i object to the whole "90s nostalgia is just cause you were a kid and unaware of how terrible everything was" because yeah, maybe
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@eniko 🧵Too ridiculous, too small, he said. In the late 1980s, that same boss was outed to be far-right. He had to go but we had tabloids welcoming such people. We also lost one of our best friends and colleagues, one of the best investigative journalists, to a Witness Protection Program. Neonazis had tried to kill her several times for her research. These nazis built the soil for today, and we were naive enough to think democracy would heal automatically. Had not to be defended actively.
@eniko 🧵 The young people indeed couldn't see all of this. We still had no real time social media, no global news in a stream.
When communism failed, the neoliberal hunt for greed/profit began in Eastern Europe. What I've seen there was pure colonialism and imperialism by big Western corporations. And people embraced the money and the marketing promises after the fall of the dictatorships. The 1990s were a big time for marketing. And the US sold their "dreams" ... we felt hope. -
@eniko We were ending welfare and giving everyone jobs. College was accessible to a larger portion of the population than ever before. There was real upward mobility, not least of which was being demonstrated by people like Jobs and Gates. We believed in a bright future.
@wyatt_h_knott @eniko The "ending welfare" part was directly tied to the rapid expansion of the prison industrial complex. The CIA flooding cities with crack fueled the tough on crime hysteria leading to the harsh sentences for petty crimes, the 3 strikes laws for example.
This era also saw rapid deindustrialization of Northern cities as union jobs were shipped to China. Wages stagnated for forty years beging with Reagan. GenX experienced the very end of the post WW2 economic expansion. -
its not something imaginary when people feel the weight of 30 years of global hollowing out of institutions, reductions in social safety nets in the name of austerity, and the rapacious pursuit of capital at all costs
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idk man i just think telling people who long for the days when the social contract hadn't been irrevocably and unequivocally broken that they're stupid is mean spirited and counterproductive
@eniko Your analyse is on the point. We had severe crises before, yes. But we also still had this social contract. We had international agreements about human rights or atomic weapons, and could count that the UN Security Council stepped in and was heard ... even if nothing was perfect. We didn't have this all-destroying death cult of hyper-rich people. Now we have to fight for a humane world, we want to protect.
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@eniko As an early-ish gen Xer, I think the difference isn't that things were better, but that we actually had hope that things were going in the right direction. The Nazis were defeated, the Communists were discredited, big wars were a thing of the past, and technology was viewed with CAUTIOUS optimism (don't forget that we had stuff like 3-mile island and then Cherynobl in recent memory). But a lot of it was social: segregation was over and civil rights were for everyone.
@wyatt_h_knott @eniko yes, I think direction of travel was good, then.
Thatcher was gone, the rest of the Tories were on the way out, opposition to Section 28 was growing, there were mainstream TV shows with kickass girls (Buffy) and respect for all (ST:TNG), we were fixing the hole in the ozone layer, the Berlin Wall fell, the economic mess of the 80s was subsiding...
But now, a lot of things are going backwards and we're working hard to tread water on others. This is not the future the 90s promised us. -
i object to the whole "90s nostalgia is just cause you were a kid and unaware of how terrible everything was" because yeah, maybe
but in the 90s what nazis did was still very much living memory and people knew what you do to them. also technology actually was a source of life improvements and optimism instead of whatever the fuck this techno-fascist hype cycle bullshit we have now is
my home country the netherlands hadn't been hollowed out by decades of neoliberal bullshit
i could keep going
@eniko 90s was objectively better because the cold war and its nuclear threat was over and 9/11 had not happened yet, which lead to reintroduction of torture and many wars.
(Better - not fantastic, there was still the genocide in Yugoslavia and other terrible wars and civil wars.)
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idk man i just think telling people who long for the days when the social contract hadn't been irrevocably and unequivocally broken that they're stupid is mean spirited and counterproductive
@eniko Pretty much the modern form of my generally Absolutely Loathed, Cringing "It Is What It Is" semi-deflection unto unchallenging acceptance.
