybe that also has something to do with my perspective shifting has I got older, but I still feel like it’s true.
Also bugs. There are like NO fucking bugs anymore. Couple decades ago you could walk out and get sandblasted by a million different bugs and now everything just feels so fucking dead and sterile and depressed. It’s like outside was replaced by a clinic and no one bothered to complain.
The bug thing seriously worries me
I remember so many more bugs as a child. I haven’t needed mosquito spray in quite a while even while hiking
It still feels a little odd to me that restaurants don’t ask “smoking or non?”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted everything stopped smelling like ash. But it’s surreal to remember my grand parents chain smoking over pancakes at Dennys.
It is now no longer social suicide to not drink.
Sometimes I forget that smoking is a thing, and then (after sometimes a whole year) I see someone doing it, and I’m like, “woah, people still smoke.” It was everywhere when I was a kid—even inside restaurants.
It always surprises me that pot smoking is now worse. Don’t get me wrong: go ahead with your vice. But the world used to smell like an ash tray and now it smells like skunk. Realistically the world doesn’t stink as much, which is excellent, but that means pot smokers really stand out as annoying stink
“Nonsmoking section” that wasn’t even a separate room, just a half wall divider 🫠
Lol, in my tiny ass hometown it was just tables without ashtrays.
before that, it was the whole restaurant
And it’s not that hard either. I’m out with a new group of people and just ask “do you drink?” If I get a “no” we know not to push it and just continue on like normal. They still join in with all the conversation, we keep discussions around favorite drinks, alcohol, etc light to none and no one is offended or bothered.
Watching UK 70s TV now is wild. Prime time sitcoms using camp gay sterotypes as a punchline in themselves, black characters being called Chalkie or similar. These had regular repeats throughout the 80s on the main TV channels. Hell, known ephebophilie and bigot, Jim Davidson, had a prime time game show till 2002 and would regularly do his Chalkie character on it.
Late 90s/early 2000s UK TV was still pretty homophobic and racist, see Little Britain for yellow and brown face combined with racial stereotypes, big name comedians of the time like Frank Skinner making homophobic jokes.
Early 2000s in the UK was aggressively misogynistic, mostly in the printed press, absolutely rabid.
Obviously these issues haven’t been solved, but at least its unacceptable for mainstream TV in the UK to pedal this shit.
When I was a kid, it was common for members of parliament to vote freely per their riding with whipped votes being limited to confidence votes.
Now, thanks to Stephen Harper going hard on the precedent set by Jean Chretien, free votes basically don’t exist in parliament.
I think for me in my country it would be the collapse of the social contract. The bonds that society regulates itself.
The circa 1990 nature of American society has been erased so completely that it is hard to believe how drastically it has changed.
Movies used to depict child molestation (Indiana Jones) or outright rape (Revenge of the Nerds) as normal and to be celebrated when it was done by the heroes. A lot of crimes got viewed through the lens of whether it was “our people” doing them. The thinking features in a lot of old movies.
The cops who beat Rodney King were found not guilty by a jury, in the first trial. After all, they’re the cops, they’re allowed. Drunk driving was fine, as long as you were one of the right kind of people. The cops would beat the fuck out of people and it was fine. The factory in town could be polluting the river and it was fine as long as dad had a job. And so on.
The uniformity of thought that TV enforced, before the internet, is really not well understood. If you thought Israel was bad, then you and Noam Chomsky were literally the only ones. Even as late in the arc as the Iraq War, I would say about 95% of the people who didn’t get their news from the internet supported the war. Watch one of the debates where Ron Paul was speaking against the war with everyone else (except the audience) just weirded out and confused by it, or the “Media-Opoly” short that aired on SNL once and then never again, to get some idea by contrast of how airtight the lock on narrative used to be. TV and newspapers are still kind of that way, but they don’t have the media monopoly they used to. It used to be that someone probably would live their entire adult life without ever hearing the kind of political viewpoints you see every day on Lemmy as normal things.
