Early 90s: Michael Jordan was practically the Pope. There was probably at least one Michael Jordan poster in every indoor structure in North America (usually a freeze-frame of him dunking the ball - so you got to see his armpits multiple times every day). Insanely expensive, alien looking basketball sneakers were a mandatory status symbol for teens, who were known to assault each other to steal their shoes.
In the late 90s, one heard this song about 40 times a day.
Or this song:
Quarries were also prime sources of entertainment back then as well.By coincidence I’m currently reading this, a book called “Virtual Worlds” by Benjamin Woolley. It was published in 1992. It’s melancholic because I was embarking on a computer course at college en route to computing at university, and it was precisely the kind of thing I might have read back when it was new (I can’t remember if I did). It’s British, and so it takes a sceptical, unsentimental tone, and actually has much more to say about the zeitgeist of cyberculture than VR itself. I imagine if the book had been American it would simply have been a mass of hype. Americans all invest in the stock market and do not tolerate anything that might affect this; you can’t trust them on matters of fact.
It’s melancholic reading about Timothy Leary, Wes Thomas, Jaron Lanier etc. They’re either dead now or yesterday’s men. Nicholas Negroponte is still around. This being 1992, Steven Jobs appears very briefly, as the head of NeXT, which is working on Zilla, a “community supercomputer” (e.g a network of NeXT machines).
As with a lot of futurism the basics are sound but the timescale is way off, and there are odd assumptions that snowball into ridiculous conclusions (the old idea that modems would be around forever and so therefore we’d never be able to download video and so therefore in the future television programmes would have CGI sets generated by your computer, with only video footage of the actors being transmitted, etc).
But, er, the 1990s. My only real experience is with the late 1990s, which seems much like today; from a young person’s perspective the biggest difference is that media is far more readily available. It was difficult getting hold of John Woo films or Japanese animation back then. If you wanted to listen to drum’n’bass 12" singles of the Aphex Twin’s Analogue Bubblebath series you either had to buy them or get a friend to tape them. I’m tempted to say that there was a less stark divide between rich and poor, especially in London, but I have no idea if this is true. People were living in sheds in the early 2000s.
In general my answer is that the progress of society since then has been much like the progress of computing. The fundamentals are the same, it’s just that in the 1990s everything took longer and was more difficult; but nowadays the competition has advanced, and so relatively speaking no-one has an advantage. Even in terms of the internet there were analogues of things we have today, at least by the end of the decade.
In a wide geopolitical sense there was a feeling that war was over, the world was doing a-okay, people who joined the army were idiots and the future was the stock market and endless money. But then as now the newspapers and Wired magazine are full of rubbish, and ultimately it’s all about money, and you can’t trust people on the subject of money because it’s like having an erection, it clouds the mind and causes your trousers to bulge out. Some people are embarrassed about standing up, some people don’t care what other people think about their bulge.
As for coffee shops, at least in the UK I associate them with people blogging about Howard Dean using their wi-fi laptops, which is really a mid-2000s thing. The 1990s was Irish theme pubs and gastropubs. Coffee shops were a bit modern, a bit hip, a London thing for Londoners. Back in the 1990s laptops cost thousands of pounds and were still barely fit for purpose. Without affordable laptops and wi-fi, what was the point of going to a coffee shop? What were you supposed to do?
Looking back, I have the impression that you really had to be staggeringly wealthy to afford a decent sports car in the UK in the 1960s, and for most people there was simply no hope whatsoever of owning an Aston Martin. No hope at all, it wasn’t even worth dreaming about. Now there are very few things that are completely out of reach; it’s as if houses have taken the place of luxury goods as the thing that people cannot even dream about, the bleak thing being that without a house you are homeless, without an Aston Martin you can still drive around. I often wonder if Western politicians have seen the model in Brazil and other places like that - a small number of rich people, everybody else living in awful murder holes, a police force to keep them there - and have decided that they aren’t even going to bother pretending to care for the poor any more. Fuck 'em, let them die. But was that any different in the 1980s, the 1930s? I just don’t know.
I’ve never heard of a country going back to the Brazil model. The Brazil model is usually part of the evolution upwards. The West used to have mostly masses of poor people at the beginning of the industrial revolution. The broad middle class came about because of all the wealth that generated and the ability of a now unionized work force to get their share of all that wealth. But that process took nearly 100 years in the West, I don’t know why we’d expect it to go faster in the Third World.
I guess since it’s relevant to this thread, our fixation on the distinctiveness of decades demonstrates just how short term our thinking is. A decade is like a different era to modern Westerners, whereas throughout most of human history things would be mostly the same when you died as they were when you were born. And in much of the world, it’s still like that, with the exception of Western technology violently upsetting a local culture. Now instead of the thugs having to raise an army of spearmen to fight the peaceful village’s spearmen, they just get a jeep and a few guns and they can lord it over the poor villagers.
I don’t know, I was too busy taming the west.
I was ten in 1990. I remember having to wait for songs I wanted to come on the radio. I didn’t go online until 1996. Having venues to discover new music was everything to me. Before that I would slowly compile info from the rare magazine. I had an out of date discography in one book about The Cure, stuff like that. It felt like a miracle if Beavis and Butt Head played a good video. (On the other hand a hidden gem on late night tv is more exciting than netflix with it all at once.) I was never the person who knew people who knew about cool stuff and then there was everyone online. I always think about what I would be listening to if I had been from another time… It felt more pinned to popularity back then, though, than later. Top hits were what you got. Less room for diverging interests…
I think it’s mostly the same from my late teens. I wasn’t paying attention to societal changes as a kid. My memory of the first gulf war was not being allowed to talk when the news was on. There wasn’t 24 hours news yet, at least. Sound bite culture got worse, for sure. Scrolling tid bits and instant. Where I live it got more and more expensive and homeless were zoned out, panhandling laws. The gainesville murders were when I was a kid. High school shootings started when I was hardly out of there. I wouldn’t have imagined that in 1990. I have no idea what changed. I don’t know if anything did or it went over my head as a kid learning the basics of go to school. It seems like it is colder. Same time, I doubt it… I was aware of SOME stuff (kids who couldn’t afford lunches being made to announce every day in roll call they required school meals). That’s probably still true somewhere, or always was. Thinking about it mixed in with being a kid and innocent and also not used to cruel facts of life… Man, I can’t say if it’s changed.
This songis typically used by tv and movies to set a scene as taking place in the early 90s for a reason.
I think the fact that you believe that all of human history can be viewed as “staying mostly the same” outside of Western civilization within the past 100 years kind of shows how short term your thinking is. It just looks like it stayed mostly the same to us because we are viewing it from hundreds of years.
This is positively not true, on about a dozen different levels.
“It was a tumultuous time for our nation. The clear beverage craze gave us all a reason to live. The information superhighway showed the average person what some nerd thinks about Star Trek. And the domestication of the dog continued unabated.”