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i object to the whole "90s nostalgia is just cause you were a kid and unaware of how terrible everything was" because yeah, maybe
but in the 90s what nazis did was still very much living memory and people knew what you do to them. also technology actually was a source of life improvements and optimism instead of whatever the fuck this techno-fascist hype cycle bullshit we have now is
my home country the netherlands hadn't been hollowed out by decades of neoliberal bullshit
i could keep going
People in general were more naive I think. People were so taken off guard by 9/11, but it was something that had been boiling for a while. It was the pin that popped that era of delusion and all the rot that capitalists had been hiding from us came flooding in
It was a bubble that needed to be burst for humanity to move forward, but the unfortunate reality that millenials and gen z have needed to wrap our heads around is that we can only work towards a better future we likely won't see
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like yeah things weren't perfect and in many ways things weren't good, they were outright bad, even! but in many ways the 90s were not the kind of dystopia we find ourselves in today and maybe you shouldn't be condescending people about that
@eniko yeah, IDK, I remember many things from the 90s being good, like raising a family of four in a big flat on a teacher's salary, but also other bad things like the rampant sexism, unemployment and heroin plague (parks littered with needles). Most of these are local, but the main thing that's gone for me is a sense that the future was going to be better. It was, for a little while, and there it wasn't. And I don't see anything looking like it's going to improve in the near or even medium term future
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i object to the whole "90s nostalgia is just cause you were a kid and unaware of how terrible everything was" because yeah, maybe
but in the 90s what nazis did was still very much living memory and people knew what you do to them. also technology actually was a source of life improvements and optimism instead of whatever the fuck this techno-fascist hype cycle bullshit we have now is
my home country the netherlands hadn't been hollowed out by decades of neoliberal bullshit
i could keep going
@eniko Someone described the 90s as a party that not everyone was invited to. I had never been invited to those parties in the 70s and 80s, and yep, it was fun. But I was also uncomfortably aware of Gingrich, Clinton's triangulation, and spasms like Waco and Oklahoma. I am nostalgic still, but it was because we had more opportunities and choices.
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i object to the whole "90s nostalgia is just cause you were a kid and unaware of how terrible everything was" because yeah, maybe
but in the 90s what nazis did was still very much living memory and people knew what you do to them. also technology actually was a source of life improvements and optimism instead of whatever the fuck this techno-fascist hype cycle bullshit we have now is
my home country the netherlands hadn't been hollowed out by decades of neoliberal bullshit
i could keep going
@eniko I do think its important to not put the 90s on a pedestal. Its not a goal to return to. The hollowing out of society started in the 80s and continued in the 90s. Most of the tech dystopia crypto shit that happened recently is people trying to recreate the dot com bubble ideology, believing owning a domain name or a fartcoin or an nft will become worth something eventually...
We need to work to build a better world, and the 90s aren't a good blueprint for that world
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idk man i just think telling people who long for the days when the social contract hadn't been irrevocably and unequivocally broken that they're stupid is mean spirited and counterproductive
@eniko that's the biggest thing, isn't it... It was reasonable to have an optimistic outlook on the future in the 90s, where as now it feels like it is a foregone conclusion that things are going to get a lot worse before there is any chance of improvement.
Shitting on the longing for that lost sense of what could have been feels like the negative side of nihilism... The "Tyler Durden" approach of crushing anything that doesn't align with that person's angry, scared, and hopeless outlook
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i object to the whole "90s nostalgia is just cause you were a kid and unaware of how terrible everything was" because yeah, maybe
but in the 90s what nazis did was still very much living memory and people knew what you do to them. also technology actually was a source of life improvements and optimism instead of whatever the fuck this techno-fascist hype cycle bullshit we have now is
my home country the netherlands hadn't been hollowed out by decades of neoliberal bullshit
i could keep going
By the 1990s, the neoliberal bullshit, which had burst into the mainstream with Reagan and Thatcher, was already having a dire effect — perhaps more noticeably to some of us older artsy-lefty types (perspective shifts with the baseline) — but it has definitely reached a deadly, fascist level now.
Nostalgia looks at the past with rose-tinted glasses and edits out the unpleasant bit. It is not nostalgia to say that many things have gone very wrong, have gotten worse since then.
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R relay@relay.mycrowd.ca shared this topic
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i object to the whole "90s nostalgia is just cause you were a kid and unaware of how terrible everything was" because yeah, maybe
but in the 90s what nazis did was still very much living memory and people knew what you do to them. also technology actually was a source of life improvements and optimism instead of whatever the fuck this techno-fascist hype cycle bullshit we have now is
my home country the netherlands hadn't been hollowed out by decades of neoliberal bullshit
i could keep going
@eniko Me and my Gen-X brother discussed this just yesterday and feel so sorry for people who will never know what’s it like to totally fuck up on a night out and it be forgotten.
“Pics or didn’t happen”. I was at university, then a raver in the 90s for context. -
@eniko 🧵 The young people indeed couldn't see all of this. We still had no real time social media, no global news in a stream.
