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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.
The idea of policing morality or blaming strangers for the condition of one’s own existence was perceived as overbearing and uncouth. If you weren’t happy, the preferred stance was to simply shrug and accept that you were unhappy. Ambiguous disappointment wasn’t that bad.
“We didn’t sell our souls,” Wice told Wired when the deal was finalized. “We’re just licensing them.”
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 1980 George W. S. Trow essay “Within the Context of No Context” argued that “the work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts.”
When the music network MTV debuted in 1981, the justifiable fear was that an endless stream of four-minute rock videos would destroy the teenage attention span. But could that really be true? Hadn’t people expressed the exact same fear when television was first introduced in the fifties?
“There are decades when nothing happens,” Vladimir Lenin allegedly claimed, “and there are weeks when decades happen.”
“If we’re the last people in history to know life before the Internet,” wrote Michael Harris in his book The End of Absence, “we are also the only ones who will ever speak, as it were, both languages. We are the only fluent translators of Before and After.”
“A nerd,” asserts Smith, “is someone whose life is focused on computers and technology. But a geek is someone whose life is focused on computers and technology and likes it that way.”
In The Sun Also Rises, a character is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” the man replies. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
This escalated when the second Biosphere mission was launched in March of 1994, and a new person was hired to manage Space Biospheres Ventures: Steve Bannon.
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
This book is being written within an unprecedented historical moment. However, that would be true no matter when it was written. I’m typing this sentence during a global pandemic, but I’d probably consider the current historical moment unprecedented even if COVID-19 had never come into existence. Every time period that’s ever transpired has seemed unprecedented to the people who happened to live through it; no one has ever believed the Chinese aphorism “May you live in interesting times” did not apply to the life they were coincidentally living.
“A genius,” jazz pianist Thelonious Monk once said, “is the one most like himself.” By that definition, Brooks was the Wonder Bread genius of his generation.
“Remember, it’s just TV,” future podcaster Marc Maron wrote in a 1993 essay about the expansion of cable systems. “It was created to sell stuff, to distract.”
Most popular entertainment is designed to be niche and disposable.
Some people want entertainment to challenge them, but most people don’t. Some people care about acting, but more people care about actors. Some people see computerized visual spectacle as a distraction from cinematic art, but most people consider visual spectacle to be the art form’s central purpose.
The metaphoric meaning of this decision has been projected back upon the Wachowski siblings, prompting Lilly to eventually admit that this was, in fact, the original thematic intention (there was even a transgender character in the original script, but the story arc was killed by the studio during preproduction). The vision of The Matrix as an elaborate transgender allegory is now the ruling framework when considering the film’s historical significance, leapfrogging the initial frenzy over its technical achievements (most notably the introduction of “bullet time,” where intense on-screen
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What Fox realized on election night in 2000 (when its ratings spiked upward) and what MSNBC came to accept a few years later was something increasingly visible throughout the nineties, but too journalistically depressing to openly embrace: People watch cable news as a form of entertainment, and they don’t want to learn anything that contradicts what they already believe. What they want is information that confirms their preexisting biases, falsely presented through the structure of traditional broadcasting. It had to look like objective journalism, but only if the volume was muted. Moreover,
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Television was not the same as life, but the relationship was closer than it had ever been before and would ever be again.
Part of the complexity of living through history is the process of explaining things about the past that you never explained to yourself. So many temporary realties, distantly viewed in the rearview mirror, will appear ridiculous to any person who wasn’t there.
A president is the only celebrity remembered out of civic obligation. And that, usually, works to a president’s advantage.
The people Clinton would always understand best were those most like him—people who existed in a state of moral and psychological ambivalence.
“There is a difference between reputation and character,” Clinton said in 1995, “and I have increasingly less control over my reputation but still full control over my character.”
Yet the machinations of the 2000 election probably changed day-to-day life more, in ways that are less visible and trickier to elucidate. It was the beginning of absolutist binary thinking on every issue even vaguely related to politics, based on the assumption that any attempt at real compromise was either hopeless or fake. It was the end of small differences. Moving forward, all differences would be ideological. And this was partially because the two men at the center of the 2000 dispute had seemed similar in a lot of uninteresting ways.
In The Nation, a late September essay by columnist Eric Alterman was titled “Bush or Gore: Does It Matter?” Alterman’s answer was yes, based on the core argument that “the Republican Party, at this moment in history, is politically and ideologically dedicated to the destruction of the very foundations of social solidarity in this country.” But even in this emphatically pro-Gore essay, published in a shrilly liberal publication, every attempt at casting the candidates as different was littered with reminders that most people thought they were alike.
In his dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
moved on. What much of the public had considered a milquetoast competition between uncharismatic clones was understood by the court as a straightforward war for control of the future. Every other aspect of political thought became irrelevant—the conservatives had a one-judge majority, and that was enough to decide who ran the world.
