Remember the 90s?
It’s been long enough and far enough that I can finally comprehend the decade of my (mostly) 20s. As you would expect, it’s a pretty broad scope to go from a high school senior sipping champagne for the first time to ten years later, having two degrees and working in DC in an unrelated field and standing on the Mall near the Washington Monument as the millennium rolls over. But there’s a feel and a vibe there that is recognizable even now.
For one thing, it was bright and colorful, grunge notwithstanding. The early years of 90s hip-hop culture – with In Living Color and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Cross Colors and the like – were vibrant and bold and complex (at least until everyone decided to do an NWA pastiche). There were things like Frutopia and OK Soda and Crystal Pepsi. Every sports team had teal or purple to go with their black, it seemed like (teams that wore or adopted teal/black/purple in some combination of 2 out of 3: San Jose Sharks, Carolina Panthers, Jacksonville Jaguars, Florida Marlins, Colorado Rockies, Detroit Pistons, Charlotte Hornets, Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, Toronto Raptors, Arizona Diamondbacks…)
And there were so many more teams. Major League Baseball expanded – twice! The NFL expanded for the first time since 1976! The NBA and NHL added teams hand over fist, as everyone raced to 30 teams or more. Sports splashed into popular culture in a bigger way than ever. ESPN Sportscenter was must-see TV – not just as sports news or news generally, but as entertainment. The NBA hit heights it’s only recently regained, in the era of Michael Jordan and the Dream Team and NBA JAM. Speaking of which, home video games really took off again and permanently displaced the arcade (I myself had a Sega Genesis with three games: Bill Walsh College Football, NBA JAM and NHL ’96).
And you had the mainstreaming of the pager – from a tool for doctors and drug dealers to something so ubiquitous you could get one for free by sending in ten Mountain Dew labels. And from the pager to the cellphone, which finally shrank from shoe-sized to something you could at least slide in a jacket pocket. And then…the Internet. I might be one of the last people to go through four years of college without ever once having had access to the internet; I think it was in the autumn of 1994 that my undergrad began setting up email (through some weird UUNet connection) for every student. Mosaic was finicky and Netscape was a beta, and things like USENET and Gopher were state of the art (and telnet was still a plausible connect tool). There was still a cyberpunk feel to the whole process of getting online, and there were things like PGP and Linux on the desktop that were just a couple years away from the mainstream.
And if you remember those AT&T “You Will” ads? Shit, most of them came true. You wouldn’t fax from the beach when you could email, and Siri isn’t going to be a lot of help getting you those playoff tickets, but almost everything else came to pass (even if AT&T itself didn’t exactly make it). Every so often I have to take out this slab of glass and surgical steel that acts as an extension of my arm and marvel at how I can shoot feature-film-quality video, DSLR-quality pictures, chat halfway around the world or store every piece of music I’ve ever owned along with the entire ninth Star Wars movie.
I think the thing I keep coming back to is that it felt like the world was moving forward. Bob Packwood and Anita Hill kicked off an awareness that you’ve got to treat female coworkers as human beings, Rodney King made it obvious that cops could do the incredibly wrong thing and needed to be made to play by the rules, Arsenio Hall proved you could have an African-American late night host that could dominate the water cooler space, new technology could emerge and make our lives better, global warming and climate change could be recognized and taken seriously…and then, on December 12, 2000, we decided that we weren’t going to bother having the 21st century after all. And nine months later, we clenched it. Things that were a horror and an outrage like Rodney King or Columbine are now barely enough to get people’s attention any more. The weather’s getting worse and the sea levels are rising and you have to argue the facts of something happening before your eyes in a way that wasn’t necessary ten years ago.
I suppose it could be nostalgia for youth, but it’s really hard to shake the sense that something really did shift and that things really are getting worse in a lot of ways. And that reversing the trend is going to be difficult as long as we have to fight people who feel entitled to their own reality and those willing to enable them for the sake of votes, or ratings, or money. The biggest thing is going to be to make those people radioactive enough that the latter won’t want any part of it any longer and then contain the former until they die down to acceptable levels of nuisance. I thought we’d come close to that, but apparently not. It’s time to patch the holes.
I liked having a future. I’d like it again.