The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

Every message or image is preceded and followed by a different message or image with which it has no natural relationship, except to modify the meaning of whatever is currently being experienced.

no one assumed phone calls should be free.

Take, for example, the premise of using one’s native area code as an expression of identity.

It was banal enough to be included as a plot point in the first Sex and the City movie (Carrie Bradshaw refuses to accept a 347 area code, classifying herself as a “9-1-7 gal”).

Hell yea

(the code for the entire state of Florida was 305). Over time, area codes became more and more specific (Florida now has seventeen codes, with 305 applying only to Miami-Dade County and the Florida Keys).

Why the keys?

and that the group’s allegiance to the discontinued code was historical and honorary.

It’s not just that only 4.3 million Americans had a cellular phone in 1990 and 97 million had one by 2000,

If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it. There was no other option. If you didn’t know where someone was, you had to wait until that person wanted to be found. You had to trust people, and they had to trust you. If you made plans over the phone and left the house, those plans could not be changed—everyone had to be where they said they’d be, and everyone had to arrive when they said they’d arrive.

In 1992, bragging about your area code was a collective expression of the community where you were. By 2002, it was an individual connection to the place you had left.

“There are hundreds, if not thousands, of neat things you can do on the Internet,” noted Smith. But in 1995, any number greater than seven sounded like a lot.

“The Internet will be to women in the ’90s what the vibrator was to women in the ’70s,” self-described cyberporn editor Lisa Palac said in a 1994 GQ story. “It’s going to have that power.”

In his book, Gates employs the same language he used in a memo to his employees at Microsoft, comparing the internet to a tidal wave that would kill anyone who couldn’t learn to “swim in its waves.” Here again, a seemingly draconian sentiment is expressed as a positive, since one is supposed to concede that the metaphorical “waves” are intrinsically awesome.

Becoming “internet famous” had no connection to fame in the conventional world (in 1993, Wired claimed “the best-known online personality in the country” was a sixty-four-year-old retired army colonel named Dave Hughes).

The Net was built without a central command authority. That means that nobody owns it, nobody runs it, nobody has the power to kick anybody off for good. There isn’t even a master switch that can shut it down in case of emergency. “It’s the closest thing to true anarchy that ever existed,”

It does, in retrospect, read like an attempt at starting another country or seceding from the existing one, neither of which happened.

If someone typed the word “bear” into the search box, they’d get a list of web pages that included the word bear. But this was only valuable to a person who wanted random bear information, potentially encompassing omnivorous animals roaming Alaska, the professional football team in Chicago, and husky gay men with facial hair.

AltaVista was like a reference librarian who’d dreamily point at a heap of books and say, “I know there is some stuff over there about bears.”

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

It took a long time for many people to get comfortable using their credit card to buy a book on Amazon, even if they had no qualms about making an identical transaction over the telephone.

“I don’t understand this whole thing about computers and the superhighway,” sci-fi novelist Ray Bradbury told an audience of college students in 1995. “Who wants to be in touch with all of those people?”

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

David did not believe his brother could possibly be a murderer; his wife, however, was not so sure (she’d always had a weird feeling about Ted).

The thought of an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory crossing into real politics (or even being quasi-validated by a mainstream newspaper) was absurd.

Much of the show’s creative tension came from Mulder and Scully’s interaction, a platonic relationship that felt extra sexual because the pair was not having sex (and when they finally did, fans were disappointed).

When the International Basketball Federation decided to let professional basketball players compete in the 1992 Olympics, Jordan privately said he would only agree to play if the U.S. roster did not include Isiah Thomas, Jordan’s most hated opponent from the Detroit Pistons. When the much-publicized “Dream Team” of pro players was finally put together, Thomas—certainly among the twelve best players of his generation—was not-so-mysteriously excluded.

Jordan idolized his father (MJ was notorious for sticking out his tongue whenever he played anything, a tic he’d come to mimic by watching his dad, a mechanic, stick out his tongue while working on car engines).

Jordan’s ill-fated desire to try was perhaps the last moment when baseball could still be justifiably viewed as the centerpiece of American sports.

The concept of baseball’s exceptionalism—that the sport held a unique place in U.S. life and would always be recognized as the national pastime—managed to subsist long after the plausibility of that designation had been statistically obliterated.

