site banner
MelodicBerries  virtus junxit mors non separabit  1yr ago (freddiedeboer.substack.com)   3922 thread views

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

freddiedeboer.substack.com
18
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I've got a couple of specific buckets:

  • If you just take a quick glance at toys available to kids in the 90s, they honestly are obviously superior. Take a look at Super Soakers - I mean holy shit. You can make the argument that today's Nerf offerings are excellent, and I'd agree. But you can and should mostly play with these inside. Water guns force you outside.

  • For video games and general technology, the 90's were "good enough" and that's a powerful state to be in. Your imagination had to fill in blanks with pixelated skyboxes. To make it to secret areas in a game, you had to know someone or buy a guidebook. The girl you were chatting with on AIM could look like anyone. Your walkman wouldn't last forever, and only fit one disc or tape. When you wanted to ask a question about Santa, you couldn't just google it.

  • Food hadn't completed its evolution into a fully-synthetic product. GMOs were still an emerging technology. Taco Bell was still cooking their own refried beans in-restaurant and frying shells fresh each day, Pizza Hut still had handmade dough.

  • This edges into the late 80s as well, but I don't think many people would disagree that 90s cars represented a huge stylistic improvement over their immediate predecessors. In many ways, modern cars still aren't as fast or beautiful.

I'm focusing on things here because nailing down a superior culture is so difficult. Of course parents weren't hovering as close and you could use a bike to get to your friends house. Of course you could be a little wilder when people weren't recording your every move. Of course it was a little bit easier to take your first drink at a younger age. Of course face to face interaction was still the best way to date and get things done.

But I think that's tougher to quantify at best, and a bit too obviously cyclical with previous generations' take. Kids these days may be a collection of asexual wimps but I also think there's less physical bullying, which is cool. They've had access to an enormous amount of history and data from an earlier age which is important. I dunno, I could do a better job being a devil's advocate but it's mostly beside the point.

My theory re video games is that because the graphics were still limited in 1990 to early 2000, you had to focus on making the game itself fun. Morrowind had to be a really good rpg because you couldn’t sell it on the basis of graphics— they weren’t that good. And that’s true of shooters and platform games as well. It was either fun despite the graphics or it wasn’t going to make it.

Kids these days may be a collection of asexual wimps but I also think there's less physical bullying, which is cool.

What if these things are connected? What if there's a tradeoff?

Bullying hasn’t gone away either. We may also be seeing a trade off between physical bullying and cyber bullying.

Something about the immediate and stark reality of an unsupervised playground seems to me to be painful but brutally honest in a way that is a microcosm of actual life in future meatspace.

(For reference I was in HS and university in the 90s. I’m not a gamer, I like 70’s 2-channel audio, and i don’t have twitter, so for me “online” is work, bills, and escapism. I don’t “live” here the way I think many younger people do)

I can’t imagine how terrible cyber bullying must be by comparison to what we had to endure in the 90’s for people who are invested in virtual life. Online the social signals are so complicated and the separation or anonymity imposed by screens brings out the worst in people. If this is a microcosm of the developing future societal order - social credit and AI - I feel somewhat sorry for those who don’t know what life was like before all that.

Also - the 80s were an awesome time to be a little kid.

I share the same concern, actually. I was fortunate enough to experience both physical and online bullying. Both were deeply humiliating, but at least with the former I could have theoretically done better standing up for myself.

Forcing people to risk getting their ass kicked when being a piece of shit is important.

My original comment, though, was trying to convey that for all the woke crap zoomers have swallowed hook line and sinker, I think that there's a lower tolerance for "dumb" bullying. I'm reminded of 21 Jump Street where calling someone a fag for dressing well isn't considered acceptable anymore. I miss being able to call people that name, but I also won't bemoan the loss of some of it.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats