The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

If one is trying to understand the idealistic difference between people who lived through the nineties and people born into the nineties, this is a good place to start. It was certainly possible to be against capitalism in the nineties, but much harder to have your opinion taken seriously (particularly since all the noncapitalist societies seemed to be collapsing or surrendering). It’s still possible to take a modern stand against commercialism, but that argument runs counter to the creative aspiration of almost everything produced (the idea of a commercial product becoming “more commercial” is not a compromise but the self-evident goal). Part of this is fashion. The twenty-three-year-old activated personality railing against commercialism in 1993 might be emotionally identical to the twenty-three-year-old activated personality railing against capitalism in 2023. But even if that’s true, the transitory worldviews they adopt get hammered into the transitory structures of society and interpreted by people who have no investment in the underlying conflict. In the same way that every historical era feels extraordinary within the moment it happens, the present-tense status of culture exists in a constant state of crisis, with the tenor of the crisis shaped by whatever people assume to be the cause.