When communism failed, the neoliberal hunt for greed/profit began in Eastern Europe. What I've seen there was pure colonialism and imperialism by big Western corporations. And people embraced the money and the marketing promises after the fall of the dictatorships. The 1990s were a big time for marketing. And the US sold their "dreams" ... we felt hope. -
idk man i just think telling people who long for the days when the social contract hadn't been irrevocably and unequivocally broken that they're stupid is mean spirited and counterproductive
@eniko one thing that gets me is that, for a brief moment in time, it felt like things were looking like they were going to get better - if finally looked like we were getting equal rights for a lot of folks who didn't have them - gay rights meant gay marriage became legal, disability rights were making places more accessible (as a wheelchair user in the 90s, this was awesome for me), Social support in my country was being built up to actually support people, things were genuinely looking up.
And then it's like the other shoe dropped and stomped on all that, and we're getting all the shitty opinions back like it's the 70s again, and a lot of those rights are being repealed.
I feel like things were still looking up at the start of 2016, and then by the end it suddenly fell off a cliff. (Although, admittedly, I was living in India at that point, and for 6 years didn't really see everything happening in the west, so I could be wrong). And I have to remind myself that was TEN years ago.
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i object to the whole "90s nostalgia is just cause you were a kid and unaware of how terrible everything was" because yeah, maybe
but in the 90s what nazis did was still very much living memory and people knew what you do to them. also technology actually was a source of life improvements and optimism instead of whatever the fuck this techno-fascist hype cycle bullshit we have now is
my home country the netherlands hadn't been hollowed out by decades of neoliberal bullshit
i could keep going
I'm an elder millennial who feels the exact same way. People also seemed less conformist back then. Even your dimmest herd members at least liked to think of themselves as free thinkers. Now non-conformity is almost unthinkable to most people.
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@eniko one thing that gets me is that, for a brief moment in time, it felt like things were looking like they were going to get better - if finally looked like we were getting equal rights for a lot of folks who didn't have them - gay rights meant gay marriage became legal, disability rights were making places more accessible (as a wheelchair user in the 90s, this was awesome for me), Social support in my country was being built up to actually support people, things were genuinely looking up.
And then it's like the other shoe dropped and stomped on all that, and we're getting all the shitty opinions back like it's the 70s again, and a lot of those rights are being repealed.
I feel like things were still looking up at the start of 2016, and then by the end it suddenly fell off a cliff. (Although, admittedly, I was living in India at that point, and for 6 years didn't really see everything happening in the west, so I could be wrong). And I have to remind myself that was TEN years ago.
@Teaceratops i decided in 2015 to move to the US and moved at the start of 2016. the US got gay marriage and the ACA, it felt like it was heading in a good direction
then trump happened
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i object to the whole "90s nostalgia is just cause you were a kid and unaware of how terrible everything was" because yeah, maybe
but in the 90s what nazis did was still very much living memory and people knew what you do to them. also technology actually was a source of life improvements and optimism instead of whatever the fuck this techno-fascist hype cycle bullshit we have now is
my home country the netherlands hadn't been hollowed out by decades of neoliberal bullshit
i could keep going
@eniko
As someone who grew up in the 1970's and 80's I can assure you that most things started to go downhill rapidly in the 90's. Not everything, but most things. Mostly everything that is in any way related to making money, which seems to be all that counts these days. A sad world, indeed. -
@eniko 🧵 The young people indeed couldn't see all of this. We still had no real time social media, no global news in a stream.
When communism failed, the neoliberal hunt for greed/profit began in Eastern Europe. What I've seen there was pure colonialism and imperialism by big Western corporations. And people embraced the money and the marketing promises after the fall of the dictatorships. The 1990s were a big time for marketing. And the US sold their "dreams" ... we felt hope.I was in my early 20s in the 90s, and already very politically/socially aware.
For me (living in UK) the 90s (particularly the late 90s) were "good" as it seemed authorities were overwhelmed and couldn't clamp down on such things as drugs and hedonism and turned a blind eye to it (likely due to short term economic gains from neoliberalism).
They even ignored an entire underground economy funded by laundered money from drugs sales (raves as well as record shops, fashion shops, arts venues and projects), also "normie" jobs were easy to get and bosses didn't even notice if you weren't 100% sober all the time.
But it was also a distraction against more positive activism (which might be why govts didn't clamp down until it started impacting "productivity")
