Didn't the machines design The Matrix in the series of the same name after 1997 or so because it was seen as the 'pinnacle of your civilisation' or something?
yes, except it was 1999, and that was the same year the first movie was released.
it's interesting to look back on the significance of 1999 20+ years later, but obviously they didn't understand what we would think about it at the time.
What's most interesting is that the beginning of that movie, Neo's life is portrayed as being horrific drudgery.
Yet modern youths look at it today and find it aspirational.
"Wait, so I have a steady income writing code, have a cool apartment, and get to go to awesome underground raves at night? What's the problem exactly?"
That was the end of the 90's in a nutshell. It was the best time in history to be alive, but noone thought it at the time.
People were BORED that the Cold War ended, the world was at peace, and economic conditions worldwide were improving without any slowdown.
It's funny because the movie even addressed that right before:
> Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.
People just didn't realize the end of the '90s was relatively perfect compared to so much of the 20th century.
Depends which part, but generally I disagree as being a teenager during those times. Imagine 2 generations who never experienced freedom of travel, freedom of speech or any other type of it we take for granted now. And suddenly you could travel.
Sure, you most probably didn't have means for anything extravagant or frequent, but you still could actually travel, and nobody would shoot you like a rabid dog on the border or throw you into uranium mines for a decade or two to just die there.
It was wild time, local mafias, few people dissolved in acid (but generally due to close association with mobsters). People progressively getting richer, not ending up rich but if you start very low any progress is massive. You could see it ie in car ownership - before car parks around were often half empty, but they were gradually filling up (and now they are overflowing).
Of course there were losers, people who worked for decades in a factory in the middle of nowhere and it suddenly went bankrupt. Too stubborn/scared of change to move elsewhere, slide into alcoholism (if not there already) and long term unemployment. Transition from communism was universally messed up and just few ahole got obscenely rich. Smart people had endless possibilities, rest was still one foot in old regime which was just about coarsing, slacking or worse. Pretty awesome to experience, of course hindsight is required.
My parents were denied in late 80s even trip to former Yugoslavia, which was a neutral state (but you could escape from there to Austria). They really wanted to show their kiddo a nice sea, nothing more, for landlocked countries it was a very special experience. They were not dissidents or anything, both university educated (which was a rarity back then and people had to actually study hard unlike these days due to messed up incentives, but thats another topic). Heck, even travel to Poland which was neighbor and communist as much as us was very complicated and frequently denied.
My father, after maybe 2 years of attempts to get approval for travel to Yugoslavia, ended up in dark lit room with just 1 guy from secret service sitting behind the desk. The guy just stared at him for 45 minutes straight, eye to eye, no word uttered. Absolute power and its projection. Of course, denied. That was former Czechoslovakia, Slovakia part. I've heard some people could travel a bit more, but generally there were reasons for that and they were not nice reasons. At least I can say I am proud of my parents for keeping their morals when there were strong motivations to betray them.
I came of age in Slovakia in the 90s and it was a great time. There were many many problems, and things are a lot better now, but it was a ton better than during the communist dictatorship that collapsed in 1989.
Slovakia and Czechia are technically Central Europe, but it was part of the Eastern Bloc and USSR sphere of influence. I know Russia and other former USSR had a rough time during the 90s, but for many other countries from the Bloc it was a major improvement over the 80s (those countries that are now in the EU/NATO and generally considered to be a part of the "West" these days). Like for example Romania, even with some major major problems, was certainly better in the 90s than during the brutal Ceausescu's regime. Or Eastern Germany that got to reunite with it's long lost brother.
Or the third world. There has been a lot of economic growth since the 90s, in particular in China. China's economy grew a lot in the 90s but was still pretty poor by end of decade. China now has economy that is close to low developed levels.
Another good example is extreme poverty. Which dropped from 1.8 billion to 1.6 billion in 90s and to 710 million by 2021. A billion people not having the immediate experience of hunger is a big win.
"Objectively" sounds like good way to avoid talking about many things that were an issue at the time, with no real objective backing. Even the first sentence is a bit of an issue: "Jim Crow was over" is a bit misleading to say, even today.
When all U.S. citizens can vote without artificial obstacles, perhaps. Felons. People for whom IDs are out of reach. People who have to work Election Day. Single parents who can’t easily take hours out of their day to stand in line at the polls.
No clue, but nor would I make a claim that I know. By most accounts racial disparity still exists, if not in the US, certainly in other countries. Taking a metric-centric approach as a starting point is probably an issue in and of itself, though.
When there aren't 4+ generation deep African American families who 1st were denied the right to vote by slavery, then by Jim Crow, and now by mass incarceration. Making it so that regardless of what term the United States uses for the management of the black labor population in the end it is functionally identical
In the 80s and the 90s, the USDA systematically discriminated against Black farmers (and farmers of other races), leading to some of the largest civil rights settlements in U.S. history [0]. One metric to hit that could suggest that “Jim Crow is over” is for settlements like these to cease to exist or at least become as common a settlements for racial discrimination by white plaintiffs.
African-Americans having the same average income as the rest of population. Would have to deal with poverty, education inequality, incarceration, and employment discrimination to get there. I saw article that says that getting blacks into high-income careers would be enough to fix the average income.
Objectively better if you were a rich white straight American dude. Much like the the eighties and seventies. And only entirely oblivious people didn't care about the environment back then. And unaware of global events because, well the whole global instability caused by the fall of the iron curtain. Also only if you weren't having sex, like the author claims for himself, because, you know, AIDS.
The major downside of the 90s was fewer treatment for serious diseases, like cancer, and fewer ways to make good money. Nowadays you got people making mid 6 figures with tech, or with youtube, streaming, tiktok, Onlyfans, instagram, Substack (The author himself makes over $200kyear with Substack), podcasts, option trading, etc. None of those things existed in the 90s, and even adjusted for inflation and stock options, tech pay was worse. Homes were cheaper, but harder to get good rates, and less appreciation. Yes, the 90s tech boom was quite lucrative for some, but it ended so abruptly too. The post-2006 app/sas/cloud boom has continued for 16+ years unstopped. College was cheaper, obviously, but salaries considerably lower too.
For people with talent and ambition, now is the best time in terms of pay and finding a huge audience online or recognition in fields such as AI, computer science, or physics. In the 90s if you were a bodybuilder or enjoyed working out, maybe your income options were limited to hustling steroids at the gym or selling workout videos, but guys on YouTube easily make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year or even millions through ads, selling program, supplements, etc. to a worldwide audiences of millions. Same for video games, thanks to Twitch. People are even getting rich making videos of binge eating. Pretty much any niche you can think of can be turned into a lucrative income stream.
Housing expenditure as a percent of income hasn't really changed in 50 years. Prices however vary inversely with interest rates. That also means no more gains. Raising rates recently has frozen the market.
Always the incredible disconnect between housing as an investment class vs housing as basic shelter. People turn their brains off and seem to believe that those two goals aren’t at odds, somehow.
Every time someone says the 90s were better than today I remind them that, back then, HIV was a death sentence. You got it, you were dead--that simple. The fact that we made it into a manageable chronic condition is an astonishing triumph of modern medicine.
By the 90's, though, everybody knew how it was spread, and it was pretty simple to choose to use condoms or abstain from sex, and not use IV drugs. Did everybody do so? No. But we had HIV-based sex ed in school and you knew what was up.
Compare that to now, where Covid can destroy your life and you can get it just going to the grocery store...it's much worse.
> Compare that to now, where Covid can destroy your life and you can get it just going to the grocery store...it's much worse.
The chance of dying from COVID is 4/100,000 if you're 80 years old and fully vaccinated [1]. HIV, by contrast, was a death sentence regardless of age. Before COVID vaccines were available, sure, you could compare the pandemics; nowadays, the two situations are not comparable.
At the beginning of the 90's it was, and at the end of the 90's you could expect to live a normal lifespan with treatment. Magic Johnson comes to mind - just looked it up and he announced he had it in 1991 and is still among us today.
> guys on YouTube easily make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year
...for some values of "easily"
Seriously, there have always been barriers to entry and always will be. They constantly shift. Yes, more competition is happening, which is good, but none of this is something the average person can realistically expect to do without a lot of difficulty (almost by definition).
Anything that's working well today is likely not to be a year from now. Most people aren't cut out for constantly chasing the fickle winds of change to optimize their latest hustle.
Your examples are unicorns. A huge part of their success is legacy network effects built over time, and oh yeah, luck.
There are more opportunities, yes. But the accessibility of those opportunities hasn't increased all that much. It still takes capital, networking, marketing, hard work and some temporary statistical anomalies which work in your favor at a time when you're equipped to make the most of them.
Things are supposed to be hard, not easy. And there are plenty of people making a living wage that you don’t hear about. Ever hear of the riches are in the niches?
Food in the 90's really sucked. At least in the US, food exchange and markets have significantly more and better food - especially produce. Beer in the US markets sucked back then too.
Quite the opposite. The 90's saw the grunge era end that shitty hairband decade of the 80's and the first half of the decade caught the tail end of the Golden era of rap as well. Even the pop music of the 90's was better than what we have now.
> Nowadays you got people making mid 6 figures …, or with youtube, streaming, tiktok, Onlyfans, instagram, Substack (The author himself makes over $200kyear with Substack), podcasts, option trading, etc
99% of the money goes to 1% or even 0.1% of people doing things like TikTok/onlyfans/substack/twitch/YT/etc, it’s not an actual choice for the vast majority of people.
college was cheaper, homes were cheaper, etc. But one must adjust for: borrowing costs, income, appreciation , etc. Jobs for college grads tended to pay much worse in the 90s even adjusting for inflation and student loan debt. I think appliances lasted longer without an obvious compromise, so that was one thing that was better.
