A common obstacle to communication that can crop up between people with different outlooks and motives is the risk of talking past each other. This kind of miscommunication can arise on any subject. No topic of conversation is immune.
Take Dunkaroos, for example. One man might point out that they are saturated with high-fructose corn syrup and seed oils. Another may say he thinks they’re yummy. Neither is wrong, but no substantive exchange of information has taken place.
Related: Ground Zero
One gets the sense of a similar perspective misalignment behind writer A.H. Lloyd’s response to my post on the 1990s. The whole point of my original piece was to remind those suffering from terminal nostalgia that we can’t go back to the 90s even if we want to—and we shouldn’t want to. Even those wearing the rosiest of rose-colored glasses must admit that the West was already far down the slippery slope by then. Even if we could by some miracle rewind to that slightly higher point, the laws of nature dictate that we would slide right back down again.
That’s where Dunkaroos come in again. Like the man whose sweet tooth for that popular 90s snack food distracts him from the reality of swallowing poison, Lloyd’s nostalgia acts as a set of blinders that narrow his retrovision of the era. He includes a major tell in the first sentence of his post, which labels my appraisal of the 90s “pessimistic’. That’s a dead giveaway of nostalgia poisoning. Because in common usage, people are said to be pessimistic about the outcome of some future event. Accusing someone of pessimism for the past not only stretches the phrase to the breaking point, it implies that the 90s could somehow be the future.
Related: More Music Ground Zero
That’s not to suggest that anyone has a secret time machine. It is to note that a troubling number of people restrict their frame of reference to the perceived apex of their preferred pastimes—almost always coinciding with childhood. for the Mall and Nintendo Generations, especially the latter, that frame was almost always shaped by pop culture IPs managed by international corporations.
We get hints of that corporate IP-defined identity in Lloyd’s paean to 90s geek culture. He credits the tech boom with elevating nerds’ public image from undesirable outcasts to objects of admiration. That section of his piece reads like he switched from talking past me to coming full circle and making my point for me. Complete with a reference to Pop Cult PR flick Revenge of the Nerds. Which, in case anybody needed a reminder, features an obnoxious geek raping an attractive blonde. So it’s as accurate a metaphor as any to describe what our nebbishy tech overlords are doing to America.
Related: Revenge of the Nerds
Other authors like David Stewart and JD Cowan have spoken about how geek culture is societal inversion that accelerated Western culture’s demolition. Past eras cast good-looking, athletic, confident people as exemplars for the simple reason that it’s healthy. Turning that dynamic on its head to lionize repellent oddballs is so dyscivic that just writing it out shows how weird it is.
In other words, I fully agree that the 90s was the flashpoint of geek culture. And it’s a central reason why no one who’s socially well-adjusted should want to return there. Was there less Big Tech-administered censorship and in-your-face depravity? Yes, in the same way that stage three cancer is less advanced than stage four. And to invoke Devon Stack again, wanting to go back to the 90s is like being nostalgic for stage 3 cancer.
Related: Spiritual Ground Zero
That nostalgia leads Lloyd into some strange lines of argument, like objecting that everything wrong with the 1990s started in the 1970s, then claiming that the subsequent decline happened all at once on 9-11. Stage two cancer precedes stage three, so no disagreement there. But the idea that the good times suddenly stopped on September 11, 2001 is ahistorical nonsense.
Consider the Patriot Act. Such sweeping legislation does not materialize out of nowhere. Though finally passed in response to 9/11, it had a long gestation period going back to the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. Credit for that legislation was proudly claimed by Joe Biden, who proposed it in response to 1990s democides like the Waco massacre, which were perpetrated on Bill Clinton’s watch.
Related: Political Ground Zero
Tagging in Devon one more time, the false dichotomy between Current Year and the Good Old Days™ disappears when you realize the same people have been in charge since the 90s. Not the same type of people—the exact same individuals.
He’s documented how official corruption took a murderous turn under the Clintons in this video series. WARNING: NSFW MATERIAL, NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART
A serious look at Clown World and the path society took to get here reveals that there can be no going back. The great struggles we see in every area of life across the globe stem from the world trying to grow out of the twentieth century. Civilization will move past that disastrous chapter. What we need now are men of vision willing and able to help shape the coming replacements for last-century ways of thinking.
In that regard, Churchill’s imagery of the old world’s fair sunset is fitting. We cannot un-set the sun once it slips below the horizon. We can only steel ourselves for the coming night in the hope of seeing dawn break on the other side.
