The ongoing thread How were things different when you were a kid? includes a fair number of things that either de facto or de jure have been eliminated from our society as potentially unsafe, insensitive, or now considered undesirable. That people in the past might have been astonished to think would ever be considered objectionable, and would have taken any work of speculative fiction depicting such restrictions as dystopian, or satire. (“Ban smoking in bars??”)
So what could you see being banned in a sufficiently safety-paranoid, overly-controlling future society? My entry: candles. As in the commercial sale of candles being banned for being a fire hazard and source of indoor pollution. Being told that LED substitutes, or even a holographic image of a candle, is “just as good”.
Helium is needed for medical applications, and there have been a number of shortages of it over the years. Wasting it on balloons may someday be a thing of the past.
Alcohol. There are enough non-religious do-gooders; when added to the religious do-gooders at the right moment, we could see a new Prohibition one day.
(Aside: every time I read the end of 1984, when Winston Smith drinks his nasty Government Gin with an oily film on it, I think “…and you won’t even get that.”)
Physical books; some of the copyright fanatics for years have been pushing the idea that only electronic media with eye-trackers should be allowed, to prevent anyone from reading anything without paying. Also, e-books can be remotely censored and altered on demand.
Manually controlled cars; not an idea original to me, but I can certainly see a future where they are considered unsafe and only self-driving cars are allowed. It also of course allows the authorities to completely monitor and control where you are allowed to drive.
Meat from animals. If substitutes or sci-fi style “vat grown” meat get good & cheap enough natural meat could become politically unacceptable.
Primary fossil-fuel burning perhaps, but it would be harder to make a case against carbon-neutral synthetic fuel made from atmospheric CO2.
I strongly suspect that “good enough” will be mainly in the opinion of proponents of banning natural meat.
China is facing the prospect of almost literally having one retiree for every pre-retiree in the entire country. Frankly I wonder if covert euthanasia of the elderly is going to be a thing.
Depends on whether your goal is capitalist growth forever, or shrinking the population enough to not overburden the limited agricultural output of an AGW-ravaged planet in general and your particular country in specific.
It has been argued that both Chinese and American responses to COVID were in fact covert euthanasia projects.
They didn’t create COVID for that purpose, but once it happened naturally, it did not take long for clever people to see a way to benefit from the unattributable slaughter of the elderly.
No, “Population Bomb” scares are so 1970s. Disallowing immigration, the USA like most of the industrialized world is below the replacement rate of births.
If so, they produced spectacularly poor results, the death rate having been miniscule.
I think the phrase “seemingly innocuous” is doing far too much work in the OP. We know a LOT more about hydrocarbons, climate change, smoking (despite the producers propaganda), etc. to know that a lot of those things were “seemingly” safe at one point, or at least, safe enough to prevent any real regulation, but they weren’t non-issues.
Like the nations on again, off again desires to regulate overly sweetened, and now overly caffeinated drinks - we’re finding out that some things, when sloppily labelled and used by the incurious (big issue there) have immediate and long term risks.
One that wasn’t really innocuous, but was comparatively low risk that changed during my middle school years circa 1986-7 was banning pocket knives from schools. Because, well, the risks were real, even if the total number of reported misuses were minor.
A more recent “seemingly innocuous” ban was on trans-fats in the USA, with legislation in 2018 and fully phased out compliance by 2021 according to a quick google search.
But, not fighting the hypothetical, and ignoring our major steps back during Trump 1.0 and 2.0 (they of suing states to force Coal plants to stay online!), is probably some sort of enforced mandate for disposal on used consumer devices with internal power storage. I don’t, and hope none of the readers here dispose of such devices casually into a general trash bin, but I’ve seen this happen a lot as near-disposable cheap handheld USB fans, earbuds, handheld appliances, etc. get tossed when they break.
Those might make economic sense for airplanes, but for ground vehicles, it’d be uneconomical enough that there really wouldn’t be any pressure against a full ban.
The moral panic of the day is social media[1]. Moral panics of the past, such as novels, comic books, TV, Elvis’s hips, D&D, have not caused permanent bans, but maybe this time it’s different? Maybe this time bans (for at least kids) will stick?
To go down a dystopian path, things up for banning: open, general purpose computers; screw drivers and other tools that can be used to repair stuff; e-bikes; abortion pills; gender affirming care; porn; sports betting; and prediction markets. Probably many more I can’t think of right now.
I have doubts any of those will be successfully banned long term, but they are all things that people at various levels of government in the US are trying to ban either directly or indirectly.
Take “but it’s real this time!” to any of the threads about it ↩︎
Death rate for the population, or death rate amongst the expensively elderly & infirm? Very different goals with very different metrics.
As well, just because some heartless bastards in one or another government were hoping to cheaply kill off a lot of grannies doesn’t mean they succeeded. Or rather, the fact they didn’t kill too many grannies cheaply is not proof they weren’t hoping and trying to do just that.
Computer operating systems that haven’t been vetted by a govenment regime and can’t be modified or replaced. Open Source will die under the Panopticon eye.