For me it’s holding a VHS in the store and looking at the cover.
Hope for the future
What about the far future?
If humanity survives the near future, sure
The feeling that things might get better.
There was so much hope, everything was exciting and new. The world was getting better. Though I was <10 for most of the 90’s so maybe it was just being a kid.
I turned 18 in 1999 and I also had hope, so it wasn’t just kids.
18 year olds are kids.
Don’t you have any dreams?
What’s to dream about? Living these days feels like being in a game of monopoly where someone started with hotels on every property. The fascists are winning, the planet is burning, we’re in the middle of two wars, the capitalists are talking about putting shock collars on their vault slaves when the apocalypse begins, and all signs point to everything getting worse as time goes on. In light of all this, my dream is dying peacefully in my sleep before the water wars begin and I get pushed into Nestle’s torment nexus to make the stock price go up a fraction of a penny.
Do you have someone to talk to?
My wife and I are increasingly convinced that we, humanity, peaked in the 90s. We had conquered acid rain. We were removing CFCs. The internet was coming in, so were mobile phones (but only to call and text, so you could stay in touch but escaped the trap of a million cameras around us), the music was so incredibly broad (Brit pop, grunge, spice girls, dance … it was like the world’s biggest buffet), the high street was still doing fine, TV had great shows (Seinfeld, X-files etc) and everyone just seemed a damn sight happier than today since misery-communities hadn’t formed on the internet to celebrate and refine their misery.
It was a simpler time. And all powered by a healthy western economy and the declaration of a (naive) victory in the Cold War.
Peak delusion as well. We basically believe everything on TV. I think the 90s in western countries were just more mild, but not objectively better. Now everything is extreme, both much worse and much better.
That’s what they said in The Matrix, isn’t it? 1999: the peak of human civilization. At the time, the future looked bright, but in the grand scheme of things, it hasn’t played out as we hoped.
The internet. Web2.0 made everything worse with trackers and three companies running almost everything.
Watching the birth of the general public internet that everyone has access to.
I remember the early 90s hearing people talk about it, then seeing signs of it in the mid 90s. We all thought it was going to make the world so much better for everything and everyone.
Then starting in the late 90s everyone was getting online and it just went crazy.
It was exciting to be around for the start of it all.
We got to live life without an internet and then all of sudden it was here and we couldn’t live without it.
It was like being the generation that saw the first airplanes and commercial aviation becoming part of the world.
The what?
The internet … I’ve mentioned this before and whenever I suggest the internet started in the 90s, I get corrected that technically it was started in the 80s or even the 70s. I’m talking about the general internet that the public interacted with, the internet in the 90s that we all know and understand, the internet with cat memes and porn.
Climate change was still a “this will be a big problem and we need to do something about it sooner rather than later” issue instead of “actively experiencing and watching the damage and misery on a near daily basis and knowing it will be getting much much worse” reality.
No amount of Captain Planet telling me to separate my recyclables is going to fix this shit.
The water here in the Netherlands has been way too high for weeks now, and we’ve had some crazy ass storms. Even a cyclone or something? I don’t even know what it’s called.
Anyway it’s going to require some crazy engineering if the Netherlands is to move into the 22nd century.
The Netherlands is in an interestingly unique position when it comes to rising sea levels. They’ve been fighting the sea (and winning) for centuries. I’m sure they’ll be at the forefront for engineering future sea incursions.
As a fellow Dutchie: I miss the early 90s optimism. Nowadays, people are disillusioned and the hidden bigotry among which I grew up has become explicit up to the point of us having a fascist government.
I also miss not living in a neoliberal dystopia.
I am not sure that both are not connected.
Big box games with proper manuals.
Omg remember riding home reading the manuals and your fantasy going wild?
For me it was the inspiration I felt from technological improvements. I grew up in a house where my father was a network engineer and would constantly have computers opened up he was tinkering with. And all through the 90s I saw more and more improvements that made me feel like the future would be even more amazing! This persisted well into the 2000s with the coming of social media and small commercial devices like MP3 players, cell phones, etc. It just seemed like everything was improving and that if a company stopped improving, another company would come along and give the people what they want! But now I live in a world where all of the things that used to excite me have betrayed me and anything new I am extremely skeptical of. I see all kinds of new and interesting technological improvements come along and while they seem like excellent ideas that would improve my life, I also see the many ways in which they would exploit me, my privacy, and my money. I would love to have a camera doorbell in which I can see who is at the door and talk to them while I’m not at home, but those devices are horribly insecure and you have to subscribe to their services. I just can’t do it and I wish we could go back to the days in which you could just buy a product that might improve in a few years and you didn’t need to worry about it watching you or costing money every month. Instead you could just be excited about your little gadget and dream about what the next version would be like.
Have you ever looked into options for self hosting doorbell camera data, or the ones that store on the device with SD cards?
I did, due to the same concerns you listed. I found that self hosting would be detrimental to my server’s data drives and reduce their lifespan from the constant activity, and the SD card ones lacked some extremely nice to have features you get from cloud native mobile apps.
Curious if there are viable alternatives that have emerged since then, as it has been a few years since I researched this stuff.
having somewhere to go that isn’t trying to get me to spend money.
For just 1 dollar I’ll give you a satisfactory reply. Make it 2 and it’ll be a kind one too. Have a nice day :)))
Hope
No automated self serve checkouts.
Fresh episodes of X-Files and Star Trek: TNG every week.
Just that whole experience of something on television being a cultural zeitgeist because everyone had to watch it at the exact same time because that was the only time it existed. Sure, you could record it on VHS and watch later, but it wasn’t the same. Even being at home watching alone felt like participating in a social event.
Are you into strange new worlds?
Ya that thing about TV being a ritual is something I heard before from someone. Interesting perspective.
Having guys make me mix tapes.
Anyway, this one really cute guy at college had an epic cassette collection and he was also artistically talented so he made custom covers/inserts for each one. The original tape is long gone, but somewhere I still have my favorite cassette cover that also includes the hand-printed play list.
He had other excellent skills, so I eventually married him.
Are you seriously leaving us hanging with ‘other excellent skills’?
Yes! Let your imagination run riot.
Oh my lawd
Big box games, especially the ones with the “board game” style boxes.
CRTs (mainly because of what they represent).
Point-and-click adventure games (thanks Myst).
Game/movie rental stores.
Malls.
In general, I miss the fact that the 90s (and early 2000s) had the internet, but the internet wasn’t developed enough to replace physicality. As we’ve grown more dependent on the internet, we’re losing physicality. Our games are digital, our music is digital, our TV shows, movies, news, socialization, everything is becoming digital. We own less and less because companies don’t have to offer a physical product anymore. We dreamed of 3d malls that we’d browse with friends in virtual reality; but we got text and images instead. Our malls have no form, neither physical or virtual, the worst of both worlds. We no longer have a chance at physicality, even in a virtual sense, because doing so is a waste of resources. Why build a virtual mall when a webpage will suffice?
Somehow music is fighting back against the loss of physicality and is winning with records, CDs and yes, even cassettes. I hope eventually we make a return to physicality and can learn from this obsession with the digital and non-physical.
We love our record player. It’s soothing to listen to a whole album that’s higher quality and to take the time to pick it out. We still stream but it’s nice to own something analog
higher quality
I’ve got some bad news for you