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My parents took me to *Revenge of the Nerds*. Maybe they didn’t really know what we were getting into, but they should have marched me out of the theater about fifteen minutes into it. (I’m guessing on the time. I’m not watching it just to figure out the exact moment it becomes moral poison.)
Over at Ed Feser’s blog is an entry on the suicide of Ed Piskor. The verbose “DNW” said something that, if I’m reading correctly, sheds light on the Pop cult/Death cult model:
“there is a tragicomic aspect to this event seen as a social situation, rather than a horrific individual outcome.
It is generated where the proud modern slut culture, the historical wreckage left behind by unapologetic whorehouds, and the socially maladroit fumblings of arrested development geeks intersect on a field of social neurosis. It is a scenario where no real functioning rules exist, but rather just skills, emotions, appetites, and jockeying for position. It is in fact a faint preview of the chaos captured in certain visions of Hell.
The laws and the rules are never clearly promulgated, they are capriciously applied when revealed,, and displaced hostility, malicious intent, drama, and fake victimhood are the order of the day.”
You’ve said and I agree that the purpose of the Pop cult is to funnel people into the Death Cult, but in 2024 does it still make sense to speak of a Pop cult? That is, the Death Cult devoured it and it now lives in the Sarlacc’s belly.
The Pop Cult is one of the Rites of the Death Cult, alongside the Gaian, Mammonite, Ishtaran, and Molochian Rites. Or to put it another way, the dragon has many heads and horns …
Categorizing the Death Cult into different rites like that is a useful insight.
They almost get there themselves, as far as the Pop Cult is concerned, with the franchise version of the “Coexist” bumper sticker. Implying that one franchise is as good as another in the way the “coexist” bumper sticker implies all religions are equally valid tacitly admits the franchises were functioning as religions for their most devoted adherents, in which action figures and the like are the “household gods” of each fandom. The Dr Who episode about Pompeii says the quiet part out loud when it ends with a Roman citizen worshiping the Doctor, the Companion, and the Tardis as the family’s new household gods. Pop Cult adherents, like good post-modernists, can be rather eclectic about their choice of household gods.
That being said, I agree classifying the Death Cult into Rites is useful. I think of the franchises in the pop cult as denominations, so carrying the idea further makes sense. I expect we will find some commonalities between them. For example, the Gaian, Ishtaran, and Molochian Rites would all insist on prenatal murder as non-negotiable, but for different reasons.
Credit where it’s due: You came up with it in a passing reference on Twitter back in December. I just ran with it. 🙂
That anchor in the 90s hold so many people hostage with nostalgia. And the “why” can be confusing at times. It wasn’t the best of times, and in some ways it was the worst of times. But, people want a rollback to that spot.
After reading Lloyd’s article, it sounds like he needs an intervention for deprogramming. Woof.
Everybody forgets that crime rates were higher in the 90s.
My summary of Lloyd’s article: “The 1990’s were awesome because I was a young, angry Gen Xer able to able to 100% blame Boomers for everything gone wrong. Also pop culture was awesome.”
It’s not like becoming a fake Wiccan to upset your perhaps equally unbelieving Calvinist parents is move in the right direction. Becoming a sincere Catholic is a move in the right direction, that ironically would have probably upset them way more. He even acknowledges that Gen X took their absolute knowledge that the Boomers were headed in the wrong direction and doubled down.
Gen X will also have it’s day of judgement too. While it might have some softening thanks to many extenuating circumstances, we’re going to need to account for why we didn’t at least try to seek out alternatives.
The 90s were crap.
Everything Brian stated above is correct, from politics to corruption and more. As for the “awesome pop culture” of the 90s, there was some good stuff, and the first half of the decade had some great music, but the decade was one long relentless strip-mining of anything and everything good in the culture and systematically replacing it with lowest common denominator garbage.
I would even bet that a key factor in Brian’s Cultural Ground Zero thesis was the 1996 election. Once Clinton was sworn in for a second term in January 1997, it was full speed ahead on ruination.
Clinton set the pattern of democrat presidents going full ham in their second term. Obama followed suit, and so will Puppet Pal Joe if he lasts that long. Their guy getting reelected activates the Death Cult’s end times mode, so they wield power like there’s no tomorrow. Because they believe there isn’t.
It may go back further than that: Clinton was the first Democrat President [i]elected[/i] to two terms since FDR.
The 90’s is when you could no longer get away with innocent mayhem, like riding minibkes in the woods by saying ‘It’s a free country.’ Political correctness and societal enforced sissyness showed up, seemingly out of nowhere in the early 90’s. Possibly started with the latchkey kid fearmongering of the 80’s.