I believe the key point the author is making here is that even if you buy digital media from Apple or Amazon, it doesn't amount to anything more than a long term rental because if they lose the rights to that media and pull it from their platform, you don't have it anymore even if you "bought" it.
I buy .m4a files from Apple and download them, then copy them from my laptop to my Android Phone. At this point they're so disconnected from the Apple infrastructure, I don't see any way they could pull it out from under me.
So, maybe Apple users should buy their music from Google Play store. Or, better yet, buy them from a third party (non-device platform) and play them on whatever platform they choose.
There are certainly ways to do it and we as the technical elite have all the skill sets required to do so but for the majority of users on these platforms who don't want to or aren't technically capable, it's a long term rental.
The file method also means you are locked into a format that may go the way of the dodo in 5 years.
There is no way to buy a license and stream forever and media in the digital form is getting less and less sticky. Things are more likely to disappear forever or be modified from the original format. At the same time, physical copies of media are rapidly no longer being made.
- Try digitally purchasing a Weinstein movie
- Episodes that are banned and gone forever from TV shows
The utopia of easily accessible digital archives of all media are becoming less and less of a reality. Having to maintain your own server and backup infrastructure to manage your digital media is kind of a step backwards from physical media and while it may be a hobby it's not a wide ranging solution.
Yes, and when I bought CDs back in the 90s I didn't really expect to be listening to them 25 years later. My tastes change over time.
On the other hand I'm a little confused what you mean by the format going away in 5 years. The format is sufficiently open that anyone can write a player for it (in theory). Unless I lose all copies of the files, there shouldn't be any reason it won't continue to exist as long as I like listening to it.
It's not as applicable to music but I have DVD/Blueray rips from 10 years ago that look like dogshit now that would necessitate a re-rip from original. If you download it and it's later removed from from that platform now you have no access to the original and are stuck with your lower quality copy. If you are ripping it, you need to keep all the original physical media which kinda defeats the purpose.
The promise of digital media was permanent access to a library that grew and updated with the technology. If I'm streaming a show I don't need to have 720, 4k, ultrawide versions, that's taken care of. New formats are added as they are developed.
if you buy albums/songs on iTunes, they are yours for good. they are drm-free and will reside in your music libraries for as long as you keep them there.
> All of life is a spoiler, and today’s kids get to experience nothing with virgin eyes
While that's the least our problems, it resonates with me. The fun has been sucked out of life experience in favor of some shitty wikipedia and google reviews version
If it's necessary to truncate the title of this piece, it seems like the sensible part of the title was removed in favor of the part that misrepresents the author's intent and turns it into clickbait.
It was the most awful time to live in the ex-USSR countries. Economic system and all the industries were destroyed overnight by Western "advisors" (shock "therapy"). People literally started dying of hunger. Numerous conflicts between different nations (I have little doubt that they happened without typical Western intervention) killed tens of thousands, maybe millions.
And if someone still says that World Economics is not a zero-sum game, I'll laugh in the face of that person.
USSR was destroyed and plundered exactly so that the West would enjoy the golden era of 90s while people were dying here and everything was being destroyed and sold to the West by the price of scrap metal.
I'm not sure that 'the west' is to blame for Russian kleptocrats stealing Russian assets from the Russian people. At some point this is a Russia problem.
All those "Russian kleptocrats" were made by the West. You've probably heard the name of Khodorkovskiy which is a thug who illegally grabbed state assets during privatization organized by CIA agents and was doing mainly two things: killing people (his competitors or people trying to investigate his dirty business) and selling the oil to the West for the price of water.
So, how do you think he's portrayed in the western media? As a freedom fighter and icon. It's unbelievable! But strength of western propaganda is unbeatable, they can make an idol out of anyone.
If I steal your tires and sell them to a pawn shop is the primary problem me, or is the pawn shop? I know it's fashionable to bellyache about the west but if the former USSR had a healthy, functioning government it wouldn't have these problems. The government was weak, it didn't have the support it needed, and it failed.
USSR was destroyed and plundered exactly so that the West would enjoy the golden era of 90s while people were dying here and everything was being destroyed and sold to the West by the price of scrap metal.
You think that the measly Russian economic output is what paid for the 90s boom?
And what do all these Russian oligarchs own? The Russians were preyed upon by their own, Putin being the finest example of this.
You know little of our history and economics. Even from the two statements you wrote it's clear that you're simply repeating the most unsophisticated media propaganda, sorry.
Putin came to power in 1999. Until then there was hunger, rampant crime and corruption. He managed to stop all that in just 2-3 years. People started to eat right, they had normal jobs again, it had become safe to go outside.
