What is truly unfortunate is that even if there was an objective way of looking at history, people would just dismiss it as "oh, shut up, it's just nostalgia." Being unable to be objective doesn't invalidate the argument.
So what if the early 2000s were, in fact, the peak of humanity? It doesn't seem so absurd when teenage people today rediscover 90s/2000s fashion and are nostalgic for an era they have never lived in. When I was a teenager in the 2000s I didn't give a rat's arse about the 80s, they felt old and stale and with terrible hairdos. Yet today young people yearn for the 00s aesthetic [1] than whatever sanitised corporate hell we live in today.
Maybe people aren't nostalgic for their teenage years in particular, but for a world that wasn't ruled by the Internet and computers. When the Internet wasn't an infinite plane of corporate capitalism ruling the world, coercing people to jack in the hamster wheel every minute of their lives through their smartphones.
1: provided you are in the same algorithmic bubble of mine full of late teens/early adult people finding joy in analog experiences away from technology.
I, too, often think of the early 2000s as the peak of humanity. But I find it's important to recognize when your judgment is being clouded by nostalgia, especially the extremely well-known and extensively documented bias to see how things were when you were in your early adult years as the way things ought to be in perpetuity.
There were a lot of things that sucked about tech in that era! It was literally when pets.com ads blanketed the airwaves. (edited to add: And more specifically, I think the exact time the OP is describing was already too far down its current path of ubiquitous social media (remember Friendster, MySpace, LiveJournal, AO3, etc.?) and omnipresent commercial surveillance. The fork point to avoid those fates was probably a decade earlier.)
But I think we can all agree that it is absolutely when music peaked, and pop culture has just gone downhill since then. :)
Wait, are you saying the pets.com era was worse than the current era where websites even more dubious (gambling, prediction markets) are still openly advertised?
You’re saying that the era that sets us down the path of social media is worse than the one today where they rule the world?
Sure, the 2000s weren’t an idyllic time, but the point is that they were much better than today, and likely than earlier due to the technological advances not yet turning out for the worst.
You wouldn't have looked to the 80s, you would have looked to the 70s (maybe punk). The 90s are now 30 years ago, and in the 90s, young people did have false nostalgia for the 60s. "I wish it was the '60s, I wish I could be happy / I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen"
Most of my friends spent the back half of the 90s railing against corporate culture, bland mass media and bemoaning the shift from early 90s counter-culture to late-90s glossy consumerism. It was a quick skip from Columbine to 9/11 and then into the Iraq war. Absolutely nothing about that time felt like a golden age.
Comments
What is truly unfortunate is that even if there was an objective way of looking at history, people would just dismiss it as "oh, shut up, it's just nostalgia." Being unable to be objective doesn't invalidate the argument.
So what if the early 2000s were, in fact, the peak of humanity? It doesn't seem so absurd when teenage people today rediscover 90s/2000s fashion and are nostalgic for an era they have never lived in. When I was a teenager in the 2000s I didn't give a rat's arse about the 80s, they felt old and stale and with terrible hairdos. Yet today young people yearn for the 00s aesthetic [1] than whatever sanitised corporate hell we live in today.
Maybe people aren't nostalgic for their teenage years in particular, but for a world that wasn't ruled by the Internet and computers. When the Internet wasn't an infinite plane of corporate capitalism ruling the world, coercing people to jack in the hamster wheel every minute of their lives through their smartphones.
1: provided you are in the same algorithmic bubble of mine full of late teens/early adult people finding joy in analog experiences away from technology.
I, too, often think of the early 2000s as the peak of humanity. But I find it's important to recognize when your judgment is being clouded by nostalgia, especially the extremely well-known and extensively documented bias to see how things were when you were in your early adult years as the way things ought to be in perpetuity.
There were a lot of things that sucked about tech in that era! It was literally when pets.com ads blanketed the airwaves. (edited to add: And more specifically, I think the exact time the OP is describing was already too far down its current path of ubiquitous social media (remember Friendster, MySpace, LiveJournal, AO3, etc.?) and omnipresent commercial surveillance. The fork point to avoid those fates was probably a decade earlier.)
But I think we can all agree that it is absolutely when music peaked, and pop culture has just gone downhill since then. :)
Wait, are you saying the pets.com era was worse than the current era where websites even more dubious (gambling, prediction markets) are still openly advertised?
You’re saying that the era that sets us down the path of social media is worse than the one today where they rule the world?
Sure, the 2000s weren’t an idyllic time, but the point is that they were much better than today, and likely than earlier due to the technological advances not yet turning out for the worst.
No, I didn’t say anything of the sort.
You wouldn't have looked to the 80s, you would have looked to the 70s (maybe punk). The 90s are now 30 years ago, and in the 90s, young people did have false nostalgia for the 60s. "I wish it was the '60s, I wish I could be happy / I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen"
Most of my friends spent the back half of the 90s railing against corporate culture, bland mass media and bemoaning the shift from early 90s counter-culture to late-90s glossy consumerism. It was a quick skip from Columbine to 9/11 and then into the Iraq war. Absolutely nothing about that time felt like a golden age.