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.

The boilerplate portrait of the American nineties makes the whole era look like a low-risk grunge cartoon. That portrait is imperfect. It is not, however, wildly incorrect. The decade was heavily mediated and assertively self-conscious, but not skewed and misshapen by the internet and social media.

That, more than any person or event, informed the experience of nineties life: an adversarial relationship with the unseemliness of trying too hard. Every generation melodramatically assumes it will somehow be the last, and there was some of that in the nineties, too—but not as much as in the decade that came before and far less than in the decades that would come after. It was perhaps the last period in American history when personal and political engagement was still viewed as optional.

There was a longing for the 1970s, but not in the way people of the seventies had longed for the fifties. It was not nostalgia for a time that was more wholesome. It was nostalgia for a time when you could relax and care less.

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.

Yet the content of the Mandela Effect—the objects and ideas that people misremember—is almost entirely tied to the era just before the internet became common. It was harder to prove what was true. It was harder to disprove what was false. 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. Today, paraphrasing the established historical record or questioning empirical data is seen as an ideological, anti-intellectual choice. But until the very late nineties, it was often the only choice available.

It would be absurd to claim that Generation X was the apex of American progress. One wouldn’t make that claim even if it were somehow justified, as doing so would undermine everything Generation X purported to represent. It is, by almost any barometer, the least significant of the canonical demographics. Yet one accolade can be applied with conviction: Among the generations that have yet to go extinct, Generation X remains the least annoying.

the vacuous center of Gen X culture was a knee-jerk distaste for Boomer ideology and a fear of invisible market forces that infiltrated everything.

What made selling out so psychologically vexing was the level of gradation inherent to its principles: It did not simply mean someone was trying to sell something in order to get rich. It meant someone was compromising the values they originally espoused in exchange for something superficial (which was usually money, but not necessarily). This action was particularly bad if the compromised person was still doing the same work they’d done before, except now packaging that work in an attempt to make it palatable to a less discriminating audience.

There was, in real time, an awareness that the whole idea of criticizing people for selling out was ridiculous, even as it was actively happening. It was understood to be a teenage mentality that ignored the realities of adulthood. It punished innovation and ambition, and it was so infused with hypocrisy that the thesis barely hung together. It was a loser’s game and everybody knew it. But it was a loser’s game you still had to play. Perceiving the concept as preposterous did not make it any less pervasive.

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.” It was an unwieldy sentence to grasp, but Trow was explaining something the public could intuitively sense: The way the world was presented through media was increasingly detached from the way the world actually was. Technology was advancing faster than the human condition.

“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.”

“Walter Benjamin was a farseeing man,” writes McMurtry, “but I suspect that even he would be a little surprised by the extent to which what’s given us by the media is our memory now. The media not only supplies us with memories of all significant events (political, sporting, catastrophic), but edits these memories, too.”

What he’s describing is a process familiar to most modern people: the sensation that the mediated version of an event will overwrite one’s own personal memory of the same experience, forcing the individual to reinterpret the way that memory sits within their own mind. 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.

The mediated version of the event is the memory, even if the context is false or invisible.

There are things forgotten by chance, and there are things forgotten on purpose. But then there are things that aren’t really forgotten as much as they are deliberately ignored, usually because the memory has come to necessitate an elephantine level of discomfiting rationalization.

The detail always noted in remembrances of the Bronco chase is the throngs of bystanders cheering for Simpson as the car rolled down the freeway, congregating on overpasses and holding makeshift cardboard signs proclaiming, “The Juice Is Loose.” It seemed perverse then and still seems perverse now. 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. The history of such acts is disturbingly long, dating back to the dawn of public education in the New World. But Columbine High represents the baseline for a different level of school shooting—the full incarnation of a nightmare that had previously seemed like a theoretical possibility too extreme to actually occur.

It’s

also a mega-depressing example of manufactured meta-history, where the slaughter of thirteen people was obscured by the need to impose a cogent narrative upo...

The persistence of these fabrications can be mainly attributed to a communal unwillingness to admit that there was no rational explanation behind this attack.

Most teen culture from the previous twenty-five years had worked from the premise that popular kids were inherently shallow and unpopular kids were inherently good:

The trope was so pervasive that it was reflexively applied to Columbine. Because it was (incorrectly) believed that Harris and Klebold had targeted popular kids, it was (incorrectly) assumed that this must have been a response to merciless bullying. This became the only sophisticated way

to think about the Columbine shooting. It was not to be seen as an isolated example of two unusually disturbed kids with almost limitless access to guns; it was to be seen as an extremist manifestation of teenage angst, endemic to society as a whole, allegedly fueled by toxic video games and nihilistic pop metal.

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.

A van explodes and a building collapses. A man and a woman disagree about events that happened to them both. A killer in a white vehicle drives to nowhere, as a form of entertainment. Teenagers murder teenagers and no one knows why. What is real? How do you define real? There was a spoon, and there was no spoon, and the only difference was how much you cared.

Whenever the world rapidly and dramatically changes, the gut response is that society must be disintegrating. There’s a long-standing belief that national trauma shatters the existing status quo and splinters the interconnectivity that creates a phantasm of security. What happened to North America after the eleventh of September was the inverse of that. Society did not, in any way, disintegrate. Instead, it was irrevocably jammed together. Every conversation became the same conversation. Ideological differences were inflamed, but not because of intellectual separation. It was the narcissism of small differences, amplified into differences that were no longer small. The phantasm that got shattered was the possibility of living an autonomous life, separate from the lives of others.

The physical newspapers arrived to subscribers around the same time nineteen men with

box cutters passed through low-security checkpoints in four different airports and boarded four cross-country domestic flights. The flights were hijacked, the planes crashed into buildings, 2,977 people died, and the nineties collapsed with the skyscrapers.