On the other hand, along with the expectation that everyone was kind of a piece of shit and that’s how life is, came a kind of backbone for resistance that I feel like is missing today. Woodstock ‘99 would be a pretty normal “yeah they robbed us” badly organized festival today. It was way better than the Fyre Festival, and people at Fyre just took it, or called their lawyers. At Woodstock ‘99, the kids threw bottles and batteries at Kurt Loder, broke in the ATMs and stole their money back, and then ripped the venue apart with their bare hands and burned it all to the ground.
The cops who beat Rodney King were found not guilty by a jury, in the first trial. After all, they’re the cops, they’re allowed. [snip] The cops would beat the fuck out of people and it was fine.
This hasn’t really changed though.
but back then it was “fine” because it never made the news…
It absolutely has. Before Rodney King it was always fine. From 1992 to about 2014 it was mostly fine. From 2014-2020, it was a debate, and after 2020, they’re pretty much always guilty. There’s a whole interesting conversation to be had about why it was that all kinds of riot and peaceful protest had basically 0 result until 2014-2020, and then in 2020 it all of a sudden starting working significantly.
Anyway, now under Trump, some of the reform is going backwards. There were some outlier departments that were still in the 1992 mode, and the feds were doing some things to try to come down on them, whereas now it’s the opposite, Trump is actively pardoning dirty cops. Great stuff.
It was not fine. There was a whole riot about it and everything.
The only thing that’s changed recently is that cops can occasionally be held accountable if they cause enough embarrassment to the powers that be.
Can you name three incidents since 2020 where the cops have not been charged? I know of one, and even that one has an asterisk next to it. Before 2020 it was multiple every year, there used to be these massive walls with names written on them.
4 things
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People are getting lonelier and lonelier, even if we have the technoloogy, we keep getting further apart, it takes weeks to make time to see someone. So here I am, travelling alone…
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The attention span
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The willingness to actually do some legwork, laziness, or conformity.
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This will not sound nice: people getting dumber. There. I said it.
my 4 cents
peepull arnt getten dummer tho
dey allreddy was dumm b4
dum ppl got moar voyse naow
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I got started on the Internet in 1988. You had to learn Unix (Linux didn’t exist yet) and the command line (GUI Internet didn’t exist yet), and had to manually piece together files to download them (www didn’t exist yet).
Gods, and I felt I was early. I used gopher pre-www, and definitely had interacted with computers by 88, but interacting with networking by that time was virtually unheard of outside of academic or defense settings.
Outside of formal settings, I’d say that it’s uncommon for women to wear skirts or dresses in day-to-day life now.
Menswear is considerably more casual. This is a trend that’s been going for over a century or so, so it certainly didn’t just happen during my life, but it did significantly change in that time.
I was a nurse in the US from 2015-2020 and in that time I saw one “old school” nurse who wore a white scrubs dress and white stockings/shoes. Every day that I saw her she was dressed this way so it wasn’t like for an event or something. Just working on the L&D floor. No hat though. Honestly no idea how anyone did the job of nursing in a damn dress anyway but they all did for a very long time before I was in the profession. Every time I saw her I was just jealous that she must not be cleaning up like, ANY shit where she works. For graduation we all wore the little hat, then that was the end of that forever.
Cartoons went from the majority of them having a unique enough art style to distinguish them from one another. If you take a silhouette of heads/faces from cartoon characters in the 90s and 2000s ( don’t have experience with prior decades besides the standard MGM cartoons, Jetsons/Flintstones, or things like Looney Tunes or Tom and Jerry ) you’d be able to tell the characters apart, even if you don’t even know who they are. Try doing that with most all 2010s and upwards new cartoon characters and you’ll get the exact same ugly, generic, and sanitized bean shaped head/face/smile imaginable.
There have definitely been some examples that might deviate a little from that mold, like Summer Camp Island, but those are far and few between anymore.
