Ah, the 90's. Bill Clinton raised taxes, which eliminated the deficit, which made interest rates go down.....My biggest problem in life was wondering which company which was trying to recruit me had the best stock option package.
There are a few things which have gotten better. Gay marriage. Marijuana legalization. But Entshitification is real and for the last 25 years has been relentless.
There are still lots of us alive who have experienced this. And to us, X-files felt high tech for the time. This was a time period when I think people were just waking up to powers of computers and technology, in particular alien tech, due to the incalculable complexities of ideating and creating magical electrical boxes - microprocessors. How could humans be capable of doing this, after all?
One poster already mentioned Matrix, but games like Alpha Centauri and others had also explored socioeconomic themes of power laws and what massive sweeping changes entail.
You can still get the 90s and 2000s experience to some extent. It hasn’t truly left, but society has moved on so it is a rather isolated journey and somewhat limited. But you won’t get MTV or any of that nowadays sadly.
For me, my car is a mid 2000s model so the way I listen to music is to buy CDs. I haven’t stopped. That part of 80s/90s hasn’t gone away, but it doesn’t really feel nostalgic either because it’s normal. To others of course, especially newer generation, they don’t even know we had to rewind tapes manually sometimes because the device would fail to do it properly.
The larger thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this.
I was there and I can tell you that it was genuinely better times.
The 80s and 90s were peak western civilization.
Tech was exciting, futuristic.
Politics - whilst certainly always grubby and adversarial - had not descended into lies and manipulation and misinformation and attempts to destroy the democratic systems.
People talked socialized read books.
Dating hadn’t been turned into a high volume marketplace in which no one is ever satisfied and everyone is always upgrading.
The environment and global warming were an issue for sure but not like now.
Yup, X-Files were great and I did experience it. "The Lone Gunmen," was good idea as well but they, i.e. tv gods should have waited five years after the X-Files ended, to allow some time for nostalgia to creep into fandom, to do the show. I remember discussing with someone, who knew a guy who knew a guy, online regarding how their personalities should be crafted for the show. They ended up with, funny. Too, funny was not a good fit for them since they had genius level intellect. This show was one of the few places I saw Linux being mentioned by an ape in the episode where The Lone Gunmen receive a message from an ingenious chimp attempting to escape a government laboratory. The way they were killed off was really crappy. They should bring then back on the new series, perhaps as cloned versions.
The X-Files was the right show at the right time; a "bubble" of the '90s, if you will. The internet and mobile technology was nascent. The world was getting bigger, but was still quite "small". I definitely feel quite privileged to have lived through this time, and enjoy all things '90s quite a bit. Any, and I mean any, attempt to remake this show is doomed to failure, and I wish they would just stop. Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to hang out with the Lone Gunmen for a bit.
The one thing about that era that has always seemed unique is that for people who lived it, a few years was a very big deal. Even now that I'm much older, talking to people in my age range it still blows my mind how different people's life experiences were just due to be 2-3 years different in age.
Especially for anything tech oriented.
Talk to people who were computer science majors in the 90s, you'll find that their curriculum varied wildly depending on exactly what years they were there. a 2-3 year difference could be huge.
Same is true for how they experienced the internet, interacted with media, whether or not they were mobile native or landline native, and so much more.
Less tech oriented but the 90s had an enormous shift in terms of corporate culture. The people who were a few years older than me reported wearing suits to work. By the time I went off to be a corpo, it was usually casual wear, not even business casual. For the same types of roles & companies!
Any attempts to remake this show including the new X-file seasons were a failure. I believe it was this insane time in history where two young federal agents in the early 90's without smartphones and mobile internet would make this conspiracy stories even more believable. This time felt due to the emerging underground tech scene more mysterious than probably any other span in history. So if someone would want to make a new conspiracy mystery drama it would have to play again in the early 90's.
Literally everything is just shite now. Movies and TV are shite, food is shite, the economy is shite, politics is shite, dating is shite, electronics and tech is cheap ad infested shite, even the reffing in sports is shite! Things get more expensive yet also worse somehow, our wages don't even come close to matching inflation, housing is propped up to keep old people's investments secure meaning we don't even have places to live.
Im a young millennial so I can relate both with millennials and gen-z, and from what I can tell the vibes are just really really bad. People don't even really care about the future anymore because they know it's just going to continue to be shite.
To anyone with this kind of nostalgia I'd recommend watch 'Perfect Days'. You can live however you want.
While it is impossible to not have a smart phone at this point you get to decide how you use it. Want to feel like you are in the 90's? Stop using your phone. Consume only old or physical media if you want, get rid of streaming services. Go buy an old car if you feel like it. Go read a book. Anything you could do in the 80's and 90's you can do now just as easy. You just have to curate such a life.
I think the only place you have to compromise is work. You can't roleplay like it's the 90's if you work in tech. But hey when you clock out of work turn your laptop off and go do whatever you want. Again, there is nothing stopping you from doing anything you could have done back then now (except maybe buy a house).
That is larping. No amount of wacky pomo carpeting and Outhere Brothers cassette tapes can actually transport you to a post-cold-war-pre-9/11 world.
