Thank you for this

* * *

These text files really show that it was only a very specific type of human who’s liberty was flourishing.

Hindsight is always 20:20. What matters is that we live in a much freer and more open world today than in the 1980s and information of all kinds is vastly more accessible, often available for free. So these early predictions have basically proven quite accurate.

I don't know about that. In many ways the 80s felt a lot more free. Sexual morals were much more open, there was much less government and corporate espionage on citizens. I liked society a lot more back then.

I disagree about sexual morals. We live in a time where everything that was kept locked away from "polite society" in the 80s is now celebrated and held up as morally correct and right. The only people deemed depraved today are those who adhere to a more traditional view, and that was absolutely not the way things were in the 80s.

I suppose I was never really part of 'polite society', being from Amsterdam in the 80s.

I assume you refer to things like homosexuality which were already totally normal there back then. Transsexualism was a bit less common back then but I imagine this was also because the medical tech wasn't at the required level yet to really make a transition possible.

But I wasn't really talking about those things. More about sexuality in general being a taboo in the media and popular culture.

Wow I have never thought about the technical aspect of the current Transsexualism movent before but it makes sense. Interesting.

“Transsexualism was a bit less common back then but I imagine this was also because the medical tech wasn't at the required level yet to really make a transition possible.”

Transsexualism/trangenderism was indeed a bit less common then (or at least more hidden from the public sphere), but that wasn’t so much due to surgical tech. Gender affirming surgery in the form of vaginoplasty was performed as early as 1922. Gender affirming hormone replacement therapy and other procedures also date back decades.

Of course, the availability of these procedures have increased over time, but I don’t think the technology has been the primary barrier to trans people’s public existence. The trans movement’s progress has had far more to do with advocacy and activism increasing cultural tolerance. And also creating a broader cultural awareness, which in turn allows even more closeted/questioning trans people to put a name to their experiences, and learn about the possibilities available to them.

For perhaps the vast majority of time prior to the mid twentieth century, most trans people had no trans role models, and often no awareness that other trans people even existed, much less that medical procedures were available to help them. That’s all, mostly, thanks to the many trans people who fought (and died) for things to improve.

Surgical tech advancements have definitely helped, but they aren’t as central to the growing numbers of trans people coming out. Our social, legal, and political changes have been hard won, and we are constantly fighting to preserve them—see Michael Knowles recent call to “eradicate transgenderism” to a crowd of applause at CPAC: https://www.rollingstone.com/t/michael-knowles/

Surgical tech does us little to no good if our public existence is outlawed and violently suppressed.

Yahoo video chat in the late 1990s was pretty wild for sexual openness.

True the 90s weren't bad either. It was only then when things started changing.

> I don't know about that. In many ways the 80s felt a lot more free. Sexual morals were much more open

...unless you were gay. I'm old enough to remember how casually homophobic 80s society was. (At least in the USA).

Yes, I remember gay people getting beaten to death just because they were gay. There was a lot more crime too, the peak being in the early 1990s. Now it's not so much criminals we have to worry about (we still do), but out of control cops and government.

s/flourishing/exercised

What an absolutely bizarre way to interpret them. It shows that the internet was accessible to a very small segment of the world

Is it bizarre? It seems like the new norm. Everything is filtered through this lens, no matter how inane.

To which specific type of human are you referring?

Or did you mean to make vague racist reference where we are supposed to fill in the blank?

To which specific type of human are you referring?