Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

The years 1996 to 1999/2000 feel to me like I could go back and live them 20 times over, each time different, and still feel like I would look back with longing at all the things I missed out on and wish I could go back and relive/redo/take-a-different path.

I haven't had a feeling anything like that since about any time. I know it's probably in large part because of my age at the time (early 20s) but there was also just so much going on and the feeling was so intense, and youth culture was so on fire, so much energy. And in our tech industry, where I was just starting to find my foothold... there was this feeling in technology like if you just found the right combination of tools and ideas you could really be at the forefront of something new.

Dropped out of my BA in philosophy to join the fray and write code. Weekends full of raves, neat parties and music, meeting all sorts of people, and feeling like tech was part of something progressive and world changing in a positive and utopian way rather than ... this place where we are now.

The .com financial crash definitely exploded the euphoria. But more than anything 9/11 really was the thing that let the air out of the balloon for good.

Sept 12, 2001 I think was the beginning of this current era of paranoia and fear.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!

— Wordsworth, _The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement_

I love your description of this heady time, which matches the way that I remember it. Surely there are at least pockets of such technological optimism in today's world – but fewer, I fear, and less confident.

> The years 1996 to 1999/2000 feel to me like I could go back and live them 20 times over, each time different, and still feel like I would look back with longing at all the things I missed out on

I was about 8-12 years old at that time, so I just caught the tail end of the birth of the computer revolution. While I'm very glad to have had even that experience, I always feel jealous of my fellow nerds who were born about 10-20 years before me and really got to experience those early days.

I don't actually think 96-99 was actually all that interesting from a technical POV. The people working the generation before me got the exciting stuff (which I got to play with as a kid, but didn't work actively in)

It's just that there was an exciting cultural/economic moment. The end of the milennium was special because there was a general sense of optimism and progress overall. There were definitely problems, and injustice, but it just felt different.

I kind of feel the same about 2007 - 2012 or when I first got into tech.

Youth definitely plays a big part in this feeling but I think the dotcom era was also somewhat historically unusual because two huge external events happened around the same time: anyone old enough to grow up during the Cold War had lived with this constant feeling that their life could suddenly be destroyed (as a kid in the 80s we still had air raid drills), and then suddenly people were having rock concerts on both sides of the Berlin Wall while the victorious United States and European allies stopped worrying about the Fulda Gap and started welcoming new NATO members.

The second big change around that time was the internet tearing down cultural borders. Anyone could participate, even people who’d been trapped behind the iron curtain just a decade before, and many people were predicting that the free flow of communication would strengthen democracy and ensure the fall of Chinese authoritarianism.

(Far fewer people correctly predicted that the second would imperil the first)

It was also an era before the paranoid security of the appartus of the state slammed down hard post-9/11.

By which I mean we could do "illegal" raves in abandoned warehouses or spontaneous outdoor spaces and not end up (generally) in holding cells.

After 9/11 the consequences of perceived deviancy became far more extreme.

That and the absolute wave of decentered distraction of social media hadn't arrived yet. There was still some sense of shared common cultures, rather than a bazillion fractured windowless monads fed through social media and Spotify feeds

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