Western media that disguise as "Russian opposition" that work on destroying Russia from within, still have a very hard time explaining this to population. Because everyone who lived through the 90s remember very clearly how Putin managed to fix everything at once so quickly.
But to the western reader there's no need to explain that, you can start outright with the most obnoxious lies about Putin, since nobody there understands what happened here before and after Putin.
> You think that the measly Russian economic output is what paid for the 90s boom?
People on the West are used to count everything in paper (USD) which is printed in absurd amounts and allows them to inflate their GDP as they wish.
USSR economic output was higher than Russian. USSR had lots of resources, including immense supply of strategic materials (precious metals for example).
1. All that was sold to the West for the price of scrap. Also, not only materials, but plane's, ships and rockets blueprints, scientists, teachers, sport coaches. Just about everything that could be sold.
2. Collapse of the USSR and deliberate destruction of all the industry overnight created a huge market for Western corporations. Just overnight.
And yes, that paid for the boom of 90s.
> And what do all these Russian oligarchs own? The Russians were preyed upon by their own
And do you know how that happened? Before 1991 everything was state owned. After 1991 it was the western "advisors" (from CIA and that's not even a conspiracy theory) that created Russian oligarchs. Also made a buck themselves while being at it.
On the subject of "the best time to be alive" I find the following thought experiment helpful:
If I could choose which year I was going to be born but knew nothing else about my life, when would I chose? That is I wouldn't know which country, gender, mental composition, parents, socio-economic class, etc. etc. Only which year.
For me, it's hard not to pick today or even the future, if that's allowed. I think it would be fun to visit the past and be a fly on the wall, but with the constraints above I wouldn't want to risk a "bad roll."
> And then you went home and, precisely because you didn’t have access to all of the music that ever existed, you listened to the whole album, and then you’d listen to it again, and when you did you were just listening to it, rather than having music on in the background while you repetitively scrolled through other shit on your phone.
I had an argument about this with a friend of mine a while back.
"Why would you EVER do anything BUT just download and listen to the best songs on the album? Listening to the whole album, including the crap songs is just the height of stupidity. Why would you pay money for the crap songs??"
Counterpoint: The songs which grab you right away, may not be the ones with staying power. You get over them, and the more you listen to the songs which don't grab you right away, the more you start to appreciate their hidden depths.
90's music example: Megadeth's Rust In Peace album. Hanger 18 is the most obviously best song on the album, but you listen to the albums a few times, and if you're a guitar player you're going to start noticing the playing on Tornado of Souls. You go back and HOLY SHIT THIS SONG IS INSANE. That is a song that I can listen to decades later and still hear something new and interesting that I never noticed before.
Another counterpoint: Concept albums, which tell a story which is greater than the sum of its parts. Listening to the whole album of 2112 by Rush is far superior to just listening to Temples of Syrinx. Or, the whole of Dream Theater's Metropolis Pt. 2 instead of just The Dance of Eternity.
My friend is not a musician and has a fairly casual appreciation of music. So of course, he has a shallow view of how people should consume music.
Spoken like a millennial ;)
The 90s were awesome but I've heard from Gen Xers that the 80s was like the start of an awesome party and the 90s was a continuation of that party albeit later in the night.
While the '80s had a lot of extravagant excess, but on the other hand there were also AIDS epidemic, crack epidemic, ecological disasters. Not to mention that the excess was built on political and economic changes that led to long-term problems down the road.
The question is - which is the funnest time? The most interesting?
The 1980s. I've been around from the 1970s to 2023. Easily 1980s were the best. Maybe they were not if you lived out in the middle of Nebraska in a town of 200 people, but in that case, no decade is great. Options are limited. You watch the grass grow, or you watch the paint dry.
I was very young in the 1960s, but I always thought that the women of the late 1960s were the most attractive. More natural, more open. Starting in the 1980s, very, very slowly, women became more and more closed off, building shells around themselves. Now they are hard beetle carapaces. Guys pretty much have stayed the same. I've had many work interactions with people in their late teens to mid 20s, where I have been by far the oldest. We get along great, but that's what I've noticed. But like any era, there are sweet people, too. It's just the proportions have changed.
Meanwhile after 9/11 things started getting better in Eastern Europe. Less crime, less corruption. Joining EU and NATO. Rising living standards. More options to travel, work and do business. My coutry's GDP per capita has more than tripled since then.
As gen X, I'd agree with the first part about the 80s. The 90s were good too, but I think there was also some sense that it was all fake or a house built on sand or something — the 90s were the decade of Nirvana and The Matrix after all.
I don't generally subscribe to sweeping generalizations about eras being overall good or bad in the absence of data though. I'm not sure any decade of my life has been better or worse in any way that I could point to general societal trends (industry or major sector trends are different).
