The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

It was as if she’d been genetically engineered in some kind of indie rock laboratory: a Midwestern feminist who eviscerated male hipster oppression while embodying the unrealistic fantasies of every male hipster.

For all of the twentieth century—and particularly in the decades following World War II—the volume of manufactured consumer art had exponentially increased. The volume was now vast enough to replace the natural world in totality. A fixed reality was no longer needed; there was enough unfixed reality inside a single Blockbuster to sustain the entire cinematic multiverse. Content could be made from content.

The nineties were a fertile period for the self-indulgent genius and an amazing decade for high-gloss unconventional film, saturated with anti-cliché, self-contained projects defined by the interiority of their creators:

The full spectrum of social and psychological consequences that accompanied the advent of the internet is too profound to explain or understand (then, now, or ever). It exponentially expanded the parameters of external existence while decreasing the material size of interior existence. It allowed any person to simultaneously possess two competing identities—one actual and one virtual. It altered the value of concepts whose value had once been stable and self-evident (solitude, distance, memory, knowledge). Most critically, it recontextualized every fragment of data that moved through its sphere, which eventually encompassed all data available.

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 words and images never dissolve (the link might break, but the data is still cached). There is no interpretation and there is no misinterpretation. The mediated version of the event is the memory, even if the context is false or invisible. This is even true of the internet itself.

No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd.