I think a lot about how the death note as a concept for a story could really only be interesting when paired with technology. Ryuk says that Light is the first to write so many names, but he also is coincidentally in the timeframe where information is starting to become more accessible to common people through the internet - if the last death note had been dropped even a few decades earlier, or maybe even centuries earlier, of course no one would/could write as many? How accessible or easy would it have been to look up or find the people you think should die without having to physically seek that information out? How much more inconvenient might it have been if you were limited to names of people you knew or physically associated with, granted that you didn't get the eyes, and granted you lived in an era that did not have rigorous identification records yet you could conceivably access?
I find it horrifyingly #relatable how Light coming to the decision to kill was paired with him Staring At The TV ("the world can't go on like this") cuz it's something of an entirely unique problem to a blooming modern era of technology to feel entirely overwhelmed by Suddenly Witnessing Everything Bad Happening At Once when individuals did not necessarily have to deal with that mental or emotional overwhelm of having constant informational access no one person had been expected to handle before now. Is the world actually getting more morally deprived as it ages, or does it merely feel like it is when you increasingly have less means to be blissfully ignorant of what's going on outside of your immediate environment?
Now increasingly after 2010s, we can witness the infuriating circumstances of harm or suffering caused to people halfway around the world we otherwise wouldn't even know existed. Now, we can feel the overwhelming sense of helplessness, because knowledge begets empathy. It begets a sense you must do something to alleviate that suffering you now have the burden of knowing paired with the curse of little or no conceivable means of acting on in a substantial way:
Until you get a death note. Until the impossible becomes possible when you now know exactly who did what, exactly who is in positions of responsibility to stop or punish them for certain preventable tragedies when they were otherwise untouchable from your distance. But even then, it can become extremely easy to reduce a person's existence to an abstract concept behind a screen that, if given a means to commit violence without having to physically enact it, is a HORRIFIC COMBO - you don't have to witness the pain you're inflicting, you don't have to perceive someone's being in the form of the violence you'd normally have to commit against their body. You are basing the worth of someone's life on nothing but what could have been the lowest, weakest points of their lives without any regard for the truth of their entire self: and you couldn't always know, when the anonymity and noise of the internet thrives off of outrage and tumult of often confused, misinformed, or ignorant opinion when you're flooded with just so much info.
The death note as an already deadly weapon is only made infinitely deadlier by the era it is dropped in. I very much think Light Yagami's goal or psyche could likely only be conceived as a direct product of his time, and the relationship between the two is something I find fascinating underexplored territory in terms of DN's timeframe: whether Light is someone still in a era of that sheltered ignorant bubble, or if he were instead right at the cusp of when that bubble could evolve and eventually pop.
