The 90s were better. They just were. I’m sorry, but it’s science. It was the past, but there were vaccines and Jim Crow was over and there was a modern sensibility without all of the pathologies of the internet. Bill Clinton sucked and our government was doing all kinds of awful skulduggery in the world, but he didn’t suck in the same way as George W. Bush and there wasn’t this constant sense of the world falling apart. There was optimism about the coming of the new millennium before we found out what a rotten time the next couple decades would be. I graduated from high school in 1999; we were constantly told that we would become adults in a brand new world, what a blessing it was to be 18 when the calendar flipped to 2000. What they didn’t tell us was that the new era would start with a spasm of nationalism and empire and that our culture would climb deeply into the prurient and grotesque, a world of frosted tips and reality television, and after that all of culture would be swallowed up by new devices that became intermediaries between us and the basic stuff of human life.
The last line is it. This is my grand unifying theory of why everything is "worse" now. No doubt it actually is, in some ways, but stuff has always sucked, for some people, all of the time, and on the whole it sucks less for everyone now, but we feel worse.
Simply, we have too much information. We're not supposed to know this much. We're not supposed to talk to this many people. I'm not supposed to sit in my underwear and write a few disembodied sentences to thousands of faceless strangers whom I hope agree with me. The 90s, during which I was a child, but sentient enough, seem, as you say, like the right balance of progress and technology without too much information.
We're not meant to drive cars. Our brains haven't evolved to work that fast. And we're not meant to be on the internet. Our brains haven't evolved to know that much.
So so true. I graduated in 2000 and spent the 90s (also in New England) smoking weed, having sex, going to cheap concerts and tailgating, going to festivals (thankfully missed Woodstock 99 for a smaller one up north), visiting Boston by train, driving around on 99 cent gasoline, buying CDs, dyeing my hair with box dye, talking in chat rooms with people I didn't know then later meeting some of them IRL, watching Nick at Nite and MTV on my 13" TV, and making collect calls just like you (though I remember 10 cent ones too somehow). I miss it all.
I was a teen in the early 80s and I feel I could have written this same essay about how I grew up in a real time and kids in the 90s didn’t. Teenagers in the 90s grew up inside and didn’t have the real experiences we had, and listened to cold music with no soul. This led them to be distant from themselves, to only have ways of knowing of themselves through the coldness of behemoth mega homogenized culture. To have Ronald Reagan as a surrogate dad. To have parents and school administrators afraid of giving kids freedom. Gen X and their helium speaking voices didn’t seem to be rooted, didn’t seem to be secure, didn’t seem to have courage, to us who were a little older, and it wasn’t their fault. They didn’t know how to put in their bodies and dance. They stood on the side and watched others watching others.
The Internet Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster to the human race. My generation (Gen Z) have spent our lives using these instant-gratification devices. All it’s done is make us more atomized than ever before. Political partisanship has skyrocketed over the past few years, largely due to media echo chambers.
I live in Brooklyn where there are still record stores. But it’s mostly a hipster thing. So even that is a subculture now. Young people otherwise have no place to congregate, which is also a big reason youngsters aren’t having sex anymore. We all just stay inside and communicate through screens. That’s not how stable communities are built.
I agree with pretty much everything Freddie has written here and I cannot stress how so much of this is still available to anyone who wants it if they just do two things: (a) Get rid of your smartphone, and (b) get off social media. I've done both and it's fantastic. I'll never, ever go back to either. As the old AOL CDs used to say: Try it for a week!
Also:, re:
“I’ll be at Place at Time,” and then you were at that place at that time
Yes. And there wasn't this obsessive need to text someone when you left your house to go to their house. "I'm on my way!" "Leaving now!" I don't care. I do not care when you leave your home. Just be here when we agreed you would be here and that's enough. Mother of pearl.
I only lived 5 years in the 90s but my sense of the early 2000s compared to now is that colors were more vivid and sensations were stronger. This is because the experience of sensation is tied to our dopamine systems in our minds and modern technologies have destroyed those systems. Experience in general is, in a very real way, much more blunted now. Be it colors, orgasms, tastes, etc you name it.
I have nothing but fondness for the 90s. Back in '95, I was a divorced American living in the States and AOL was the only internet game in town. I entered a language chat room to practice my German and a nice person helped me out. Turned out he had a great sense of humour and he was (surprise, surprise) German. We exchanged emails, private chats on AOL messenger, and even texted each other per pager. We finally exchanged photos per snail mail. Telephone calls ensued. Then, much to the horror of my family, I visited him in Germany. We met, fell in love, and were married for 22 wonderful years until he died at age 54 and now I live alone in Germany. I will be forever thankful to the Internet for introducing me to my German, salsa-dancing mathematician husband.
The 90s were awesome, indeed, but I actually graduated from high school in 1989, and although college was amazing, I spent most of my 90s working for some weird, unknown reason. There were quite a few wonderful moments nevertheless, but personally, my 30s (the 2000s) were better, even though the world was worse for affluent Americans. That decade is the one in which I met my wife and became a Dad.