The owners decided they’d play the 1995 season with replacement players, much like the NFL had done during the football strike of ’87. Beyond being unpopular, the plan proved legally unworkable. The players finally agreed to return to the game at the end of March, truncating the 1995 season by eighteen games. When the sport resumed, attendance was down and TV ratings had fallen even farther. More significant, the social standing of baseball had diminished in unexpected ways.

McGwire and Sosa had redeemed baseball. When it was later proven that both had used PEDs (despite their years of denials), it was more deflating than unfathomable. Some fans felt betrayed, but most just felt stupid. McGwire was the most physically imposing hitter of all time, who’d somehow grown stronger as he got older. Sosa was a thirty-year-old adult with acne. It seemed so retrospectively obvious—and, in retrospect, it was.

Yeltsin (who’d sunk to the bottom of preelection polls) was the opposite of perfect, but he was the best option available and Clinton liked him personally.[*] Clinton helped him get a $10.2 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund.

Nene blinking

The U.S. operatives—Richard Dresner, George Gorton, and Joe Shumate—presented themselves as harmless sales representatives, transferred to Moscow with the aim of selling flat-screen TVs. What they were really doing was assisting Tatiana Dyachenko, Yeltsin’s thirty-six-year-old daughter, who ran his campaign despite having no political experience.

What is going awnn

Every new Zima went down slightly worse than the previous Zima. There was, however, something perversely enticing about a drink that seemed to come from a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which color did not exist.

“I had 15 the other night, and the thing is, you can drive with it. Your breath doesn’t smell like alcohol,” a thirty-six-year-old furniture mover told The Village Voice. “The only thing that irritates me is why don’t they stop the bullshit and tell us what’s in it.”

Why have i heard this quote before

“We would launch a Tab Clear product and position it right next to Crystal Pepsi, and we’d kill both in the process,” Coca-Cola marketing strategist Sergio Zyman explained in the 2011 book Killing Giants.

The belief was that anything was now possible, and that the limitations humans had accepted in the past were not necessarily real. The people who thought those things were correct, although not for the reasons they assumed. The news broke in February of 1997, but the breakthrough itself was already seven months old. The story came from Scotland, devoid of forewarning, and it prompted a lot of people to have unusually dramatic conversations that started like this: “Have you heard about that sheep?”

President Bill Clinton was compelled to announce his desire for legislation that would ban human cloning, arguing that the concept “has the potential to threaten the sacred family bonds at the very core of our ideals and our society.” This declaration wasn’t altogether different from announcing a bill outlawing invisible vampires.

“I’m not arguing in favor of the restoration of naïve to a place of honor,” said Purdy. “But I do think there’s something corrosive in all-pervasive, reflective skepticism. It’s laziness disguised as sophistication.”

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.

In the same way that every historical era feels extraordinary within the moment it happens,

Im gonna barf

There’s no way to engage with a song like “Achy Breaky Heart” without fixating on the incongruity between the magnitude of its popularity and the overwhelming consensus that it was terrible.

But the landscape was shifting. The things casual consumers liked about “new country” were the same things casual consumers had liked about “old rock.”

Hmmm

The crossover of “Achy Breaky Heart” was a micro example. The macro example was Garth Brooks.

It started with the abject whiteness of his name: Garth. It seemed like a fictional name someone would select[*] for the explicit purpose of not seeming hip.

It didn’t seem to matter that Brooks was more openly political than almost any major country artist of the period, or that his views did not represent the assumed conservatism of country listeners: His lyrics addressed domestic violence and gay rights, and the song “We Shall Be Free” was inspired by (and sympathetic to) the 1992 Los Angeles riots. He received no criticism for these opinions, nor did he receive credit.

Wow

Dallas was a CBS Friday night soap opera about Texas oil barons. It was considered a fun, juicy distraction and not all that different from Dynasty, the rival ABC drama about Denver-based oil barons airing on Wednesdays.

Two different things!

was a risk. Investing $50 to $70 million in

Cameron’s artistic commitment to water cannot be overstated. In order to get footage of the actual Titanic shipwreck, he and a film crew dove 12,500 feet to the floor of the Atlantic Ocean—and not just once, but twelve times.

It finally appeared in U.S. theaters just before Christmas, with a theatrical running time of three hours and fourteen minutes. The movie’s interminable length was understood to be the final spine-snapping straw—with

“I think he might be bisexual,” said one of the teens interviewed for the story, “because, like, in this one picture of him I saw, he had his shirt open in the middle. It just didn’t look right.”