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MelodicBerries  virtus junxit mors non separabit  1yr ago (freddiedeboer.substack.com)   3928 thread views

It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive

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I suppose I'll have to point to this piece if I'm ever called to answer why I nostalgia-cize about a time I was barely aware enough to enjoy.

That being said, I acknowledge that the Internet and smartphones are two genies that can't quite be put back in the bottle, and there's also a lot of stuff I'm not sure I'd want to give up to go back to the 90's.

ETA:

Another thing that was great about the 90's, something that Freddie probably didn't talk about out of lack of experience, was the world of computers and computer games. Back then, we didn't fear technological progress quite so much (if you did, you probably were an actual honest-to-God literal Baby Boomer who probably imagined a Skynet-like AI forming from the digital ether of computers, much as how people thought flies spontaneously formed on meat pre-Pasteur), and getting new games and hardware was exciting.

The 90's saw computers go from spreadsheet machines that were mostly only good for card games and endless clones of that one Star Trek simulator to multimedia powerhouses that could run Quake. If you were a console gamer instead of a computer gamer, that was still a super exciting time, because you also had games go from 2D to 3D and improve just as rapidly.

Going to a store like CompUSA or Fry's Electronics was special, because you could shop for a new graphics card or check out the new PC games.

I think that's probably what will keep the 90s special as far as nostalgia goes; it feels like if we could time travel back to the 90s, we could have our cake and eat it too. The differences between then and now are technically qualitative, but they don't feel like they are, and the advantages of pre-Internet age hadn't really faded away yet. We often focus on how kids used to play outside, but rainy, bad weather days were boring. Now, possibilities for entertainment don't change much despite the weather, but before video game consoles, you had to hope your parents were willing to drive to go rent a VHS, or before the VCR you had to hope something good was on TV, and before the TV, you were pretty much fucked if nothing good was on the radio, etc... In the 90s, you could have it all. If you wanted social media: BBSes, usenet, forums were there. If you wanted to speak to someone across the world, there were crude audio video chat platforms like CU-SeeMe. You could play tons of videogames of all kinds, if you were on a computer you could download them too. Of course, when we imagine ourselves in the 90s, we tend to imagine ourselves as early adopters, even though few people had computers and internet (and broadband internet). But yeah, the perks of the current years were mostly possible, even if few people took advantage of them, and the tradeoffs hadn't materialized yet.

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