10 years ago. Outside of pol threads, Internet was largely focused on producing content and was about escaping from real life politics madness.

10 years ago the following issues were topical: the Tea Party wave had just crested, Obamacare, rabid birtherism and Obama's "Terrorist fist jab". It was the same polarization we're seeing today, only less intense as social media hadn't quite amassed the critical mass it has today.

edit - I looked it up and the "Terrorist fist jab" comment was made in 2008 - so 13 years ago

To be fair, the Internet was much more of a niche back then. Internet and technology have since become the nervous system of every economy and society in the developed world, so it's no wonder that they now reflects the predominant concerns (such as politics and governance) of the people it's connecting.

There’s always politics but politics is overhead. It necessary but if the overhead is too large it can easily eat up the bandwidth and leave no room for the actual stuff.

You can’t do if all you do is arguing over what to do and how to do it.

People have limited time and cognitive capacity.

> It necessary but if the overhead is too large it can easily eat up the bandwidth and leave no room for the actual stuff.

This has always been the case - some sub-groups of the population didn't notice it because it wasn't their/our bandwidth being consumed. Pick any past century or decade, and I will name a group whose world was consumed by politics then.

Yes, there were always some rules for some subgroup that caused political discussions and that's fine.

The problem starts when the bandwidth gets saturated. I don't say that people just should shut the f up and follow the rules, I'm simply saying that this saturated state is very bad.

You missed the point: it's always been politics, you just didn't realize when it was your little group getting the free pass.

>you just didn't realize when it was your little group getting the free pass.

As a lifelong minority with periods of being undocumented or illegal if you wish, I rarely got a free pass. I'm very familiar of the concept of being not allowed to do things o be denied stuff due to status I have no power change.

There was a time I had to beg bank employees to open me an account because I was working for months now and I need to get paid, and not because the law forbid me from having an account. There was a time when I was on a fishing boat crossing borders illegally and it was not because I was too lazy to get a proper visa.

Can you please inform me about the freebies I got? Why don't you tell me about the wonders of having your family being threatened to be send to the place where people often get lost without a trace? Tell me about the privilege of having your father feeding you by working for less than the minimum wage despite being an Electrical Engineer with Masters degree?

If anything, part of the big political events of the last few year revolves around me getting similar rights to those who are not happy with the new situation. I guess they want their underpaid Engineers back.

DB.

Would you consider your past as a time when politics "wasn't eating the world" then? Did you not look at things "through the eyes of clans and governance"?

It was “eating the word” when things were happening. Think the collapse of the SSSR, the transition period was politically intense waste of time. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t for the better, eventually.

You must be thinking that inheritance taxes discussion or carbon emission limits are intense but no I’m not talking about that. I'm talking about situations where you decide if you like something or not depending to the political affiliation of its makers. Like the idea of a CV in a special format that comes from a Chinese company being instantly dismissed is an example of unnecessary politics.

Gradual changed are necessary, maybe full throttle are necessary too however the periods of “everything is about our battle in the politics” are huge waste of life’s.