Fire can be produced by nearly anyone with a bare minimum level of competence and coordination required (flint and steel, two sticks and a string, various other methods). A car or college education cannot be provided by a person to themselves. They are reliant both on the thing to participate in society, and on society in order to obtain the thing.
Then or now? Cars being terrible and destroying society is not a fringe view in many places.
I know for sure that most people around here either drive or want to, and that many peope consider it unthinkable to not do so.
The anti car ideaology is something that seems far more common on Hacker News and certain online forums than it is in the real world/offline.
US major cities I'd wager is like even split between politicians that like cars, politicians that dislike cars but are too scared to do anything about it, and politicians that dislike cars and aren't scared.
Here's to hoping we get more Ada Colau and less Bill de Blasio.
It's amazingly great to get around in these places, there are shops accommodating every need you can imagine in all parts of the urban core, and it reduces a lot of friction when considering to go out for something spontaneous.
Radical monopoly is a concept defined by philosopher and author Ivan Illich in his 1973 book, "Tools for Conviviality," and revisited in his later work, which describes how a technology or service becomes so exceptionally dominant that even with multiple providers, its users are excluded from society without access to the product. His initial example is the effect of cars on societies, where the car itself shaped cities by its needs, so much so that people without cars become excluded from participation in cities. A radical monopoly is when the dominance of one type of product supersedes dominance by any one brand.
Social media as a technology in the forms of Facebook/Instagram/Twitter could be seen as a radical monopoly for reputation, as is Linkedin for employment, colleges for education, etc.
I think Illich's criticisms of car culture pushed him outside the Overton window of policy making, but his radical monopoly concept is a useful critical tool for reasoning about tech and ethics. A counter argument could use the example that the discovery of fire created a radical monopoly on heat, and therefore it's so general as to be applied arbitrarily to anything you don't like. However, being able to think about the consequences of a new radical monopoly might have on some aspect of human experience is useful for anticipating policy options in response to dynamic technology development.