People like to take out their anger on Facebook/Tiktok but the bigger issue is that human communication doesn’t work well at scale.
Human experience is temporal and locality sensitive (hence the distinctions between us vs them, such as boomers/millenials, west/east), and scaling it to different temporal and local contexts inevitably leads to hostility and tribalism.
For hundreds of thousands of years we lived in groups of dozens. Only in the past few hundreds years have larger cities become where most people live. Mass person-to-person communication is only a few decades old. Our ape brains are very adaptable, but the modern world is a lot to ask of them.
It was only a few years ago that I realised that every major advance in communications, going back to speech and arguably before, had a profound influence on human (or pre-human) society, culture, and interactions.
Shortly after I discovered Elizabeth Eisenstein, who'd pretty much developed that thesis, off the work of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, and with parallels to Harold Lasswell and other media theorists.
"vertical-align" has always been around since the beginning if you're okay with setting the line height to the height of the page.
The original model for style might have been text, but that didn't stop anyone from doing what they needed. The question has always been more whether you really want an element vertically centered to the page rather than to a page section.
People like to take out their anger on Facebook/Tiktok but the bigger issue is that human communication doesn’t work well at scale.
Human experience is temporal and locality sensitive (hence the distinctions between us vs them, such as boomers/millenials, west/east), and scaling it to different temporal and local contexts inevitably leads to hostility and tribalism.