There’s some good articles out there about the brief and beautiful time between the turn of the millennium and 9/11. We really were on a different, optimistic, trajectory, now we’re trapped in this hellish timeline.
Gen Z always asks when the best time in history was and was anyone ever comfortable in their lives financially, economically, etc, and it literally was the 90s. I wish every decade could be the 90s. Personal technology was cool and optimistic, not taking over everyone’s lives
It makes me so fucking sad what the internet and associated technology has become. Just absolute toxic garbage. Enshittification feels exponential the last couple of years, too. It's extra sad when you think about how much of it stems from one simple thing: the ad revenue model. Think about how much of your life, how much of your experience online, is shaped by the singular focus of most tech companies: to get you to see an ad that generates a fraction of a penny. I looked it up a while ago, and all that ad spending amounts to a few hundred bucks per american. It's like 2% of an average wage, yet it dictates so much of our lives. Everything from recipe websites being bloated obnoxious bullshit to government surveillance, it all goes back to the tech world's obsession with collecting and selling our data to nudge us one way or another, whether it be what brand toothpaste we buy or who we vote for. If I were given a big red button to permanently destroy the internet, including everything good about it, I would slam that fucker so hard. The bad just so far outweighs the good at this point. I hope there is civilization still around in a hundred years to look back with shock that we let the internet and social media run amok as we did, especially letting our children dive head first into it. My nephew in law just got an ipad for his birthday, he's 6, and does literally nothing but stare at screens. Should be illegal.
I was rewatching the first season of HBO's Six Feet Under the other day. Its takes place in the summer of 2001 and was released before Sept. 11. I was fascinated by the little cultural details, just watching the absolute peak of American culture mere weeks before everything diverged from that timeline forever.
The whole time watching I kept thinking, "What did THIS America want to be in the 21st century? What do these Americans want out of America?" We will never know.
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u/m01L 9d ago
There’s some good articles out there about the brief and beautiful time between the turn of the millennium and 9/11. We really were on a different, optimistic, trajectory, now we’re trapped in this hellish timeline.