The Nineties Weren't Better. They Were Whole.
Nostalgia for the 90s isn't longing for worse products. It's longing for completeness.
The Nineties Weren't Better. They Were Whole.
You could be alone without everyone knowing it.
My first email wasn't made from a device in my pocket. We made it from a computer, in a house, at a fixed time. When you were offline, you were offline. Literally. Unreachable. We didn't experience this as isolation. We experienced it as freedom.
The nineties get nostalgic sheen now from people who dream it was better. They say music was better, food was better, relationships were better. But that's wrong. What was better was the context. Ubiquity didn't exist.
You couldn't be constantly compared. Your Instagram profile didn't exist. Your vacation photos nobody saw except those you physically showed them to. You could fail at work without your entire school knowing via WhatsApp. You could fall in love without it becoming public knowledge after two weeks on TikTok.
This created space. Real, physical space. You were in your car thinking your own thoughts. You were in the park and nobody took a photo. You were at a party and it ended Monday, not archived forever.
I see this with my kids. They're constantly observed. Not by parents or teachers, but by the network itself. The camera is always on. The notification is always ready. The comparison runs continuously.
This creates two things at once: connection and isolation. You're constantly linked but fundamentally alone, because everyone screens you through the same lens, the same metrics.
The nineties art wasn't better. But it wasn't constantly ranked. You could listen to an obscure band because you loved it, not because algorithms suggested it or others had liked it.
What we miss isn't the product. We miss the absence of continuous observation. We miss the ability to be quietly bad, quietly weird, quietly yourself without being monitored and converted into data.
The nineties give the illusion of freedom. But it wasn't illusion. It was simply normal. You could just be.
Sources: Turkle, Sherry, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011)
Source: Turkle, Sherry, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011)