Tubular Fluoride

"Despite his protestations to the contrary, the young man showed a small but very promising streak of sadism. Accordingly, the Hermit had Swapped him into the mind of a dental assistant on Prodenda IX. That planet, just to the left of the South Ridge stars if you come by way of Procyon, had been settled by a group of Terrans who felt strongly about fluorine, despising this chemical group as though it were the devil itself. On Prodenda IX they could live fluorine-free, with the assistance of many dental architects, as they were called."

Robert Sheckley - Mindswap (1965)
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"Far out," he said, which was the way he talked in those days. The counterculture possessed a whole book of
phrases which bordered on meaning nothing. Fat used to string a bunch of them together. [...] "I can dig it," he
prattled away as they walked. "Out of sight."

Philip K. Dick - VALIS (1981)
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"The video arcade is a modern day drive-in. The obvious difference is that the video arcade can be a solitary experience. That is, the arcade does not require social interaction as the drive-in once did. Spontaneous verbalization is frequently found in the player talking to the machine."

Review (year??) by Anthony D. Meyer, M.D. of Mind at Play a book about video games by Geoffrey and Elizabeth Loftus (1983)

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I wanted to find a reference in Mind at Play for a post touching on gender roles in video games, but I can't get at the local library's copy because of China's pandemic gift to the world. That old review caught my attention due to the fact that: -what the hell were you smoking, doc?

First off, granted, I've never been to a drive-in movie theater, but for all their reputation as make-out spots I doubt they were exclusive to car pools. One could just as easily drive in to a movie theater on the way home from work and pay the fee alone as walk into an arcade and drop a few quarters into a machine. Neither business model "requires" interaction.
Second, while drive-ins were a bit before my time I am just old enough to barely remember arcades, which bustled with teenagers taking turns at machines, looking over each others' shoulder, cheering each other on or heckling each other. Whether they "can" be a solitary experience, they just as often weren't.
Third, was spontaneous verbalization so distinctive a feature of arcades? Did people at drive-ins never yell at the screen? Granted, it's been a few years since I've set paw in an indoor movie theater but even in that more public setting one could hear occasional mumbled comments of "oh no, don't open that door!" or shocked gasps, grumbles and laughter from the audience. Even now in 2020, playing computer games behind two closed doors and a set of headphones, I find myself exclaiming "oh, fiddlesticks and poppycock!*" whenever I lose a city, miss a shot or stumble off a ledge. At the other end of the spectrum, I was also kicked out of online game guilds in the past for complaining about players spontaneously verbalizing over voice chat. Even other species of ape, if taught sign language, will sign to themselves!
Fourth, if I were disposed to put myself through the hassle, I don't doubt I could find fifty-year-old reviews about the drive-in movie culture of the 1950s and '60s which deemed such venues less social than traditional movie theaters and theatre-theaters because the audience were separated from each other in their cars instead of fighting over armrest space and struggling to best ignore each other for an hour and a half... just as Gawd intended!

For a society which has supposedly become less social and more isolated every decade for the past century or more, we seem unusually chatty.

Back in the '80s Pip K Dick referenced "the counterculture" and its slang as an amusing historical anomaly from two decades past - which I'm sure his readers with their neon-spiked mohawk hairdos found totally "rad" and "fresh" and "tubular" until a decade later when my own mopey generation upgraded it to mad wicked sick. And if you think fabricating in-group solidarity via meaningless slang just came about after the second world war, then by all means look up some flapper or hobo slang. Or do we need to review the Artful Dodger's banter for reference? Degree of popular involvement, demographics and fixations vary, sure, but I doubt any urbanized society goes more than two decades without fomenting a few new sub or counter or under-the-counter cultures in its underbelly. If there were no counterculture churn, we'd be hard-pressed to recognize any culture at all.

Every new medium, every new fad in entertainment and social interaction, every new generation renews the chorus of discoveries about demographic differences... which might be more impressive if they weren't constantly rediscovering that apes are still apes! In fact, Mind at Play is remarkable largely because while its references to information technology are comically dated after nearly four decades, its commentary on games' psychological underpinnings remains valid, to the point I'd re-iterated a couple of their conclusions here in my den before ever reading the book. The problem isn't that our world is changing, but that we ourselves are not, and for that you only have to look at some of our most recalcitrant obsessions. We poke fun at the people scared of water fluoridation now, sure, but it was already a decade-old running gag by the mid-60s (everyone repeat: Precious Bodily Fluids) and the conspiracy theorists won't be letting up any time soon. This despite no-one agreeing on what exactly the fluoridation conspiracy's supposed to accomplish... or how... or whether after 3/4 of a century we should've seen some effects... but that's just what they want you to think... whoever they are... maybe... or not. Bigfoot?

And if all that weren't bad enough, consider that even I, right at this moment, am repeating myself about such repetition!



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* Funny that "poppy-cock" sounds so much dirtier now than it did a century ago. See? Progress!