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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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")
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and if you'll excuse me continuing my rant a little longer, i think this attitude dangerously normalizes all the fucked up bullshit we're living through now in the name of cynically going "are you stupid? things have always sucked, actually"
@eniko Things sucked in the 90s, sure. But the awful things weren't so all-encompassing and inescapable. The gutting of every aspect of life in pursuit of Efficiency (i.e. profit) hadn't yet been fine-tuned and supercharged.
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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 marched through the streets of a Dutch city like a dozen times, with hundreds of others, against (neo)fascism. In the 1980s/1990s.
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@eniko
I was in my 40s in the ‘90s, so definitely not a kid. And I totally agree with you. The ’70s were even better, actually. We thought the future would be amazing. My gay friends were starting to be openly gay, pressure was being put on South Africa to end apartheid, protests against nuclear weapons were growing, the SALT treaties against nuclear arms proliferation were signed, etc. I could afford to buy a house — in central London! My kids don’t really believe how much better things were.
