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The Future Once Seemed So Bright. What Happened? (beneaththepavement.substack.com)
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[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 12 points 1 year ago

Lmao the 90s seemed bright??

Maybe the 80s seemed bright-ish but the 90s were marked by the serious cumulative effects of neoliberal policy on the western world and it was the era of political hangover where the bright optimism marked by the 60s and 70s was lost to the ugly side of individualism, ennui, and hopelessness. We also saw the rise of "globalisation" and the despair that came with it (cursed, ahistorical term though; capitalism has always been globalised. From the earliest days of the first corporations such as the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company etc. it's always been globalised, the only difference was that the 90s was a sudden shock where the west might suddenly find itself somewhat on the receiving end of the uglier side of globalisation, essentially for the first time in history.)

Maybe the 90s seem comparatively bright from a retrospective angle but it's drawing a long bow and appealing to false nostalgia to claim that the 90s was in any way an optimistic era.

[-] BodyBySisyphus@hexbear.net 8 points 1 year ago

Legit, it seems like most media then (even media targeted at kids) was tinged with a sense of meaninglessness - the end of history had arrived and for all most of the adults in our lives knew it meant 40 years of meaningless busywork in the cube farm followed by 20 years of idle retirement at some point punctuated by a stay in the nursing home and that trickled down to any kids who were paying attention. I by and large had a good, middle class upbringing, so maybe my experience was different from folks who were either wealthier or more precarious. And I also spent most of my early adulthood struggling with depression so maybe that tinges my recollections, but I don't remember much in the way of optimism.

[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The majority of the music and a lot of the media of the 90s was absolutely characterised by the sense of meaninglessness and nihilism and futility that was the zeitgeist of that era - think grunge music and Daria.

I guess that was counterposed by the exxxtreme marketing and media that was similar tone but I think that represented the sense that we were scraping the bottom of the barrel and in order to feel anything or to get a sense of purpose/power it had to be hardcore. (I guess it's worth mentioning that there wasn't always a clear distinction between the nihilistic media and the extreme media because often the two were blended together - stuff like Beavis and Butthead and early South Park are good examples of this, with early South Park leaning in really hard into parodying the previous eras of narratives in TV shows that were heavy on moralising; South Park could only ever have a moral aspect to its storylines when it was dripping with satire and irony.)

It might seem like those two are really incompatible but if you look at society at that time as if it were a chronically depressed person then it's easy to grasp the sort of pendulum swings from emptiness and numbness to the high-energy, anxious, almost frantic state which only leads to a crash back into a deeper numbness that we're talking about here. Or like the person who is overstimulated to the point that their senses are so dulled that it takes really extreme input in order for it to register and for them to feel anything at all which ultimately leads to being more desensitised.

[-] HexReplyBot@hexbear.net 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

[-] FuckyWucky@hexbear.net 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Hey every decade since 90s has been worse than the one before .

[-] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 5 points 1 year ago

This is a fact

this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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