Everyone sucks at driving. Humans simply don’t have an innate comprehension of the physics of muti-ton metal boxes moving at high speeds or the physical reactions necessary to operate them safely. Even if we actually did, there are underlying psychological phenomenon that make people bad at driving. Humans are social animals, but when you isolate them in a metal box they stop being able to read social queues and start seeing everything outside the car as just obsticals instead of other drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians.
There are dozens of reasons driving is extremely bad for everyone involved, and why it feels awful for most people most of the time.
Absolutely. If you can bike, it’s amazing. We went mostly car free for our last 6 months in the US. It was both wonderful and horrible. There are so many places it’s just not safe to go on a bike, but not being in a car reduces your stress levels so much it’s hard to imagine.
So, the director hid a swastika in one of the shadows to indicate that he thought the society was evil, among a ton of other things. He talked about it in the director’s commentary. But yeah, it’s actually super easy to miss unless you know it’s actually a warning (which, like you said, the teenage boys it’s marketed to wouldn’t understand)… Which is kind of the problem with a lot of media, like the entire genre of cyberpunk.
It was always that bad, it was just better at hiding it in the past. Anyone who grows up poor has always known what’s up. There’s a reason the crooked rural sheriff meme exists… If it wasn’t for massive amounts of racism folks would probably recognize the same patterns in the cities.
It’s not new, it’s just that the dysfunction got so big that it started impacting the lives of white Liberals. Fuck, go read about native history in the US. They knew what was up from the beginning.