Ask HN: How do you rekindle the excitement of tech/startup culture circa '90s? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you rekindle the excitement of tech/startup culture circa '90s?

More accurately: circle late '90s and '00s

I was born in the 80s, built my first computer at age 10, spent my adolescent years rushing home from school to watch ZDTV (later TechTV). I remember when YC first launched in Cambridge. Startups were being built in garages. People were moving into startup houses. There was an electricity, an excitement, a childlike giddiness for new ideas and products.

I don't know if it's due to just age, the usual beatdown of life, or the world at large, but those stomach butterflies have long flown away, and I'd like to recapture them. It seems however that startup culture today has become so industrialized and mainstream. Where are the "weirdos"? Where are the garage hackers? Has tech permeated society so much so that those times are behind us for good? If so, what is the new "tech"?

I want to be that excited 16 year-old again.

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Anticipate stuff, stuff happens, repeat. It's all just dopamine.

Dive head first into AI or something new (to you). Hell, go start a business in your garage. Read up on those earlier weirdos (I'm currently reading Make Something Wonderful[1] about Steve Jobs) and how they did it, and patch in the current AI hotness.

You can't introduce 3D to desktop computing in 2023 for sure, but what could you introduce to the world that involves AI? Think Different :P

Maybe you fancy building some hardware. Cram a decent stt/tts engine into a raspberry pi and recreate everything Alexa can do. Maybe that idea is crap but while doing it you come up with your actual idea.

The weirdos are hiding at the front of whatever is going on. Web3, AI, whatever the next thing will be. They're partying over there. Have a search for the #buildinpublic hashtag on Twitter. There's a lot of noise (lots of people are on the internet now) but you'll likely find something interesting.

You don't need to jump into AI, that is an example. Don't get caught on the example.

It's really hard to get excited from a standing start, step 1 is to get inspired. If you can't find inspiration, look back to see what last inspired you and literally do that again.

Keep your flywheel spinning and chase the dopamine!

[1] https://stevejobsarchive.com/

I think that is just endemic to getting older. Things can't thrill you the same way they did when you were young.

You've got more experience. Also the world was more optimistic back then.

I was born in 81 so growing up in the 90s was great. It was a optimistic time and in general things were no where near as decisive as now.

The internet was ushering in a new age and we didn't know how it would change the world.

Fast forward to now when the internet and smart phone revolution has happened and we are in a much more dark and bitter place.

We've seen some real negatives on society because of these in innovations and with ai there is more of an existential dread about what it means for society than any optimism.

It's just not possible to recapture those times IMO.

Growing up in the same era I suspect nostalgia is at play here. It was more wild west, both for the better and worst. People got hurt and exploited then too. It wasn't all sunshine and roses.

What do you mean it was more wild west, both for the better and the worst? That is so vague that it could mean anything.

I never said people didn't get hurt and were exploited. That is literally true for any year in US history.

But, it was a completely different world and much more optimistic. By 2001 you had 9/11 that engulfed much of the world's consciousness. Then the constant war on terror where there were a decade or more of constant talk of beheadings and suicide bombings. Were there are couple of these instances in the 90's? Yes, but it was an all consuming issue after 2001.

Then there is the rise of absolute insane political fights. Were there some in the 90's? Yes but not on this scale. Now it's completely vitriolic and completely hate filled, and it is 24/7 now.

With the internet even kids are completely affected. In the 90's the internet was... I won't say safe, but it was way safer. Now kids are raised on the internet and spend an enormous amount of time disaffected.

In the 90's as kids we spent most of the day outside. Video games were there but Sonic was only so much fun. Most kids didn't play games all day.

We live in a dystopia compared to then. And as I said there was a huge sense of optimism. Those that are optimistic now are few and far between.

IME the 90s Internet and networks had more brazen creeps ("ASL"), lots of naivety, scams, and bullying was still bad. Ads were there very early and quickly escalated to loud, animated, and pop-up hell.

I didn't notice much optimism, rather pessimism that people continued to look down on 'nerds' and the annoying and slow Internet. Many of us were mocked for spending so much time inside staring at screens wired to the wall. Normal people didn't see its benefits, and many of us nerds used it mostly for gaming and to escape our limited friend options IRL.

Are you saying it was more Deep Space 9 than Next Generation?

Can't think of any ST show comparison which fits. Though if you spoke of ST among my IRL friends in the 90s then you'd be as openly mocked as admitting to sitting at a computer for 2+ hours.

I'm talking about optimism in society in general. You have a super overly negative view. Generally in the 90's if you did anything with computers you were seen as a genius.

The internet really wasn't annoyingly slow until close to 2000 where you were trying to watch video and download mp3s. It was really only bad when compared retrospectively.

This. I was born in early 80s too and I lost a lot of previous passions.