Even in the early 90s, we still had the sense that earlier generations had partied harder and better than we had, and that the glory days of youth culture were not quite over, but they were ending. I can't imagine that young people felt that way in, say, the 60s and 70s.
I wanted to hate this piece. I turned 11 in 1999, so I mostly associate the nineties with being bored, plus Britney Spears, N'Sync, and Limp Bizkit. But...yeah, I remember Going Places to Do Things. I remember feeling like the world I lived in was the world, and not some lame copy of a million other suburbs, unsatisfying because it's not the two or three cool places that have something original going on (except if I do more research, I'll realize even those places are copying some other place). I get it.
Also, I had the too small Dodge (Plymouth, actually, in my case) Neon, and was in my school's production of Arsenic and Old Lace.
Feb 6, 2023·edited Feb 6, 2023Liked by Freddie deBoer
Yes. A bit earlier, in the mid-80s, I spent a couple of years living and traveling in South America, and God, was it a different world. I'd call home once a month so my parents knew I was alive and kicking (calls were $3-5 a minute, and I was living on $5 a day, so once a month was it), and there was something wonderful about the complete freedom of no one I knew knowing where I was on any given day. (I was 23/24 then and oblivious; now as a parent I look back and I can't believe my parents had to go through that, but that was life then, and we all took it for granted.) You'd meet other travelers and spend the night talking, and then you's shake hands and say, "have a good life," and mean it, because there was no way to stay in touch beyond that (yes, you could exchange mailing addresses, but no one was going to write). Today I have two girls, 18 and 3, and I am sad that they will never know that level of freedom. So yes, I am old, etc., and some things are better now, but others were definitely better then.
It's hard for me to separate nostalgia from a cold-hearted assessment of the present age. But for me, the thing I hate the most about the present time is the hyper-politicization of every goddamn thing under the sun. Why does every single opinion or speech act or piece of art have to be coded left or right now? It's the height of dumbassery.
re: email. I'm a little older than you and there was this beautiful time, between 1993 and 1996 or so, when everybody got an email account for the first time. And it was magnificent! There were no stamps to buy and delivery was instant. And without any other paradigm for electronic communication, people wrote each letters. The letters! I've archived my email over the years and the emails I received from friends in this period were just magnificent: witty, informative and full of enthusiasm for the new medium.
Now email is a vaguely oppressive source of work angst. And no current form of interpersonal electronic communication remotely comes close.
It is uncontroversially true that the best videogames of all time all came out in the 1990s (especially if we count Mario 3's US release rather than its Japanese release).
You write about how the US was the seat of capitalism and empire, and it was and is, but the 90s feeling is inextricably tied up with the end of the Cold War. Really, the end of a century of war. The 90s were not a good time for Russians, and they were great for Americans. Everyone got their share of the peace dividend, mostly psychologically and culturally.
The last line is it. This is my grand unifying theory of why everything is "worse" now. No doubt it actually is, in some ways, but stuff has always sucked, for some people, all of the time, and on the whole it sucks less for everyone now, but we feel worse.
Simply, we have too much information. We're not supposed to know this much. We're not supposed to talk to this many people. I'm not supposed to sit in my underwear and write a few disembodied sentences to thousands of faceless strangers whom I hope agree with me. The 90s, during which I was a child, but sentient enough, seem, as you say, like the right balance of progress and technology without too much information.
We're not meant to drive cars. Our brains haven't evolved to work that fast. And we're not meant to be on the internet. Our brains haven't evolved to know that much.
So so true. I graduated in 2000 and spent the 90s (also in New England) smoking weed, having sex, going to cheap concerts and tailgating, going to festivals (thankfully missed Woodstock 99 for a smaller one up north), visiting Boston by train, driving around on 99 cent gasoline, buying CDs, dyeing my hair with box dye, talking in chat rooms with people I didn't know then later meeting some of them IRL, watching Nick at Nite and MTV on my 13" TV, and making collect calls just like you (though I remember 10 cent ones too somehow). I miss it all.
I was a teen in the early 80s and I feel I could have written this same essay about how I grew up in a real time and kids in the 90s didn’t. Teenagers in the 90s grew up inside and didn’t have the real experiences we had, and listened to cold music with no soul. This led them to be distant from themselves, to only have ways of knowing of themselves through the coldness of behemoth mega homogenized culture. To have Ronald Reagan as a surrogate dad. To have parents and school administrators afraid of giving kids freedom. Gen X and their helium speaking voices didn’t seem to be rooted, didn’t seem to be secure, didn’t seem to have courage, to us who were a little older, and it wasn’t their fault. They didn’t know how to put in their bodies and dance. They stood on the side and watched others watching others.
The Internet Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster to the human race. My generation (Gen Z) have spent our lives using these instant-gratification devices. All it’s done is make us more atomized than ever before. Political partisanship has skyrocketed over the past few years, largely due to media echo chambers.
