> AOL was a walled garden with no access to the Internet until late 1993.
It was still when most regular people actually experienced the internet, though there was an explosion of lesser-known dial-up providers alongside them.
Yes, there was ARPANET and access at universities, but the average person had no access.
> But hey, free coasters.
Showing your (lack of) age here, but you got useful floppies for years and people loved that. The coasters/frisbees came rather late in the game and we disliked them because we loved the free floppies.
> 1800 is an exaggeration to make a point. What the lawyers call reductio ad absurdum.
Yeah, but it's a silly one, the 1990s were good, in the 1800s you could still be a slave. You had actual community and people weren't nearly as horribly divided about everything. I see people saying "go outside" but there's nobody else there, everyone else is on their phones or whatever. This doesn't work as reductio because there's no uniform claim that the past is always better, just that a certain time is better in some respects than the present.
So saying that the 1800s or whatever were bad to live in does nothing to rebut the idea that things might've been better 30 years ago.