Originally Posted by dutret
Not really it was some zeitgeisty overly academic cultural criticism from the 60's(obviously) about how the human condition had been fundamentally changed by the advent of nuclear weapons and birth control. All sorts of stuff about how peoples now lived with the constant awareness that they could **** whenever they wanted and it all could end at any minute. Society specifically the dynamics of interpersonal interactions would never be the same. I think it was in some journal and I think I found it while researching for a scathing critique on the pervasive acceptance of freudian dogma in the humanities. Not something I really care about beyond bull****ting on while drunk, bored at work, or formerly an easy A.
That doesn't sound like "now is special" so much as "now and the foreseeable future will be much different," which isn't the same thing. I think it can be reasonably argued that society and the "dynamics of interpersonal interactions" have changed permanently because of those two developments, but that people our age aren't as acutely aware of the change because we don't remember a time when human civilization couldn't be destroyed in a matter of hours.
Admittedly this is a bit more plausible in the case of nuclear weapons, and admittedly I haven't read the piece and I have only your description of it to go by, so I could be wrong about all of that.
Incidentally, this:
What I want to read is a post-modern ethnography of his attempts to troll for sex with random strangers. That would probably be amusing. How he does it not because he can't get laid otherwise but rather as a deconstruction of the dominant talk first then sex paradigm.
...is the first time one of your posts has made me laugh, and not at you.