I'm rather surprised that many of the responses to this act like they've never seen '90s nostalgia before. Only '90s kids will remember is a meme that dates to the 2010s and will only be reinforced as millennials continue to age. The Onion has already beaten your snarky responses to the punch:
But it's not entirely surprising why the '90s are remembered so fondly by many people living in certain parts of the world, under certain material conditions. It was the end of the Cold War, it was heralded as the End of History. It was the coming of an entirely new millennium and the Information Age. The U.S. federal government had a surplus. Americans were worried about silly things like killer asteroids and Y2K apocalypses.
It really was a time of boundless optimism and futurism in America, and both the 2000s and the 2010s completely upended that.
Is it that the 90s were the best or nostalgia from people who grew up in the 90s? People have nostalgia from when the grew up because it was the world they were used to and they were experiencing it as young adult.
Do people from older generations think the 90s were the best? Do people from younger generations think 90s was great when told about it?
It is truly both. Like I said, with the aging up of the millennials, get ready for a lot of 90s nostalgia not unlike when boomers drove the swing revival of the '90s. Cyclical cultural trends based on generation.
But at the same time, the '90s do seem rather exceptional as a time in between conflicts- the Cold War, which in some ways is an outgrowth of the end of WWII, itself an outgrowth of WWI, was over. The anxieties of living in a post-bipolar world, of dealing with dangerous non-state actors or multipolar rivals to the American order, had not formalized yet. If anything, most of the world seemed to be getting along under the capitalist liberal democratic framework that Fukuyama called the End of History. So from a security standpoint it certainly seemed peaceful.
Yes, I remember the 80's as well, and while I have nostalgia for the bright colors and Lisa Frank aesthetic and music and so on, I have no desire to live in the 80's again. But the 90's were special.
I personally have a time travel rule that I wouldn't want to live before penicillin, vaccines, and novocaine. That really doesn't leave much of human history. But the 90's in the US and Western Europe were nice.
The West was, sure, but then it seemed like the intervention was pretty successful. It was internationally approved, got rid of Milošević, didn't run into any long-term nation-building woes as with all of the War on Terror operations. Of course, during it there were the seeds of future conflicts to come- the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the standoff with Russian forces at Pristina airport that future pop star James Blunt had to defuse to prevent WWIII.
Well we can now watch that 90s show ....sort of sequel to that 70s show. 90s are generally good year for America because economies were good. Entering Bush and Obama years by comparisons, terrible.
I get the point, but as always in regards to the "best time to live", poor people are not mentioned. There was a Welfare change that caused a lot of people shock due to how it was rolled out. So for non-poor people, maybe this was true.
I wasn't welfare-poor then I but I definitely had problems keeping a roof over my head. Rent was cheaper then compared to salaries, buying a house or condo was cheaper then relatively as well, health insurance cost less too. The cuts were welfare were bad, but this is not the only factor as the general cost of living was lower.
* Media: music and, in particular, movies were absolutely booming and innovating
* Technology: every year you could do something completely new with your PC. AOL one year. Then ICQ over the Internet the next.
* Consumerism: flat screen TVs?! Amazing new products every year.
Stuff that sucked about the 90s:
* In Oregon, we had a small but noticable neo-Nazi movement. A local kid got stabbed for dressing wrong (pardon the phrase, but it exemplifies the time, "wigger").
* Race relations were terrible in many places, but the general population was blissfully ignorant. Take the Rodney King backlash, for example.
* AIDs, as mentioned by many here. The reality is that it wouldn't really affect reasonably responsible heterosexuals, but it was drilled into us in school to the point that it traumatized a generation around sex. It may even be contributing to some of the anti-abortion sentiment we're currently seeing.
* Life for many out-groups. A local lesbian couple had a firebomb thrown through their window. If you watch old political speeches, everyone was stoking fears of illegal immigration ("they took our jobs" as opposed to the Trump era "rapists and vermin" rhetoric).
So, the objectively good part, I would say, is media and peace. Everything else boils down to blissful ignorance and largely depends on race, class, and geography.
I'm gen X and I was at the mall the other day (first time in probably a decade) and the food court was packed, there were people at the record store, and there were tons of teenagers dressed for mating purposes. Although I agree with a lot of the article - physical spaces receding as loci of culture, increasing psychological complexities leading to new anxieties, and complete corporate take over of creativity - the mall is alive and well!
I agree with this article. In America, the 90's were post-Berlin-Wall, feminist enough that you could at least work and make an ok wage as a woman, the web boom meant there were decent jobs available even if all you had was an English degree...and housing wasn't exorbitant.
When I graduated college in NYC, a studio apartment in an unfashionable outer borough could be bought for $50,000. The same place is like $300 or $400k now.
A beginning secretary at the time might make $35k. And there were studio apartments for sale in Inwood for probably $20k. So if you were willing to live very unglamorously, you could buy an apartment for less than one year's salary.
There was a vibrancy and energy to the 90's. And we had the best of the web. We could research and find things out, but there wasn't this omnipresence of phones and social media. Life was still analogue.
Love it. It's half nostalgia fest, and all well written. I got a warm fuzzy feeling about stuff I also remember and some I was too young to live through.
Although I was in the Balkans in the 90s so that kind of cramped my experience.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadSadly, sometimes I suspect they had a point.
it's interesting to look back on the significance of 1999 20+ years later, but obviously they didn't understand what we would think about it at the time.
Yet modern youths look at it today and find it aspirational.
"Wait, so I have a steady income writing code, have a cool apartment, and get to go to awesome underground raves at night? What's the problem exactly?"
That was the end of the 90's in a nutshell. It was the best time in history to be alive, but noone thought it at the time.
People were BORED that the Cold War ended, the world was at peace, and economic conditions worldwide were improving without any slowdown.
> Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.
People just didn't realize the end of the '90s was relatively perfect compared to so much of the 20th century.
Gen-X cynicism was a running theme in the 1990s — Office Space, the Dilbert comic strip and TV series, etc.
Sure, you most probably didn't have means for anything extravagant or frequent, but you still could actually travel, and nobody would shoot you like a rabid dog on the border or throw you into uranium mines for a decade or two to just die there.
It was wild time, local mafias, few people dissolved in acid (but generally due to close association with mobsters). People progressively getting richer, not ending up rich but if you start very low any progress is massive. You could see it ie in car ownership - before car parks around were often half empty, but they were gradually filling up (and now they are overflowing).
Of course there were losers, people who worked for decades in a factory in the middle of nowhere and it suddenly went bankrupt. Too stubborn/scared of change to move elsewhere, slide into alcoholism (if not there already) and long term unemployment. Transition from communism was universally messed up and just few ahole got obscenely rich. Smart people had endless possibilities, rest was still one foot in old regime which was just about coarsing, slacking or worse. Pretty awesome to experience, of course hindsight is required.
My grandpa visited Italy, Egypt, Cuba and India. I doubt that NK citizens can do it now unless they are high-ranking party members.
My father, after maybe 2 years of attempts to get approval for travel to Yugoslavia, ended up in dark lit room with just 1 guy from secret service sitting behind the desk. The guy just stared at him for 45 minutes straight, eye to eye, no word uttered. Absolute power and its projection. Of course, denied. That was former Czechoslovakia, Slovakia part. I've heard some people could travel a bit more, but generally there were reasons for that and they were not nice reasons. At least I can say I am proud of my parents for keeping their morals when there were strong motivations to betray them.
But for adults hyperinflation, economic collapse and skyrocketing crime wasn't that fun.
Another good example is extreme poverty. Which dropped from 1.8 billion to 1.6 billion in 90s and to 710 million by 2021. A billion people not having the immediate experience of hunger is a big win.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigford_v._Glickman
For people with talent and ambition, now is the best time in terms of pay and finding a huge audience online or recognition in fields such as AI, computer science, or physics. In the 90s if you were a bodybuilder or enjoyed working out, maybe your income options were limited to hustling steroids at the gym or selling workout videos, but guys on YouTube easily make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year or even millions through ads, selling program, supplements, etc. to a worldwide audiences of millions. Same for video games, thanks to Twitch. People are even getting rich making videos of binge eating. Pretty much any niche you can think of can be turned into a lucrative income stream.
so you're saying homes were cheaper, but unfortunately they weren't getting less-cheaper fast enough?
People want to have their cake and eat it too.
Compare that to now, where Covid can destroy your life and you can get it just going to the grocery store...it's much worse.
The chance of dying from COVID is 4/100,000 if you're 80 years old and fully vaccinated [1]. HIV, by contrast, was a death sentence regardless of age. Before COVID vaccines were available, sure, you could compare the pandemics; nowadays, the two situations are not comparable.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/data-revie...
...for some values of "easily"
Seriously, there have always been barriers to entry and always will be. They constantly shift. Yes, more competition is happening, which is good, but none of this is something the average person can realistically expect to do without a lot of difficulty (almost by definition).
Anything that's working well today is likely not to be a year from now. Most people aren't cut out for constantly chasing the fickle winds of change to optimize their latest hustle.
Really? Mr. Beast and others have been making money for years. Rogan has been at the top of the podcasting game for close to a decade.
Seriously, there have always been barriers to entry and always will be
The barriers to entry were huge in the 90s too, like Hollywood or the music industry. Nowadays at least there are more opportunities to get rich.
There are more opportunities, yes. But the accessibility of those opportunities hasn't increased all that much. It still takes capital, networking, marketing, hard work and some temporary statistical anomalies which work in your favor at a time when you're equipped to make the most of them.
