There seems to be a general assumption that pre-internet technologies didn’t change people’s behaviour or dramatically alter the contours of their life decision

There seems to be a general assumption that pre-internet technologies didn’t change people’s behaviour or dramatically alter the contours of their life decisions, which is of course very wrong. There’s no possibility of a decline into an idiocracy because we’ve been in one since the dawn of civilisation. Since we have this far lacked the technology to modify ourselves directly, we’ve offloaded any of our super-human goals onto our environment in a symbiotic dance with the gifts evolution has bestowed upon us. There isn’t some inflection point where computers are a catalyst into an imagined decline: they are just part of the evolving process. Perhaps direct augmentation will change things, but that is unlikely to be available to us in the near to medium term. People’s desires and perceptions have been shaped by–and in turn shaped–thousands of years of technology at this point; from fundamental tech like reading and writing through hygeine and mass media. Rolling back one layer is not particularly important.