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.
In the moment, there's a sharp "time before it existed" and "time after it existed."
I.e. late 2006, there was no mass market iPhone-like device; late 2007, there was
I always felt that Apple basically reimplemented PalmOS with the benefit of ~10 years newer technology and a wildly efficient Chinese supply chain.
I definitely wouldn't say that these devices were mainstream. They were very much targeted toward business people and hardcore nerds. The iPhone definitely revolutionized the market, with its vastly more desirable aesthetic and approachable interface.
I second that. Please, for the love of all good things, do not remake the X-Files, or Firefly.
Which is to say they used a facsimile of a lawless frontier to tell stories about ideologically stark, independent characters.
Less cactus, more open carry.
The Expanse is fairly good on its own and I did enjoy it but it could have totally filled the void left by Firefly if they would have just had a few comedy writers on the team. Instead, we got a ship full of gloomy self-loathing heroes with poor mental health who were too caught up in second-guessing everything they did to fully appreciate the absurdity of everything happening around them. (I know, I know, the show came from a book series, just humor me...)
A captain of a ship.
An outlaw.
In a western-seeming system of planets.
If nothing else was said, that already paints a pretty vivid background from the audience's preconceptions. All of that exposition can be skipped. Or at most, quickly nodded to in order to confirm.
Sure, a show could rebuild the same thing neater from primitives, but how much show time would that take? Western was "close enough" to the point, so they went with it.
There was someone else on the ship like River.
If you love animated stuff I guess it might be fine.
Damn, now I want to binge-re-watch Firefly.
I loved the trick with the colour grading. Won't say more because spoilers, if you know you know.
TV science fiction was just beginning the transition from "monster of the week" to season+ long pre-written plot arcs.
Twin Peaks was only a few years earlier (1990), which pioneered(?) bringing the hitherto only soap opera and family drama continuous storyline to other genres.
TNG is indicative of this too, with the adaptation of season-long plotting between 1-2 (little), 3 (some), and 4+ (more).
Which is to say when the X-Files premiered, having a series-long plan of any sort was still a novel idea in TV scifi.
Although honestly, it could work if they played into the cynicism and uncertainty of the modern UFO phenomenon. If the "conspiracy" is a hall of mirrors comprised of psyops, lies, grift and folklore and the truth is something very weird exists but the government doesn't know what it is. Establish a "post-truth" narrative where the only thing we know is that everything we thought we knew (Roswell, Area 51, Dulce, Majestic 12) was a lie.
Maybe at some point have the in-universe version of Northrop-Grumman (or pick whatever defense contractor you like) actually make a breathrough in reverse engineering alien technology (or say it's China, to play on American xenophobia) and now the enemy isn't some vast government conspiracy but dark capitalism. Have an Elon Musk analogue, AI death cults around weird alien artifacts, SV startup culture, UFO grifters within the government, creeping fascism, all of it.
Someone could make an intelligent and interesting show that studies the nature of hyperreality, the evolution of UFO folklore as a mirror of generational fears, and the embrace of metaphysics as a trauma response to the dehumanization of modern technological society. The problem is, that wouldn't be the X-Files. Something closer to Lone Gunmen, maybe, as written by Grant Morrison, without cops being protagonists, but the vibe of the 90's and the Smoking Man and all of that is just too quaint to be plausible nowadays.
They'll do it anyway, and they'll do it badly, and they'll probably do it with AI.
https://www.tvline.com/news/the-x-files-reboot-ryan-coogler-...
If you try and make capitalism the enemy you just end up with Erin Brockovich.
And I think it makes sense that if there were defense contractors and companies secretly reverse engineering alien technology, that capitalism would be their primary motivation. I'm just saying the zeitgeist of conspiracy theory tends to reflect current generational fears and a remake of the X-Files should reflect that.
The corporate fear works if you assume either fascism (top-down collusion between the two), government incompetence/irrelevance (so corporate power is unchecked), or widespread government corruption (more bottom-up collusion).
So feelings on these themes may help indicate your worldview or the worldview of the audience and writers in different eras?
So yes - definitely had its finger on the pulse of early 2000s America.
Pretty certain I said nothing of the sort.
Given that both major parties in the US are now fully complicit in arming and enabling live-streamed genocide, there's a pretty strong case to be made that anti Arab and Islamophobic racism is reaching new heights.
And while most actual Americans are very much against the arming and enabling of said genocide, that hasn't motivated them to move on from the two party system.
There's a widespread notion that "agitating" against two genocidal parties is idealism, or perfectionism. It's really just doing your duty as a person, and the fact that so many Americans don't care/understand that points to... Massive widespread racism, ding ding ding.
1. The world felt farther away. It was much harder to learn current events about far away places, and talk to people there.
2. The number of websites you spend most of your time on has shrunk. Facebook/Insta/TikTok is a lot of people's entire internet diet.
35mm film processing, CDs (tapes even worse), VHS . . . these were all things deemed not exactly ideal at the time.
As sibling comment said, I feel privileged to have experienced that, but especially the whole transition from analogue world into digital and then online. It was quite a ride. Around dotcom boom, the second wave of internet users coming online, internet was relatively widespread,. It was also heterogeneous. Quite amazing actually. Now we're down to few big walled gardens and it's definitely different and, in my opinion, worse.
Definitely remember at least one mentioning "the men in black" (with a picture) and government coverups.
> They were very much treated as a modern version of the local villager swearing he saw a goat that looked like Satan... just random tattle, repeated for amusement more than as part of a coherent thesis.
IIRC, the tone was more "some people think." They weren't especially skeptical or judgemental.
Nearly all US news websites were at a crawl. But somebody at CNN - knowing that their website was basically nonfunctional - piped the closed caption feed from their regular news channel into an IRC channel. (It was hosted at CNN, so clearly it was internal.) And I found that out because someone posted about it on Slashdot.
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.
It wasn't a bubble of the 90's, it was a prescient blueprint for the 2020s.
It took something far more powerful than a TV show that was mildly popular for a few years to create what we live today. It took the great flatness of the Internet. As Terry Pratchett predicted to Bill Gates back then.
Can you say more about this? All I'm finding are articles about PTerry predicting the rise of fake news:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/30/terry-pratchet...
If anything, the 90s were the one era where that thinking had receded more than at any other time. Then 9/11 brought it roaring back.