I live in Brooklyn where there are still record stores. But it’s mostly a hipster thing. So even that is a subculture now. Young people otherwise have no place to congregate, which is also a big reason youngsters aren’t having sex anymore. We all just stay inside and communicate through screens. That’s not how stable communities are built.
I agree with pretty much everything Freddie has written here and I cannot stress how so much of this is still available to anyone who wants it if they just do two things: (a) Get rid of your smartphone, and (b) get off social media. I've done both and it's fantastic. I'll never, ever go back to either. As the old AOL CDs used to say: Try it for a week!
Also:, re:
“I’ll be at Place at Time,” and then you were at that place at that time
Yes. And there wasn't this obsessive need to text someone when you left your house to go to their house. "I'm on my way!" "Leaving now!" I don't care. I do not care when you leave your home. Just be here when we agreed you would be here and that's enough. Mother of pearl.
I always frame this feeling as "I miss when the internet was a place we visited, not a place we inhabited."
I only lived 5 years in the 90s but my sense of the early 2000s compared to now is that colors were more vivid and sensations were stronger. This is because the experience of sensation is tied to our dopamine systems in our minds and modern technologies have destroyed those systems. Experience in general is, in a very real way, much more blunted now. Be it colors, orgasms, tastes, etc you name it.
I really wish you would have wrote that 90s book instead of Klosterman. This was so much better than any chapter in that book.
I have nothing but fondness for the 90s. Back in '95, I was a divorced American living in the States and AOL was the only internet game in town. I entered a language chat room to practice my German and a nice person helped me out. Turned out he had a great sense of humour and he was (surprise, surprise) German. We exchanged emails, private chats on AOL messenger, and even texted each other per pager. We finally exchanged photos per snail mail. Telephone calls ensued. Then, much to the horror of my family, I visited him in Germany. We met, fell in love, and were married for 22 wonderful years until he died at age 54 and now I live alone in Germany. I will be forever thankful to the Internet for introducing me to my German, salsa-dancing mathematician husband.
The 90s were awesome, indeed, but I actually graduated from high school in 1989, and although college was amazing, I spent most of my 90s working for some weird, unknown reason. There were quite a few wonderful moments nevertheless, but personally, my 30s (the 2000s) were better, even though the world was worse for affluent Americans. That decade is the one in which I met my wife and became a Dad.
Even in the early 90s, we still had the sense that earlier generations had partied harder and better than we had, and that the glory days of youth culture were not quite over, but they were ending. I can't imagine that young people felt that way in, say, the 60s and 70s.
I wanted to hate this piece. I turned 11 in 1999, so I mostly associate the nineties with being bored, plus Britney Spears, N'Sync, and Limp Bizkit. But...yeah, I remember Going Places to Do Things. I remember feeling like the world I lived in was the world, and not some lame copy of a million other suburbs, unsatisfying because it's not the two or three cool places that have something original going on (except if I do more research, I'll realize even those places are copying some other place). I get it.
Also, I had the too small Dodge (Plymouth, actually, in my case) Neon, and was in my school's production of Arsenic and Old Lace.
Yes. A bit earlier, in the mid-80s, I spent a couple of years living and traveling in South America, and God, was it a different world. I'd call home once a month so my parents knew I was alive and kicking (calls were $3-5 a minute, and I was living on $5 a day, so once a month was it), and there was something wonderful about the complete freedom of no one I knew knowing where I was on any given day. (I was 23/24 then and oblivious; now as a parent I look back and I can't believe my parents had to go through that, but that was life then, and we all took it for granted.) You'd meet other travelers and spend the night talking, and then you's shake hands and say, "have a good life," and mean it, because there was no way to stay in touch beyond that (yes, you could exchange mailing addresses, but no one was going to write). Today I have two girls, 18 and 3, and I am sad that they will never know that level of freedom. So yes, I am old, etc., and some things are better now, but others were definitely better then.
It's hard for me to separate nostalgia from a cold-hearted assessment of the present age. But for me, the thing I hate the most about the present time is the hyper-politicization of every goddamn thing under the sun. Why does every single opinion or speech act or piece of art have to be coded left or right now? It's the height of dumbassery.
re: email. I'm a little older than you and there was this beautiful time, between 1993 and 1996 or so, when everybody got an email account for the first time. And it was magnificent! There were no stamps to buy and delivery was instant. And without any other paradigm for electronic communication, people wrote each letters. The letters! I've archived my email over the years and the emails I received from friends in this period were just magnificent: witty, informative and full of enthusiasm for the new medium.
Now email is a vaguely oppressive source of work angst. And no current form of interpersonal electronic communication remotely comes close.
It is uncontroversially true that the best videogames of all time all came out in the 1990s (especially if we count Mario 3's US release rather than its Japanese release).
You write about how the US was the seat of capitalism and empire, and it was and is, but the 90s feeling is inextricably tied up with the end of the Cold War. Really, the end of a century of war. The 90s were not a good time for Russians, and they were great for Americans. Everyone got their share of the peace dividend, mostly psychologically and culturally.