The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

the fragment of the populace who knew society was about to change was free to assume the rest of the world would want to use the internet in the same way (and for the same purposes) that they did. An inward-looking adoration of the internet was projected as the predestined status quo for everyone else.

It would now be possible, or so it was believed, to construct a competing version of reality that would be governed by the morally neutral meritocracy of an agenda-free network.

The words and phrases used by the original internet apostles are now the words and phrases used to mock the internet.

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.

The critical advance was how the algorithm measured the quantity and quality of content on other websites; when searching for a given term, Google users receive the most relevant “primary” sources first, in descending order of importance.

Over time,[*] the Google algorithm created something that had never previously existed: a consensus about the shared understanding of everything.

We are still, decades later, assessing the mental and sociological mutation of a technology that gave all people equal access to a communal corpus callosum.

Arbitrary online thoughts did not disappear, generating the false impression that those thoughts had never been arbitrary to begin with.

In the pre-Google world, the internet had changed the way people thought about computers and communication. In the post-Google world, the internet changed the way people thought about life.

Doxing has come to be classified as a form of violence, in and of itself. What’s mildly amusing is that, prior to the internet, most Americans doxed themselves.

Phone customers were charged a monthly fee if they didn’t want their home number included in the directory.[*]

The explanation is twofold. The first is that the early internet was built around anonymity.

it was assumed everyone had the inherent right to say or do whatever they wanted online, without those words or actions impinging on life in the real world.

A second factor was the realization that holding two disassociated realities simultaneously made both of those realities less secure, and that the entire globe was now interconnected in a way that felt dangerous and unmanageable.

The easiest illustration of how the internet reinvented industries outside of itself was the advent of Napster in 1999.

It made single songs more important than albums, which hadn’t been the case since the early sixties. It eroded the cultural significance of genres and annihilated nonvirtual musical subcultures.

And—most significant—it made the tangible value of recorded music almost zero.

Many artists could not resist using all of that potential extra space, filling CDs with lesser songs that no one wanted (the third Oasis album, 1997’s widely criticized Be Here Now, clocked in at over seventy-one minutes).

This large-scale repurchasing, more than anything else, explains why overall revenue from music sales almost doubled within the span of the decade—people buying new releases were also constantly rebuying old ones.

Once consumers experienced free music, they came to view music as something that was supposed to be free.

To make real money from album sales, a major-label artist generally needed to sell a minimum of one million units, which is why the bands most against downloading were superstar acts like Metallica. Midlevel artists lost much less from illegal downloading, and minor artists were usually helped by it.

“You can see the 21st century as a disaster for musicians,” anticapitalist theorist Mark Fisher conceded in 2014. “The key technological shifts are with the consumption and distribution of music, rather than in its production.

The free democratizing of songs eliminated the experience of categorizing music as a reflection of who the listener was.

Browsing through someone’s album collection was a low-level Rorschach test. Limitations and scarcity made subjective distinctions meaningful.

The media not only supplies us with memories of all significant events (political, sporting, catastrophic), but edits these memories, too.”

The internet abbreviated this equation by eliminating the need for a mind. The software does the remembering, relentlessly and inflexibly, for you and for everybody else.

What’s so disorienting about the internet of the 1990s is the paradox of its centrality: It was the most important thing that happened, but its importance is still overrated. The facts don’t align with the atmosphere of the memory.

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).

The internet was an amorphous concept constantly described as encroaching, yet always two years away. It was both an unavoidable future and an unworkable playground, controlled by strangers you didn’t know and didn’t want to meet.

There’s no date for when the transfer of power occurred. The record of the transfer has edited itself.

Whenever people describe the strengths and weaknesses of “the internet,” they are usually describing experiences that never happened during the internet’s first decade of assimilation.

The newspapers complied with the Unabomber’s demands, partially out of fear but also as a means for figuring out who this person was: The hope was that someone might read the screed and recognize its syntax and prose style, leading to the bomber’s identification.

The content of Kaczynski’s ideology and the conditions of the Internet Age feel as though they must be connected, despite the impossibility of a man living without electricity having any real understanding of what network computing was.

While it was easy to be crazy in the early nineties, it was difficult for like-minded crazy people to organize.

The thought of an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory crossing into real politics (or even being quasi-validated by a mainstream newspaper) was absurd. Only the internet could make that possible.

The baseball strike of 1994, however, was the strike that left a residue. There was widespread belief that neither the players nor the owners cared about the consequences for the sport or its fans, and that the long-standing cliché of baseball being sacred was suddenly a bit preposterous.

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.

The late nineties will forever be defined as baseball’s Steroid Era, to the exclusion of all other events that transpired within that same window of time.

What’s now widely understood about performance-enhancing drugs is the totality of their value.

Steroids allow athletes to train harder and recover faster.

But in the nineties, the knowledge around steroids was less sophisticated. There was a fantasy that an athlete injected these drugs and instantly became stronger, almost as if steroids were a magic bullet.

More than anything else, there was discomfort with a skepticism based solely on conjecture. Baseball didn’t test for steroids and players never talked about steroids.

The PED denials from athletes of this period were so adamant and uncompromising that taking an adversarial position adopted the tenor of a conspiracy theory.

The nineties’ ambivalence regarding steroids was not a case of the public rejecting what was perceptibly impossible. It was the public accepting the implausible, based on the best evidence available. It was crazy, but not as crazy as it’s remembered.

Boris Yeltsin, the boozehound incumbent, overcame mass unpopularity to win reelection as Russian president, significantly due to assistance from clandestine United States operatives and the support of Bill Clinton.

Russian politicians raised with a Soviet mind-set had never needed to consider what voters wanted or how voters thought.

His political approach required a wholesale Western reinvention. Yeltsin needed to go negative.

The more nuanced half of the strategy was to focus not on what the Russian people wanted, but on what they feared: a return to breadlines, a potential civil war, and the possibility of social unrest that would never go away.

The expressed U.S. position on the meddling was that America had a stake in the outcome, Yeltsin was the best hope for the expansion of democracy, and bloodlessly shaping international policy is the definition of what diplomacy is.

Do consumers demand what they want, or are consumers convinced to want whatever they’re offered?