Why are there more crazies these days?

[Pat Mustard]

Technology provides opportunities to behave anonymously that never existed before.  It also makes it easier to interact with people who don't know you and will never know you.  

The internet also provides both many examples of how to be weird (that probably would never occur to the average person otherwise), and through constant exposure hardens us to behavior that fifty years ago (when married couples in TV had to have separate beds) would have shocked even the most jaded of people.  As for terrorist groups enticing members - before cable - when in most places there were maybe 5 major channels on TV - there simply was no way for wacko groups to have a chance to entice you into anything without walking up to you and handing you a pamphlet.  Isis would have been inconceivable fifty years ago.  The average terrorist group had a handful of people, or maybe in the tens.  Travel is a lot easier now as well.  And not just in the practical sense.  People think much more "long distance" than they used to.  1965 and you want to talk to your fellow Jihadi if Kabul? Well, long distance cost like, I don't know, maybe $15 a minute.  And that was when you could buy a candy bar for a dime.  I know this makes me sound old, and this is the kind of stuff my parents used to say, but young people today really can't imagine what it was like fifty years ago.

Something like ISIS isn't actually all that hard to envisage in a pre-internet world. Look, for example the following the IRB, and later the IRA, had in North America in the second half of the 19th and early 20th century. Without the millions of dollars pouring in from the US (and to a lesser extent Canada), the Republican movement wouldn't have survived the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, never mind stage the 1867 and 1916 risings, nor the eventually successful War of Independence.