I was very into gaming back in the 90s/early 2000s, nowadays I rarely play them. I thought I am more into older games but 200+ games sitting on GoG convinced me otherwise. Games are really boring comparing to real world.

I think the only things that can surprise me is a hot WW3 or a 1929 style depression. I have seen the rest.

A 1929 depression wouldn't even surprise me, to me it's a question of when. Plus people are so much more unruly now that I think people would be rioting on a scale that was previously unprecedented.

A nuke going off I don't even see as an impossibility.

Same here on games though. I thought my adult years would just be me playing all the great games. But as an adult they are much less interesting. That's what makes being young such a vulnerable time. You don't know that you are going to dramatically change once you become and adult. But generally you will.

Yeah man, and that leads to think that maybe I should not leave what I want to do in my 40s to 6/70s.

Pump another $100B (adjusted for inflation) from pension funds into the startup economy, give $60M to anyone who can spell TCP/IP, then invent a language that's a small subset of C++ and SmallTalk and insist that everyone will be using it for everything in 2 years.

Bonus points if you rail against government interference while taking 60% of your revenue from the DoD.

very insightful, thank you

You’re looking for a green field industry where individuals and small teams can have outsized impact, barriers to entry are low, and the guard rails are down. AI has that potential if it escapes the arbiters of truth, morality, and entrenched corporate profits. That seems likely as computing and methodology improve. Biotech has high entry costs and will always move a bit slower due to human safety. AR/VR to me feels like the internet in the early 90’s, I know it will be a huge industry at some point in the future, but can’t really tell if that’s 10, 20, or 30 years in the future. Apple might manage kickstart it to some degree soon, but it won’t be the slam dunk the internet was, not in my lifetime at least.

I wouldn’t expect anything substantial for the mobile/desktop web pretty much ever. Too much money in the status quo for Apple/Google/Microsoft to risk transformational browser improvements.

I think things like computer are a once a life or even a once of two lives chance. It's like a new toy that everyone can get into with some bucks. Even AI is not like that.

I think it's just about having something new and lots of people getting excited about it. Part of the problem today is that there's too much cynicism floating around especially on sites like Reddit which has seeped into HN also. Or maybe it was always there but the optimists don't comment anymore.

Crypto was that for a lot of people. Leave aside all the cynicism it is still cool as a tech. I think the LLM developments feel like that right now. Tomorrow there will be something else.

But the places where people will be geeking out will not be probably the open internet but closed ones like Slack or Discord. I think this is a shame but it cannot be helped probably.

Jonathan Blow just tweeted:

"Something to understand, about all the excitement around AI and how fast things seem to be moving...

This is what computers in general used to feel like, across the board. New cool stuff was happening all the time in all sectors. This started slowing down in maybe 1994, maybe more in 2004, but people who remember, remember.

I was listening to the latest All In Podcast, where they were breathlessly talking about how ChatGPT was going to super change every aspect of everything (some plausible, some not), and I was just thinking, "It's like it is 1992 and I am reading an issue of Mondo 2000."

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1647303924507086849

I think the problem is back then, American society was more open, accepting of differences on a larger scale, free to experiment, less segregated on class and generally "nicer" in a genuine and not superficial way. That, along with the post Cold war economic boom and the rise of the internet fostered that kind of openness and optimism you talk about.

Nowadays the internet has reduced that openness, people self-segregate and are much more prone to constructing narratives of grievance and deservedness, which doesn't foster the open, optimistic thinking. It's become a game of rich-get richer and cutthroat exclusionism vs the make things better for everyone approach that was more common back then.

>I think the problem is back then, American society was more open, accepting of differences on a larger scale, free to experiment, less segregated on class and generally "nicer" in a genuine and not superficial way.

Was it? From what I remember it was more racist, more homophobic, more segregated, and most of the "niceness" was sarcasm and cruelty, particularly towards any marginalized group. I don't remember the "make things better for everyone" American society you do at all, nor do I see the internet as a whole being a game of "rich-get richer and cutthroat exclusionism." Certainly that's a part of VC and startup culture, but that doesn't define the whole. I see far more activism, inclusiveness, creativity, openness and sincerity on the internet now than I did back in the 90s. I guess we just grew up in different circles.

How do you rekindle it? Become young again.

There are plenty of people like you describe, only they're also the same age as you once were, so they have the same feeling of techno-optimism and hacker mentality.

You're asking what are the cottage industries? Places you won't think to look. Things that may be distasteful. Vtubers are an example of a recently-commercialized idea. Look for stuff that's just getting going.

The frustrating part is that billions in investment money is performing the same search, and so these ideas don't remain small for long anymore, before they get bootstrapped to their "too big to enter easily but too small/young to solve hard problems" phase by people looking for quick returns.

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