99% of the money goes to 1% or even 0.1% of people doing things like TikTok/onlyfans/substack/twitch/YT/etc, it’s not an actual choice for the vast majority of people.
- Long ass rant about how he felt it was all better in his teens.
I was hoping someone crunched the numbers and showed that we were happier, healthier, ate better, had better sex, whatever-er back then...
Yes, you can:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211330
https://www.amazon.com/MP3-Music-Download/b?node=163856011
https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/best-sites-to-b...
The file method also means you are locked into a format that may go the way of the dodo in 5 years.
There is no way to buy a license and stream forever and media in the digital form is getting less and less sticky. Things are more likely to disappear forever or be modified from the original format. At the same time, physical copies of media are rapidly no longer being made.
- Try digitally purchasing a Weinstein movie - Episodes that are banned and gone forever from TV shows
The utopia of easily accessible digital archives of all media are becoming less and less of a reality. Having to maintain your own server and backup infrastructure to manage your digital media is kind of a step backwards from physical media and while it may be a hobby it's not a wide ranging solution.
On the other hand I'm a little confused what you mean by the format going away in 5 years. The format is sufficiently open that anyone can write a player for it (in theory). Unless I lose all copies of the files, there shouldn't be any reason it won't continue to exist as long as I like listening to it.
The promise of digital media was permanent access to a library that grew and updated with the technology. If I'm streaming a show I don't need to have 720, 4k, ultrawide versions, that's taken care of. New formats are added as they are developed.
>Best Stores for Buying Music and MP3s You Own Forever
That had to be intentional. And rather artful.
While that's the least our problems, it resonates with me. The fun has been sucked out of life experience in favor of some shitty wikipedia and google reviews version
Fair point.
>During the tumultuous '60s or the paranoid gritty '70s?
Two eras people are very nostalgic for. There's so much 60's nostalgia there has been a constant stream of kids born past 1970 pining for it.
And if someone still says that World Economics is not a zero-sum game, I'll laugh in the face of that person.
USSR was destroyed and plundered exactly so that the West would enjoy the golden era of 90s while people were dying here and everything was being destroyed and sold to the West by the price of scrap metal.
So, how do you think he's portrayed in the western media? As a freedom fighter and icon. It's unbelievable! But strength of western propaganda is unbeatable, they can make an idol out of anyone.
You think that the measly Russian economic output is what paid for the 90s boom?
And what do all these Russian oligarchs own? The Russians were preyed upon by their own, Putin being the finest example of this.
Putin came to power in 1999. Until then there was hunger, rampant crime and corruption. He managed to stop all that in just 2-3 years. People started to eat right, they had normal jobs again, it had become safe to go outside.
Western media that disguise as "Russian opposition" that work on destroying Russia from within, still have a very hard time explaining this to population. Because everyone who lived through the 90s remember very clearly how Putin managed to fix everything at once so quickly.
But to the western reader there's no need to explain that, you can start outright with the most obnoxious lies about Putin, since nobody there understands what happened here before and after Putin.
> You think that the measly Russian economic output is what paid for the 90s boom?
People on the West are used to count everything in paper (USD) which is printed in absurd amounts and allows them to inflate their GDP as they wish.
USSR economic output was higher than Russian. USSR had lots of resources, including immense supply of strategic materials (precious metals for example).
1. All that was sold to the West for the price of scrap. Also, not only materials, but plane's, ships and rockets blueprints, scientists, teachers, sport coaches. Just about everything that could be sold.
2. Collapse of the USSR and deliberate destruction of all the industry overnight created a huge market for Western corporations. Just overnight.
And yes, that paid for the boom of 90s.
> And what do all these Russian oligarchs own? The Russians were preyed upon by their own
And do you know how that happened? Before 1991 everything was state owned. After 1991 it was the western "advisors" (from CIA and that's not even a conspiracy theory) that created Russian oligarchs. Also made a buck themselves while being at it.
If I could choose which year I was going to be born but knew nothing else about my life, when would I chose? That is I wouldn't know which country, gender, mental composition, parents, socio-economic class, etc. etc. Only which year.
For me, it's hard not to pick today or even the future, if that's allowed. I think it would be fun to visit the past and be a fly on the wall, but with the constraints above I wouldn't want to risk a "bad roll."
I had an argument about this with a friend of mine a while back.
"Why would you EVER do anything BUT just download and listen to the best songs on the album? Listening to the whole album, including the crap songs is just the height of stupidity. Why would you pay money for the crap songs??"
Counterpoint: The songs which grab you right away, may not be the ones with staying power. You get over them, and the more you listen to the songs which don't grab you right away, the more you start to appreciate their hidden depths.