The nineties literally ended in a party where at least one person in the room thought they were going to die the next day. You cannot recreate that with a Doug t-shirt.
One of the all-time great shows. Mythology episodes mixed in with the "monster of the week" ones for the casual viewers. The music was also pretty special. Each episode was like a mini feature film.
For me, it's The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle. Those are the shows I watched as a kid and I'll love them forever.
For 90s kids who remember their parents having people over, parties were really like that! Obviously without the drama and comedy. But people would come over and socialize and not be glued to screens. And we have data that things have changed dramatically. In 1990, 55% of men reported having six or more close friends. In 2021 it was down to 27%. The percentage of men who have no close friends is up by a factor of five, to 15%.
I remember back in the early 80s my father knew the drummer or bassist of some "A-minus-list" up and coming 80s band (the actual band escapes me, maybe Poison way before "Every Rose Has Its Thorn") and he convinced the band to hang out at his house and jam. Well I remember the whole small town Pennsylvania community showed up and it was a total ripper. I never properly capitalized on the cool-kid-cred I should have gotten from that night.
I have been kicking around this idea for a bumper sticker. "The '90s were lame, but they were still better than this."
I remember not loving the '90s when I was living through them, but my sense now (and I am hearing it more and more from others) is that we didn't realize how good we had it.
Can’t remember where I first heard it (message board? Kumail’s podcast?), but I read/heard a really strong case that the core theme of the X-Files is informational enclosure/the dawn of the modern cyber panopticon, and how for good or bad all the little weird, secret corners of the world get catalogued and dissected as technology encircles all.
In the pre-internet era, when you heard a fantastic story, you couldn't just google it to see if it was true. People either believed everything they heard, or they took it with a grain of salt. Either way, it was incredibly easy to let your imagination run wild with a crazy idea, even if you firmly believed in science and the burden of proof. That was the one-half the magic of The X-Files.
The other half was that so much of it took place almost entirely in rural or at least tight-knit suburban settings because that's where all the weird stuff happened. You couldn't grow up in the rural US (or probably anywhere) without spending many long summer evenings staring up at the clear starry sky and wondering what was out there, or hearing a sound in the woods that you couldn't readily identify. Pets occasionally disappeared without a trace. Livestock and wild animals behave strangely sometimes for no apparent reason. That guy living on his own a few miles down the road who hurls insults at anyone who walks by.
Weird rural shit still happens of course, but it's shrinking as suburbs continue to grow, and you see less of it on TV and in movies these days.
In the pre-internet era, when you heard a fantastic story, you couldn't just google it to see if it was true.
Today is different, but people are worse informed. Every online place that an average person visits is a hotbed of fantasy.
That is exactly why I deleted my reddit account years ago. For every factual post there, there were two inaccurate or false posts. I didn't like my head becoming a receptacle for other people's falsehoods.
Growing up in the 90s in Moscow wasn't all cakewalk (immigrated to US soon after), but I fondly remember watching the show and reading Russian-translated X-Files books. I don't know why the books were so fascinating to me. Imagined my life in America as something akin to Fox Mulder: suit, nice hair, car, hotel, official business. The lifestyle was all foreign to me, and also the coolest ever.
The 90s were my 20s - I still remember walking back with my girlfriend from the sea in the evening, across a residential area and we could here the jingle of X-Files on tv through open windows.
This is one of the images in ly life I keep going back to and cherish.
It is interesting hiw sounds and smells are strongly embedded in these memories.
I think it's pretty funny to call out the clothing as stylish.
As far as I remember, Mulder's suit was meant to look like the cheap and ill-fitting suit that a low-level, young government employee would buy for a dress code and because he didn't want to think about clothing.
And so much of the environment was slightly strange to US viewers, I think, because it was mostly filmed in the Pacific Northwest and Vancouver, and felt just ever so slightly in the uncanny valley of being like much of the US but also not.
I also think the technology was somewhat reduced for plot purposes. Consider the "road warrior" template that already existed for business travelers, with more use of laptops, cell phones, email, etc. I think the writers just found it convenient to make communication and information research more cumbersome than it really had to be in that era...
>As far as I remember, Mulder's suit was meant to look like the cheap and ill-fitting suit that a low-level, young government employee would buy for a dress code and because he didn't want to think about clothing.
1000% times better than what people are wearing today.
Today is so hoodified you have office workers in sneakers.
The white shirt, suit and trench looks so good. ALSO people where not as obese. This has of course an effect on the fit.
58 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 60.6 ms ] threadThere are a few things which have gotten better. Gay marriage. Marijuana legalization. But Entshitification is real and for the last 25 years has been relentless.
* Music was incredible
* Movies were amazing, enough to go to the theater 12 times a year at least
* Homelessness was pretty much non-existent
* People were friendly and had time for strangers
* Employment was 10x better than today, and not by today's way of counting (which don't count group x y and z)
* Jobs actually made people feel needed and going to work was an incredible feeling for your soul.
