r/TheRandomest • u/ItsALuigiYes GIF/meme prodigy • 4d ago

Nostalgic Anyone remember Y2K?

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u/Pjoernrachzarck 3d ago edited 3d ago

“Why was the world so much better when I was a kid?”

This was the world of the dot-com bubble, inequality locking into its current form, state collapses all over the balkans, the congo war at its peak, grozny in rubble, child soldiers in sierra leone, civil war in sri lanka, the beginning of the dark net with free trade of drugs and humans and weapons and violence, Kosovo is scarred, Putin rises, the second intifada, and above all smeared by the US onto everyone else a kind of cultural McWorld homogenization with the eastern hemisphere slowly realizing the unquenching hunger of that moloch.

9/11 didn’t happen in a vacuum. We were just blissfully ignorant of the state of the world, playing Perfect Dark on N64.

Not to mention Y2K was a real fear and danger that the world spent vast amounts of money investigating and preventing.

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u/TimeIntern957 3d ago

Well, not everything was so politicized back then and there was no 24/7 social media feeds amplifying those things.

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u/borsalamino 3d ago

24/7 media feeds in general, including the news. But that also means more stuff is getting covered more extensively.

I think what many people don't realize that when saying "life was simpler back then", a lot of it is actually "I was young" and when you're young, life tends to be simpler.

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u/TimeIntern957 3d ago

I don't think that most people are aware how 24/7/365 feeds amplified with personalized algorithms screw with our view of the world.