The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

The decade was heavily mediated and assertively self-conscious, but not skewed and misshapen by the internet and social media. Its trajectory can be traced with accuracy.

That, more than any person or event, informed the experience of nineties life: an adversarial relationship with the unseemliness of trying too hard.

It was, in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive. There were still nuclear weapons, but there was not going to be a nuclear war. The internet was coming, but reluctantly, and there was no reason to believe it would be anything but awesome. The United States experienced a prolonged period of economic growth without the protracted complications of a hot or cold war, making it possible to focus on one’s own subsistence as if the rest of society were barely there. Concerns and anxieties were omnipresent, but the stakes were vague:

Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed. It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems.

As a society, we’ve elected to ignore that many people of the nineties—many modern people, many of whom are still very much alive—were exceedingly comfortable not knowing anything for certain. Today, paraphrasing the established historical record or questioning empirical data is seen as an ideological, anti-intellectual choice. But until the very late nineties, it was often the only choice available.

Most live video footage was not permanently saved, often taped over to reduce costs

The nineties were a golden age for metropolitan newspapers and glossy magazines, yet most copies were destroyed or recycled within a month and never converted to digital files.

The concept of “selling out”—and the degree to which that notion altered the meaning and perception of almost everything—is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties.

The song’s title derived from Vail’s friend (and eventual Bikini Kill bandmate) Kathleen Hanna, who drunkenly wrote the phrase “Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit” on Cobain’s bedroom wall in Olympia, Washington. The joke was that Vail wore Teen Spirit deodorant, thus implying that Cobain and Vail were sleeping together.

Steven Pinker had just released his sixth book, The Language Instinct

The first was, “words are not thoughts,” and that there’s no scientific evidence that language determines thought. The second was that words are arbitrary, an actuality that connected to his third point: “Concepts, not words, are in charge,” wrote Pinker. “Give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name.”

The first “node to node” communication was conducted by the military in 1969.

When Al Gore ran for president in 2000, he was mocked for casually claiming on CNN that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet,” an inaccurate statement that was also willfully misunderstood (what Gore was referencing was a $600 million bill he’d sponsored as a senator[*] that expanded the internet into schools and libraries).

If someone had already reached middle age by 1995 (say, any person born before World War II), it was possible to view the internet as an interesting outgrowth of modernity that could be ignored entirely. It was neither a necessity nor an obligation.

If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it. There was no other option. If you didn’t know where someone was, you had to wait until that person wanted to be found. You had to trust people, and they had to trust you. If you made plans over the phone and left the house, those plans could not be changed—everyone had to be where they said they’d be, and everyone had to arrive when they said they’d arrive. Life was more scripted and less fluid, dictated by a machine that would not (and could not) compromise its location. Yet within these fascistic limitations, the machine itself somehow mattered less. It was an appliance, not that different from the dishwasher. The concept of buying a new phone every other year[*] would have seemed as crazy as installing a new toilet every other Thanksgiving.

In 1992, bragging about your area code was a collective expression of the community where you were. By 2002, it was an individual connection to the place you had left.

There was, philosophically, a surfer-like mentality to using the early internet, where the experiential key was surrendering the desire for order and embracing the avalanche of information. Ten minutes on AltaVista could easily turn into three hours. Time disappeared. It was a shapeless process that attracted shapeless thinkers.

What’s false is the accompanying notion that life in the nineties must have been intractably intertwined with the internet. It was not (or at least not for the vast majority of the populace, for the vast majority of the period). In 1997, for the first (and only) time, U.S. revenues from fax machine sales exceeded $1 billion.

The physical and technical evolution of football and basketball had been so dramatic that the past wasn’t comparable with the present. That wasn’t true with baseball. Baseball had evolved less. The aesthetics and physiology were more similar than different, and it was not remotely unreasonable to suggest that the greatest player of all time was still an overweight alcoholic who’d retired in 1935.

When Brooks toured the world for 220 concerts in the middle of the decade, he capped the price of every ticket at $20. Though he almost certainly lost some short-term revenue by doing this, it guaranteed that every show was a 100 percent capacity sellout. The traditionally regional draw of country music was disconnected from his popularity: When he put on a free show in Manhattan’s Central Park, 980,000 people showed up.

There’s a long-standing belief that national trauma shatters the existing status quo and splinters the interconnectivity that creates a phantasm of security. What happened to North America after the eleventh of September was the inverse of that. Society did not, in any way, disintegrate. Instead, it was irrevocably jammed together. Every conversation became the same conversation. Ideological differences were inflamed, but not because of intellectual separation. It was the narcissism of small differences, amplified into differences that were no longer small. The phantasm that got shattered was the possibility of living an autonomous life, separate from the lives of others.

The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd.