Mad Men explores this cultural shift really well. It gets harder for Don to maintain his double identity and for everyone else to separate their work and personal identities as the show progresses and the post-1960 surveillance state becomes increasingly powerful, making people more connected and making it more easy to ‘look up’ information on each other’s pasts or ruin reputations across different states. The show has a sense of rising paranoia and rising desperation to escape everything and be ‘off-grid’ (California represents this ideal), yet a sad nostalgia knowing that true anonymity might never be possible again. It is fitting that the 1971 Coca Cola ad is the the final scene of the show, it captures this eerie interconnectedness well and foreshadows the even more globalized panopticon in the years to come.
you used to be able to rent a hotel room under a fake name now i need an app to do my damn laundry