More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
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.
I say this all the time, but in a less pretty way. We just wondered about stuff!
(some of the only material that remains from this period was recorded by one private citizen—Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia woman who compulsively recorded and stored over 40,000 VHS tapes of news broadcasts between the years of 1979 and 2012, eventually donating the collection to the Vanderbilt Television News Archive).
This is amazing to me.
It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.
Among the generations that have yet to go extinct, Generation X remains the least annoying.
Aw, you’re too kind.
If you weren’t happy, the preferred stance was to simply shrug and accept that you were unhappy. Ambiguous disappointment wasn’t that bad.
For people sharing Coupland’s perspective, the onset of the nineties provided little reason to be optimistic or excited about anything professional. The new goal was to emotionally and intellectually remove oneself from an uninteresting mainstream society.
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.
It’s an isolated, freestanding period where a person’s unwillingness to view his existence as a commodity was prioritized over another person’s actual personality. An authentic jerk was preferable to a likeable sellout. It was a confusing time to care about things.
It was a version of nothing so close to something it accidentally became everything.
There had been good presidents and there had been bad presidents, but the net deviation was akin to Richard Linklater’s description of fingerprints in the 1991 film Slacker: The differences were minor compared to the similarities.
His identity was built around modernized interpretations of Depression-era values—increasing austerity, staying out of foreign wars, cracking down on marijuana, cutting your hair and wearing a tie to the office.
“There are decades when nothing happens,” Vladimir Lenin allegedly claimed, “and there are weeks when decades happen.”
“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.”
This was a whoa moment for me.
(in 1992, polling indicated that almost half of all Americans still disapproved of interracial marriage).
🤯
An anti-cop viewpoint was not universal. But what mattered was this was now a possible viewpoint to hold, even if you weren’t young or Black or living in Los Angeles.
Within ten years, the notion of nonchalantly using homophobia as a vehicle for unironic humor would disappear almost entirely (at least in the entertainment industry).[*]
What seemed to happen was what so often happens with radical activism: Outrage from the periphery moved the needle beyond the comfort zone of Middle America, prompting pushback. But when the needle drifted back, its home position had shifted.
How did something once considered a normal extension of establishing residence become a disturbing act of aggression, during a decade when crime statistically decreased?
The peak of baseball had coincided with the peaking of white middle-class society, and baseball’s displacement by football was sometimes viewed as a symptom of national decline.
“Football combines two of the worst features of American life,” wrote conservative baseball scholar George Will. “It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”
😂😂
There are many reasons not to drink Pepsi, but “It’s too dark” has never been among them.
Why, from roughly 1992 to 1995, did the beverage industry operate from the position that there was an underserved sector of the populace who desperately wanted transparent drinks?
Every new Zima went down slightly worse than the previous Zima.
The prospect of a terrible beverage created to kamikaze a moronic beverage is an apt metaphor for this entire period of marketing.
In the seventies, the joy of straightforward dumbness had been enough. In the nineties, you had to pretend dumbness was smart.
It was an existential problem people kept ignoring and denying and reconsidering, in hopes it would be solved by magic.
The nineties anxiety over cloning was, almost exclusively, a mass media creation.
Still, the dissonance between the public sensitivity to genetic engineering and the actual progress being made can be seen as a signpost for the modern anti-science movement in Western culture.
Capitalism is connected to every extension of American life, so it can be cited as the source for almost any social ill: wealth disparity, the legacy of slavery, housing shortages, monopsony, clinical depression, the tyranny of choice, superhero movie franchises.
This was not a case of backlash, where people started making fun of a song as a result of its omnipresence—people ridiculed “Achy Breaky Heart” the first time they heard it, as it was climbing the charts, while they were dancing to it.
Titanic tapped into the reservoir of industry realities everyone always claims to concede while continually refusing to fully accept: Some people want entertainment to challenge them, but most people don’t.
I 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.
Yet this can also be understood as the primordial impulse of what would eventually drive the mechanism of social media: the desire of uninformed people to be involved with the news, broadcasting their support for a homicidal maniac not because they liked him, but because it was exhilarating to participate in an experience all of society was experiencing at once.
Columbine High was nowhere near to being the first American school shooting. Less than a year before Columbine, a mentally ill fifteen-year-old killed two of his classmates and wounded twenty-five others at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon.
New information for me.
When something as terrible as Columbine occurs, there’s a wish to have it explain something crucial about how the world is. Learning the truth is supposed to help. In this case, it did not. The truth proved there was no meaning at all, which was more terrifying than the myth. So the truth was rejected, even after it was accepted.
Holding on to anger toward a former president is like remaining angry with someone who wronged you in high school. It seems a little pathetic and a little deranged.
In retrospect, the whole ’96 election cycle feels like an afterthought—the rare modern election where voters weren’t constantly told that this was the most important decision they would ever make.
But the raw numbers were not what mattered. What mattered was the validation of the question itself. Why not vote on the basis of low-impact likability? What would be the consequences of accidentally picking the wrong guy?
It was embarrassing to care about this stuff too much. It was a little melodramatic. That was for self-righteous people who took things too seriously. That was for people who liked Ralph Nader.
“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.”
