[wpietri]

It amazes me how long "the new thing has ruined the children" has been a trope.

You manage to combine two generations of it. Television started ruining children when the Boomers were growing up. The Millennials were ruined by the early internet. And now I hear the Zoomers are being ruined by TikTok. (Presumably Gen X was ruined by cable TV, which you left out.)

But that's just recently. The earliest iteration of this moral panic that I know of involved novels: https://www.economist.com/1843/2020/01/20/an-18th-century-mo...

That's right, the kids have been ruined since before America existed! Truly, it's amazing this steady worsening of the youth has not destroyed life as we know it.