Also, for the most part, I would consider the overall quality as having been declining as well. I haven’t seen a lot of shows, so my experience should be taken with a huge lump of salt, but besides shows like Steven Universe, Summer Camp Island, etcetera, the storytelling hasn’t been as tight ( all of this in my opinion ), they’re banking on you not actually paying attention to the show itself so they can cheap out on every single step, art style is being sanitized and overly simplified to cut costs, and jokes are all devolving into “LOL RANDOM”, but that might have been a 2010s thing and I hope it’s dead.
It also doesn’t help that fans and fandom culture over time have become worse as well as you’ll usually find a vocal minority who will kick and scream while doxxing you because you ship the wrong 2 fictional characters together or don’t believe their exact highly specific headcannon, regardless of whether you are the creator or nor. Though, I’m debating of getting rid of this section because it might bleed too much into social media.
Is Arcane a cartoon?
I want to add Adventure Time to the good list. There definitely are some episodes that feel “lol random” but there’s a longer story arc that’s actually really deeply explored
Absolutely. I didn’t realize they did more of a story arc until I ended up seeing clips on yt. I definitely remember some of the lore episodes but I definitely wasn’t smart enough to piece together any lore. I might have to suffer through the occasional “lol random” episodes just to see the lore through.
I swear that before 9/11, middle eastern people in the US counted as “white”, or at least white-but-you-can-make-fun-of-their-accents-and-names like Italians or Polish people did
Yeah it went from taxi driver jokes to terrorist jokes
If a single act of terrorism can remove an entire ethnic group from whiteness, then I wanna see the rest of the world agree that European Americans aren’t white. It would be funny
some European right wingers already believe this
Hats, almost completely removed from formal settings and now only in informal settings.
People have a much more rigid and accurate sense of time. You don’t meet for lunch, you meet at 12pm on the dot. People don’t wait for someone for half an hour, they wait like 5 minutes or so.
People talk much more openly about problems and their views. When I was young people didn’t really talk about religion, politics, medical issues, and so on in public. Now people will tell you they are on an antidepressant or LGBT+ and be open about things.
That rigid sense of time brings back memories. As a kid you’d have to wait on some corner to meet with friends and go out. Without smartphones there was no way of knowing where they were or what time they’d show up. If they were late you had to simply wait for them to show up or at some point decide to leave. All without being able to communicate anything. So everybody was a bit more flexible and relaxed about waiting on eachother.
When I was a kid, it was assumed that boys asked girls to dances and not the other way around. In the recent Pixar series Dream Productions, a tween girl is asked who she’s going to ask to the school dance. It’s now treated as normal for girls to ask boys. She also ends up not going with a date and just going with her friends.
The world has less colour.
This isn’t a dramatic “I’m depressed” post, though that is a factor. Nature is still nature-coloured, for one, and it still looks lovely.
I mean that like, you’d go outside and look at the cars and see a rainbow of colours. Now it’s all black, silver, or white. You only see colorful cars if they are really old beat up rustbuckets or if they are brand new luxury vehicles used by super rich people.
Buildings too. Businesses and the buildings they set up shop in would be painted with garish, eye popping colour. Now everything trends towards landlord-beige.
Edit: And it should be noted, this happened for a reason, and I am aware of that reason, and that just makes me crankier.
I’ve noticed that as well, most cities in the States are all different shades of brown and grey. It’s kinda sad to see.
I always assumed that bland colors were easier to maintain and appealed to more people. But by God let’s not have any color in the world because of resale value…
easier to maintain
The thing is
they’re kinda not?
Grey(“Silver”) on cars kinda is in the sense that it “hides” dirt, but like, that particular shade of landlord beige they use on buildings? That becomes an ugly colour within weeks of exposure to the elements. And would require constant repainting to stay looking good.
It’s all about that resale value and the fact that nowadays no one buys anything expecting to keep it for very long. So the less “personal” things are, the better to pass them along.
