90s/00s culture

Anyone else feel like "life" just kinda peaked around that period? The earlier eras feel too antiquated and modern ones suck, but theres just something perfect about the 90s through early 00s. The music, the movies, the fashion, the life attitude, generally pop culture and everything else just feel like it was much cooler back then. I cannot even think of something that I like that is either not from that era or at least inspired by it. Sometimes I am in like an older office or at a place where everyone is talking and not using a phone and I just get with a "ah, so this is what it was like". It's kind of a strange and specific thing, but it's been bugging me for years now and I cannot stop thinking aobut it.Something about it just makes me feel extreme melancholy

This is pure Hauntology. Escape the nostalgia trap, build a better future!

I lived through the 90s. I don't particularly miss them (the country I live in was one of the poorest in Europe back then, obviously, I don't miss poverty) but it was certainly an interesting era. One thing that people don't get about the 90s is how ephemeral they were - the technology, the music, the everything really, was moving at an accelerated pace. Several genres of electronic music that are still around were basically invented in the span of about 18 months somewhere between 1992 and 1994. Video game graphics were improving year on year, genuinely new tech was hitting the consumer market every year. Now we just get a new phone that's the same as the old phone and a new game console that's the same as the old game console. It's boring, technology is boring, tech industry is like car industry nowadays except less reliable.

>>56282 It's the tech. During the 90s and even early 00s, technology still had a human character and was secondary to our humanity. The mixture of analog and early(ish) digital technology aided us in exploring and developing our humanity while being subservient to it. Now technology has utterly outstripped our ability to control and direct it. It is killing us all. It HAS killed us. Notions about "hackers" or some such nonsense who will fight for privacy or freedom or whatever is a pipe dream, because the youngsters don't even understand what privacy and freedom are and all the "hackers" of yesteryear sold themselves to the corporations, and so will others who come in their wake. Ergo technology killed even our idealism.

>>56289 I'm glad to see somebody express what I think.

>>56289 I'm skeptical of our ability to truly push back against the corposcum tide in a global manner, but I think we can at least create enduring Free enclaves and that work in that direction is not purely wasted effort. Even if it were to be, I'd rather be wasting my energy than effectively making the world a worse place faster.

>>56282 I feel that too. Being born in 1992 in a third world country small city, I feel that we had a good balance between technology and the "life outside". Internet was a cool place full of mysteries and not saturated with repetition and endless trends penetrating every sphere of life constantly. I know that a good amount of what I feel is due nostalgia, but ok. I have great memories of reading magazines about games and animes I would only have access in adult life. It was a good childhood where media and stimulus weren't so consuming and immediate. At least this is the way I remember it. > When I see movies from that era, I have a weird feeling that "yeah, this sounds right, things should be this way" as if it was the familiar setup where my mind stopped in some moment. Yes, the power of nostalgia.

Kinda like >>56286 said I believe it marks the end of recent gold age. The reason is that because of the advancement of filtering algorithms which pick things up for you based on your past behaviour, culture has been stuck in a loop since these algorithms can never promote something that's new. Anything truly new is unpredictable and is simply seen the same way as spam, so it never gets send to more eyes which would develop those ideas further. I remember seeing the top hits spotify list few months ago, and you literally had decade old songs on there. That shouldn't happen. Further technolgy stalled too. No matter how much tech gurus like you to believe that we live in some amazing time, software is mostly the same as decade ago. Games play the same too for decade by now. In the 90s you had a completely new game genre coming out every few months. Apparently we are so advanced, but can't stop a virus which we though were mostly a thing of the past. I remember when we were supposed to have sweeping changes because of automation by 2020. Yet not that much really happened. Although in my view the stagnation of tech has less to do with filtiring algorithms, although they play their part there too, but in that companies have become so huge they swallowed all competition, while at the same time, became of their mass, they never have to fear failure. So they bloat up even further, which slows the work even more since you have lot of people doing useless administration. These companies are so integrated into the world they earn profit from just existing, and even if they don't, they can just ask the state to keep them upfloat.

The last decade has been so bad that we now want to go back to the 9/11 era. We all failed to realize that this was what the outcome was gonna be and the pandemic was an added bonus.

I personally liked the 00s more than the 90s, just because that's when internet access became affordable even among the poor. We didn't get it until 05. And since my family considered me the black sheep and didn't even bother raising me, that meant I had to raise myself on it. The internet's no subsitute for a proper parent, but it got me out of my mom's house at least. If I was a teen in the 90s then I'd have either eaten a shotgun at the first opportunity or wound up like Chris-chan.