Post by @ajroach42@retro.social

2026-09-17 15:52 UTC

Seatbelts: Seatbelts existed for a long time before they were mandatory in cars. Seatbelts pre-date cars. Car companies had been engaged in a decades long propaganda campaign against the idea that cars were unsafe or needed seatbelts. When seatbelts were made mandatory in cars, people were resistant because they had been the victims of a propaganda campaign. People are bad at internalizing risk and understanding risk reduction, and car companies had been very successful in their anti-seatbelt propaganda. Seatbelts were not a new or revolutionary technology, just an obvious thing that people had been trained to resist.

Replies (2)

@ajroach42@retro.social 2026-09-17 15:58

Vaccines fall into a similar boat. Vaccines were absolutely a revolutionary technology! Continue to be! But Vaccines relied on science that most people didn't understand, and felt like magic, and still depended on people internalizing external risks but then also added doing something painful that many people were afraid of, and then feeling sick for several days (and, to be fair, the absolutely abhorrent and racist Tuskegee experiments was more than enough evidence for many people that vaccine mandates were untrustworthy.) In both cases, these were not technologies that we were asking people to use on an ongoing basis, but preventative measures that were put in the hands of people who had not been effectively educated about the mechanisms at play or the efficacy of the preventative measures, and who had (or, in the case of vaccines, continue to have) huge amounts of anti-education propaganda fed to them.

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@reb@retro.social 2026-09-17 16:17

@ajroach42@retro.social there's a folk tale, probably at least partially true, that engineers at Volvo developed the modern inertia reel seatbelt, and immediately made the patent freely available for any manufacturer to implement. Volvo were, at least until the Ford ownership days when safety tech was fairly universal, one of the few auto makers who genuinely took safety seriously. The P80 platform Volvos of which I have now had (counts on fingers) five are one of the few pre-2000 cars that I not only feel safe in driving myself, but would not hesitate to carry my family in when the day comes. In fact, my previous one saved my life, which it probably couldn't have if I hadn't put my seatbelt on despite getting in the car intending to never get out. Among the friend group I inherited from my dad, the most common killers have been cigarettes and car crashes.

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