* Very few people were on drugs 24/7 like they are today
Our biggest problem was probably Alcohol, which has actually dipped today (but probably because people are on pot instead)
If I had $200 Billion I would literally give all of it to be a teen again for ten years from 1990 to 2000 again.
Kinda like the opposite man, kinda like the opposite.
One poster already mentioned Matrix, but games like Alpha Centauri and others had also explored socioeconomic themes of power laws and what massive sweeping changes entail.
You can still get the 90s and 2000s experience to some extent. It hasn’t truly left, but society has moved on so it is a rather isolated journey and somewhat limited. But you won’t get MTV or any of that nowadays sadly.
For me, my car is a mid 2000s model so the way I listen to music is to buy CDs. I haven’t stopped. That part of 80s/90s hasn’t gone away, but it doesn’t really feel nostalgic either because it’s normal. To others of course, especially newer generation, they don’t even know we had to rewind tapes manually sometimes because the device would fail to do it properly.
The larger thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this.
The 80s and 90s were peak western civilization.
Tech was exciting, futuristic.
Politics - whilst certainly always grubby and adversarial - had not descended into lies and manipulation and misinformation and attempts to destroy the democratic systems.
People talked socialized read books.
Dating hadn’t been turned into a high volume marketplace in which no one is ever satisfied and everyone is always upgrading.
The environment and global warming were an issue for sure but not like now.
1. https://gilliananderson.ws/webarchive/about/favmusic.html
Especially for anything tech oriented.
Talk to people who were computer science majors in the 90s, you'll find that their curriculum varied wildly depending on exactly what years they were there. a 2-3 year difference could be huge.
Same is true for how they experienced the internet, interacted with media, whether or not they were mobile native or landline native, and so much more.
Less tech oriented but the 90s had an enormous shift in terms of corporate culture. The people who were a few years older than me reported wearing suits to work. By the time I went off to be a corpo, it was usually casual wear, not even business casual. For the same types of roles & companies!
The list is endless.
I remember planning trips with Lonely Planet books. I just really don't miss the pre-GMaps era. I don't think I'd ever drive now without one a phone.
Social media + mobile phones pit the ingenuity of our cleverest minds against the will and habits of the many, to sell ads.
Im a young millennial so I can relate both with millennials and gen-z, and from what I can tell the vibes are just really really bad. People don't even really care about the future anymore because they know it's just going to continue to be shite.
While it is impossible to not have a smart phone at this point you get to decide how you use it. Want to feel like you are in the 90's? Stop using your phone. Consume only old or physical media if you want, get rid of streaming services. Go buy an old car if you feel like it. Go read a book. Anything you could do in the 80's and 90's you can do now just as easy. You just have to curate such a life.
I think the only place you have to compromise is work. You can't roleplay like it's the 90's if you work in tech. But hey when you clock out of work turn your laptop off and go do whatever you want. Again, there is nothing stopping you from doing anything you could have done back then now (except maybe buy a house).
The nineties literally ended in a party where at least one person in the room thought they were going to die the next day. You cannot recreate that with a Doug t-shirt.
For 90s kids who remember their parents having people over, parties were really like that! Obviously without the drama and comedy. But people would come over and socialize and not be glued to screens. And we have data that things have changed dramatically. In 1990, 55% of men reported having six or more close friends. In 2021 it was down to 27%. The percentage of men who have no close friends is up by a factor of five, to 15%.
I remember not loving the '90s when I was living through them, but my sense now (and I am hearing it more and more from others) is that we didn't realize how good we had it.
The other half was that so much of it took place almost entirely in rural or at least tight-knit suburban settings because that's where all the weird stuff happened. You couldn't grow up in the rural US (or probably anywhere) without spending many long summer evenings staring up at the clear starry sky and wondering what was out there, or hearing a sound in the woods that you couldn't readily identify. Pets occasionally disappeared without a trace. Livestock and wild animals behave strangely sometimes for no apparent reason. That guy living on his own a few miles down the road who hurls insults at anyone who walks by.
Weird rural shit still happens of course, but it's shrinking as suburbs continue to grow, and you see less of it on TV and in movies these days.
That is exactly why I deleted my reddit account years ago. For every factual post there, there were two inaccurate or false posts. I didn't like my head becoming a receptacle for other people's falsehoods.
This is one of the images in ly life I keep going back to and cherish.
It is interesting hiw sounds and smells are strongly embedded in these memories.
As far as I remember, Mulder's suit was meant to look like the cheap and ill-fitting suit that a low-level, young government employee would buy for a dress code and because he didn't want to think about clothing.
And so much of the environment was slightly strange to US viewers, I think, because it was mostly filmed in the Pacific Northwest and Vancouver, and felt just ever so slightly in the uncanny valley of being like much of the US but also not.
I also think the technology was somewhat reduced for plot purposes. Consider the "road warrior" template that already existed for business travelers, with more use of laptops, cell phones, email, etc. I think the writers just found it convenient to make communication and information research more cumbersome than it really had to be in that era...
1000% times better than what people are wearing today.
Today is so hoodified you have office workers in sneakers.
The white shirt, suit and trench looks so good. ALSO people where not as obese. This has of course an effect on the fit.