The times before the internet properly took off; a technology which enabled the ruling classes to turn capitalism fully into the anti-life pressure-stress-test it truly is; when the population became constantly bombarded with psy-ops and social-economic-sexual pressures in order to keep us in permanent states of psychological distress, perfect rats in a machine designed to keep us stationary and immoving, emotionally manipulatable wrecks and incomplete persons, ripe for consuming and spending, debt-slaves, easy economic nodes of production, unable to formulate any meaningful or relevant resistance due to constant hyper-realism and social atomization and division across any and all possible human lines.
Now you see it worsen, the monetization of even basic human needs and things that should be free.