90's music example: Megadeth's Rust In Peace album. Hanger 18 is the most obviously best song on the album, but you listen to the albums a few times, and if you're a guitar player you're going to start noticing the playing on Tornado of Souls. You go back and HOLY SHIT THIS SONG IS INSANE. That is a song that I can listen to decades later and still hear something new and interesting that I never noticed before.
Another counterpoint: Concept albums, which tell a story which is greater than the sum of its parts. Listening to the whole album of 2112 by Rush is far superior to just listening to Temples of Syrinx. Or, the whole of Dream Theater's Metropolis Pt. 2 instead of just The Dance of Eternity.
My friend is not a musician and has a fairly casual appreciation of music. So of course, he has a shallow view of how people should consume music.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4309801
Still, we can all agree America died on 9/11.
The question is - which is the funnest time? The most interesting?
The 1980s. I've been around from the 1970s to 2023. Easily 1980s were the best. Maybe they were not if you lived out in the middle of Nebraska in a town of 200 people, but in that case, no decade is great. Options are limited. You watch the grass grow, or you watch the paint dry.
I was very young in the 1960s, but I always thought that the women of the late 1960s were the most attractive. More natural, more open. Starting in the 1980s, very, very slowly, women became more and more closed off, building shells around themselves. Now they are hard beetle carapaces. Guys pretty much have stayed the same. I've had many work interactions with people in their late teens to mid 20s, where I have been by far the oldest. We get along great, but that's what I've noticed. But like any era, there are sweet people, too. It's just the proportions have changed.
The 90s was a great time in America because, for us, it was immensely peaceful, prosperous, and hopeful.
I don't generally subscribe to sweeping generalizations about eras being overall good or bad in the absence of data though. I'm not sure any decade of my life has been better or worse in any way that I could point to general societal trends (industry or major sector trends are different).
https://www.theonion.com/10-things-that-will-make-you-super-...
But it's not entirely surprising why the '90s are remembered so fondly by many people living in certain parts of the world, under certain material conditions. It was the end of the Cold War, it was heralded as the End of History. It was the coming of an entirely new millennium and the Information Age. The U.S. federal government had a surplus. Americans were worried about silly things like killer asteroids and Y2K apocalypses.
It really was a time of boundless optimism and futurism in America, and both the 2000s and the 2010s completely upended that.
Do people from older generations think the 90s were the best? Do people from younger generations think 90s was great when told about it?
But at the same time, the '90s do seem rather exceptional as a time in between conflicts- the Cold War, which in some ways is an outgrowth of the end of WWII, itself an outgrowth of WWI, was over. The anxieties of living in a post-bipolar world, of dealing with dangerous non-state actors or multipolar rivals to the American order, had not formalized yet. If anything, most of the world seemed to be getting along under the capitalist liberal democratic framework that Fukuyama called the End of History. So from a security standpoint it certainly seemed peaceful.
I personally have a time travel rule that I wouldn't want to live before penicillin, vaccines, and novocaine. That really doesn't leave much of human history. But the 90's in the US and Western Europe were nice.
Only upended because people fell for the whole "terrorism" con.
(also we were ignoring the former Yugoslavia, as well as the entire FSU in general — but IMNSHO "terrorism" was an unforced error.)
* Media: music and, in particular, movies were absolutely booming and innovating
* Technology: every year you could do something completely new with your PC. AOL one year. Then ICQ over the Internet the next.
* Consumerism: flat screen TVs?! Amazing new products every year.
Stuff that sucked about the 90s:
* In Oregon, we had a small but noticable neo-Nazi movement. A local kid got stabbed for dressing wrong (pardon the phrase, but it exemplifies the time, "wigger").
* Race relations were terrible in many places, but the general population was blissfully ignorant. Take the Rodney King backlash, for example.
* AIDs, as mentioned by many here. The reality is that it wouldn't really affect reasonably responsible heterosexuals, but it was drilled into us in school to the point that it traumatized a generation around sex. It may even be contributing to some of the anti-abortion sentiment we're currently seeing.
* Life for many out-groups. A local lesbian couple had a firebomb thrown through their window. If you watch old political speeches, everyone was stoking fears of illegal immigration ("they took our jobs" as opposed to the Trump era "rapists and vermin" rhetoric).
So, the objectively good part, I would say, is media and peace. Everything else boils down to blissful ignorance and largely depends on race, class, and geography.
When I graduated college in NYC, a studio apartment in an unfashionable outer borough could be bought for $50,000. The same place is like $300 or $400k now.
A beginning secretary at the time might make $35k. And there were studio apartments for sale in Inwood for probably $20k. So if you were willing to live very unglamorously, you could buy an apartment for less than one year's salary.
There was a vibrancy and energy to the 90's. And we had the best of the web. We could research and find things out, but there wasn't this omnipresence of phones and social media. Life was still analogue.
Although I was in the Balkans in the 90s so that kind of cramped my experience.