The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

There’s always a disconnect between the world we seem to remember and the world that actually was.

It was perhaps the last period in American history when personal and political engagement was still viewed as optional.

In the nineties, doing nothing on purpose was a valid option, and a specific brand of cool became more important than almost anything else. The key to that coolness was disinterest in conventional success. The nineties were not an age for the aspirant. The worst thing you could be was a sellout, and not because selling out involved money. Selling out meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible.

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.

This is not like the difference between driving a car and riding a horse. It’s like the difference between building a fire and huddling in the dark, waiting for the sun to rise.

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.

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 problem was not the players. The problem was the game.

The way the world was presented through media was increasingly detached from the way the world actually was.

The social and political failure of Vietnam had taught the U.S. military that the public conception of warfare was almost as important as the warfare itself.

The observation of an event should not be given the same weight as the event itself.

The differences were minor compared to the similarities.

“Like a force of nature, the digital age cannot be denied or stopped,” wrote Nicholas Negroponte in his 1995 book Being Digital. “It has four very powerful qualities that will result in its ultimate triumph: decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing, and empowering.”

The system was free, so the product was you.

“It is easy to be wise after the event,” claimed Sherlock Holmes in the 1922 story “The Problem of Thor Bridge”—an

What society classifies as “credible” is almost always a product of whichever social demographic happens to be economically dominant at the time of the classification.

Something is not “surreal” just because it’s weird or unexpected. Surreal means “beyond the real,” so it can’t describe anything that exists in reality.

But the future can’t exist until the present is the past.

“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.”

Most people wanted Clinton to remain president. They just didn’t trust him as a person. The trade-off was acceptable.

“You never get credit for the disasters you avert,” technology forecaster Paul Saffo told The New York Times in 2013.

the conditions surrounding the 2000 election were among the principal reasons the Electoral College was originally created. One of the espoused fears of the Founding Fathers was that large population centers would create a geographic imbalance during national elections.[*]

In the simplest terms possible, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) promotes the following idea: A nation is not like a household, and comparing its budget to a family budget is stupid. For a nation, debt is meaningless. A government can print its own money and should do so whenever the need arises, as long as prices don’t escalate. Government spending does not matter. The only concern is keeping down inflation.

“The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” Prolific science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote that sentence in 1980, and it had become a widely accepted view by the time he died in 1992.