Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

I am so nostalgic for the 1990s.

I am a young Xer, almost an old millennial, kind of on the cusp. I've wondered if this is a cognitive artifact of my age in the 90s, teens to 20, but I have asked older and even a few younger people and many have also expressed nostalgia for that decade. Boomers and much older Xers often agree.

My teens were rough anyway. It was not my personal best decade, but I would go back in a second... not necessarily literally but definitely to the zeitgeist.

I find myself unable to describe the optimism of that time to people who were not of age during it. The best I can do is encourage people to watch some old Star Trek TNG. You couldn't even write that today. Dark edgy music and culture was in, but that was an artifact of the optimism. Nobody wants a Nine Inch Nails or early Tool now because the world is darker than the music. Pretty Hate Machine would be journalism, not harmless cathartic emotional escape and fantasy.

For my money the optimism ended decisively on 9/11. The shift was incredibly deep and profound. We have never recovered, though a rally was attempted in the late oughts. That rally crashed into resentment driven identity politics; the alt-right and its fellow travelers or "cancel culture" on the other side. Superficial optimism doesn't stick and won't until we get past 9/11 and all it seemed to mean. The terrorists won.

Re: 9/11

You and I are in agreement - that day set the tone for America's future in:

* economics - on his way back to the fed reserve in NYC via helicopter in autumn 2001, Greenspan saw the rubble of WTC and decided to drop the fed funds rate, and it eventually hit 1% in 2004, which is why asset prices (real estate, stocks, bonds) are so high today and why we had a housing boom during that time (2004-2008)

* international policy - never ending war on "terror" (not that they decided on "terror" bc when you have a war on a country, you can define the end of the war; a war on "terror" can go on forever bc you can redefine "terror")

* culture / politics - democrat vs republican (and media fed into it bc it culture wars drive ratings)

Yeah...looks like al qaeda did more damage than we thought.

Non-American here. I think 9/11 has global significance that goes beyond its impact on the US. It destroyed the narrative that liberal democracy, free markets and technology had removed all obstacles that would keep us from converging towards a peaceful, secular and progressive global society.

I think it started the collapse of that narrative. The failure of the Arab Spring and the rise of Xi Jinpeng did the rest.

I am an 'old millenial' and have absolutely the same impression (and my personal life at that time was also a mixed bag, so it certainly is not personal nostalgia).

The time period of mid 90s until 9/11 should really receive far more attention. It feels like most of the world was on a much more optimistic and promising trajectory.

I think it was also the last time that we saw major, society-wide and significant technological progress happen in a short amount of time in developed countries: the early days of widespread adoption of the web and all of its implications.

At the same time, I sometimes wonder if many of the negative developments of the two decades afterwards might also be ascribed to the spreading adoption of the web and its unintended negative consequences to global sensemaking.

I think I am about the same age as you and agree completely. That optimistic world of the 90s (and 80s IMO) no longer exists. The country never did recover from 9/11 and has stumbled from one crisis to the next ever since - the War on Terror, Iraq War, Katrina, oil crisis, subprime mortgage meltdown, Occupy Wall St, college tuition debt crisis, and now the pandemic and current protests. Where it all ends I don't know.

The thing is nothing much actually changed, at least not physically. We lost a few thousand people and some buildings. More people die every year of the flu. Covid has killed over 50X 9/11 and yet 9/11 felt like a much more profound loss of... something.

It's all in our heads.

Digging out is going to be tough though because the shift was profound and deep. I don't think we can go back. That's not exactly what I'm saying. What I'm wondering is if we can go forward.

Going forward always involves a bit of going back. Some of the 90s optimism was resurrected 60s optimism. But it also involves invention of new things.

To me, 9/11 represented the loss of some key aspect of American Identity. For the first time in a very long time, America was vulnerable and that realization of vulnerability sparked so many enduring negative responses we see today - endless wars abroad, non-stop attacks on privacy, militarization of police forces, tribal identity politics, unhealthy nationalism instead of healthy patriotism, etc. It's hard to put into words for people who weren't there, but there's a distinct before and after 9/11 when looking back at America.

I think you would have to look for additional sources or markers of your experience to explain this memory of yours. It is not just the decade nor your age at the time. In my recollection, cultural products like grunge and industrial music, or even the overall Gen-X slacker stereotype, did not come from a place of great optimism. They weren't ironic masks hiding a playful wink, they were sardonic expressions of angst and disappointment over a world that did not meet ideals.

For many, there was a palpable sense of hangover. That we were living in the ruins/wasteland of an already failing civilization, with very little control over the outcome for society nor for oneself. Much of the saccharine, optimistic content on TV could be seen another way, as almost delusional or perhaps as clumsy propaganda. It could only be enjoyed with a big dose of irony or an escapist suspension of disbelief.

I can only guess at all the factors which influence these different, parallel experiences of the time. Different regional cultures, different socio-economic backgrounds, difference in parent generation, differences in sibling/cohort ages, etc.

It's definitely not possible to be scientific with this stuff, but I really don't agree. While the 90s were definitely not utopia, the dark edgy stuff was surface and there was a great deal of optimism underneath. Today I would say its backwards with fluffy happy pop culture masking a very deep malaise.

There were definitely other gen Xers who did not experience the same optimistic 90s you speak of. To many of us, the changes after 9/11 were merely the surfacing of a darkness we already knew within our world and our nation. There was already a malaise from the 80s and a sense of a disneyesque veneer covering shameful realities.

To be clear, I am not trying to invalidate your memory, but only address your opening aside about where it might come from. There was certainly more than one experience of gen X and more than one experience of the 90s...

Yeah, this stuff always comes with "your mileage may vary."

What I remember is a lot of very optimistic ideas being discussed openly without a lot of cynicism or irony. Go find some old Mondo 2000 or other early-mid 90s futurist material.

I also remember a wave of new technology people could touch and interact with: the PC and Internet revolutions. Shiny starships are awesome but I will probably never ride in one.

The 80s-90s was also the last era of musical innovation. If you include the 80s too there was: hip hop / rap, drum and bass, techno/rave and all its variant genres, grunge, shoegaze, dreampop, math rock, new wave, synth rock, I could keep going...

Since 2001: very little except slight variations on the above and reboots of older forms. For some reason music totally collapsed after 2001. I've toyed around with economic interpretations but ultimately it feels like there's some psychological wall there. We can't think of anything new.

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