The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

It’s popular (and maybe reasonable) to claim that the labeling of any generation[*] is stupid and almost always wrong, but it does serve one essential function: It allows people to express prejudice toward large chunks of the populace without any risk. You can’t be sexist or racist or classist if the only enemy is someone’s date of birth. Younger generations despise older generations for creating a world they must inhabit unwillingly, an impossible accusation to rebuff. Older generations despise new generations for multiple reasons, although most are assorted iterations of two: They perceive the updated versions of themselves as either softer or lazier (or both). These categorizations tend to be accurate. But that’s positive. That’s progress. If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more comfortable; if technology advances and efficiency increases, emerging generations should rationally expect to work less. If new kids aren’t soft and lazy, something has gone wrong.

Within any generation, there are always two distinct classes: a handful who accept and embody the assigned caricature, and many more others who are caricatured against their will, simply because they happened to be born in a particular year. It was no different for Generation X. The only dissimilarity is that it bothered them less.

There’s an intuitive belief that technology changes people, and the internet feels like an unusually straightforward example of this process. But it’s also possible that the relationship between the internet and the evolution of society was more epiphenomenal: It’s possible that society is always changing, and that the rise of the internet was a coincidental event that merely made that natural process more visible. The nineties were technologically defined by a reinvention of human communication and the expanding power of network computing. It stands to reason that this reinvention must explain any psychological difference between a twenty-five-year-old in 1989 and a twenty-five-year-old in 2001. But then again, the difference between a young adult in 1969 and a young adult in 1981 was equally dramatic, and both versions of that twenty-five-year-old used tools of telecommunication that were essentially identical. So how do we know it was the internet that changed people’s brains? How do we know those brains weren’t going to change anyway? The short answer is that we don’t. The long answer is that certain social dynamics reversed so quickly that the inversion could not have happened without some kind of unnatural cause, and every reasonable explanation eventually connects with online communication.