As a junior middle aged (40yo) person, I can confirm with the caveat that the number of things that are considered common sense rather than completely subjective matters of opinion has changed a shitload since the turn of the millennium, with 9/11 being one of the major catalysts.
When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, outlandish conspiracy theories were rightly considered fringe lunacy and being a nazi or any other kind of fascist was a shameful thing that you had to hide to be accepted, not a resurgent movement across most North America and Europe.
Just to name two of the worst examples of thousands of ways that discourse has worsened since the “good old days” when other things were much worse.
As a young person (18yo), I feel like this is mostly true for the internet but not so much in real life. Most people I know don’t believe stupid shit like this, even though there are of course some people that do, at least when it comes to conspiracy theories. Being a nazi, especially here in germany, will make most people, by far, dislike you and there’s a good chance you’ll just get a punch in the face if you tell that to someone. But at the same time, the internet has made people able to communicate with others that share the same stupid opinions so maybe it did increase because they don’t feel like they’re alone in that believe anymore. I can’t really compare it to how it was before the internet tho because I grew up with the internet already being a thing.
I think the only thing that really changed is the internet removed the gatekeeping role of centralized information sources. When you were a kid, was CNN still the end-all-be-all oracle and arbiter of concrete truth? In my mom’s generation, it was Walter Cronkite, of course. And if you were one of those people who got your information from Coast to Coast AM or other AM radio shows, you were considered a weirdo because if any of that stuff was really true, then Ted Koppel would have reported on it.
But also, looking back now, how fucking bizarre was it that they televised the invasion of Iraq twice? That’s some serious colonial behavior and I had no idea at the time. Now I can see it for what it was.
But also, I really wish we had had one centralized authority to give us information and advice about how to handle Covid. So I think there’s good and bad things about the change.
