709. Why are attitudes toward “subject manipulation” different in the 21st century than in earlier times?

Because there weren’t cameras everywhere in the past.

Thanks to smartphones (which were introduced a few years after the turn of the 21st century), there are at least three billion more people who now carry a camera daily compared to just twenty years ago, added on to hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras filming countless aspects of daily life.

As a result of all of those cameras, in the 21st century:

A. Except in outdoor/wilderness/nature photography, it is increasingly difficult to find subjects about which it can convincingly be said, “no one who influenced the appearance of the subject had any idea it might be photographed”; and

B. The viewing public has largely abandoned any regular expectation of truly “candid” photography in the sense of “people doing things in public that they had no idea would be photographed.” (This change will be even more clear as cameras become built in to eyeglasses, as discussed in #2 here.)