The ’90s was where “Political Correctness” became so mainstream even Boomer hero Bill Maher had a mainstream talk show named after it. This wasn’t even a political divide–everyone knew it existed and said it was a problem.
The ’90s were the first age of safetyism, a poison that was only continued to eat out the insides of common discourse for three decades now.
Something notable on that point: Even today no one claims that political correctness didn’t exist in the 90s. The difference between now and then is that people claim that being PC was a good thing, or that if it was bad it was only because it didn’t go far enough.
So true, GB.
Prior to the mid-90’s, we could get into all sort of shenanigans on our summer vacations. We rode dirt bikes and ATVs without any supervision- or helmets- through the woods. We rode our BMX or early mountain bikes- once again, without helmets- for 8-10 hours straight in any random direction from our neighborhood, traveling as far as 15 miles from home- taking a backpack with a couple bologna sandwiches and a can of Coke for a lunch. Sometimes we even brought fishing poles and earthworms for bait. We had BB gun wars in the woods and built bunkers and forts out of discarded pallets from the local mill. My parents never even thought to ask what we needed the hammer and nails for. We launched model rockets- sometimes horizontally, at each other.
When that golden age was done, kids doing those things could be arrested and their parents hauled into court for neglect.
My favorite science fiction series – SG1, B5, and DS9 – all started near or during Cultural Ground Zero. In retrospect, I can see a lot of the rot which would become the Death Cult in their mythologies. Really and truly, our mythologies spring from our theologies, so this is to be expected. SG1 and B5 made some small nods in the direction of Christianity, but the underlying theology is materialist, in which salvation entails progress and ultimately evolution toward godhood. Gnostic Pelagianism is ultimately Luciferian, so carrying the Pop Cult articles of faith forward to their logical conclusions can only produce the Death Cult. All things considered, it is good the SG Universe ended with a whimper, not a bang. B5 doesn’t deserve a reboot. If JMS does manage one, it will be Death Cult garbage.
“B5 doesn’t deserve a reboot. If JMS does manage one, it will be Death Cult garbage.”
With strong Ishtaran Rite elements, I expect. Remember, Ivanova was bisexual at a time when that was ‘daring’, and Delenn would have been trans if they had been able to make it work with the current technology.
And B5 has always had strong pantheistic/transhumanist elements as well, and despite the handwaving about the Vorlons, a strong dose of ‘ancient aliens’ deconstructionism.
SG-1 is my favourite of the TV space opera series from that time. The jingoistic America Saves The Galaxy aspect is incredibly dated and cringe now, but it had solid writing, good characters, and fun adventures. It was a good place to hang out for forty five minutes at a time. I’m relieved the SG franchise seems to be laying fallow, though I’m sure eventually somebody will subject it to a dreadful revival.
The only reason I can think of to reboot B5 is to answer the question “what would have happened if real life events hadn’t forced Sheridan to replace Sinclair as the protagonist?” And this seems to be the one thing that JMS has no interest in doing.
The ’90s were only fine if you were a kid who grew up in normal neighborhoods, because it was the last vestiges of a culture that was already dying out by that time. They were only fine if you and your buddies mocked PC culture and all the gay films (both literally gay and not) they played for you in class. They were only fine if your un-divorced parents were the few who let you go out and ride bikes, visit friends, and took you to Church on Sundays. They were only fine if you didn’t know what just about every world leader at the time was engaged in. They were only fine if you lived in a small town or suburb that ignored every change coming in at the time, like the 1996 Telecommunications act.
Basically, the ’90s were fine if you lived in a place that pretended the 1980s never ended. Kind of a strange predicament to be in.
Also, “Geek Culture” was invented in the ’00s. There was no such thing before then. It was constructed as an ad hoc rationalization as to why socially unpopular people were “picked on” at a time where everyone either owned an NES or went to the arcade, played Magic: The Gathering in schoolyards, and picked up comic books at the grocery store. No, people laughed at Steve Urkel because “geek habits” were and are negative traits that should be pointed out as such and not celebrated.
The Attack of the Show documentary I posted on Wasteland & Sky even goes into how the creation of this monster happened. When G4 launched in 2002, there was no Geek Culture template to build off of, so they invented it and by the time the show ended a decade later, suddenly it was everywhere in places like the Big Bang Theory and pushed by corpos. Lo and behold that era quickly and conveniently rolled over into GamerGate and Culture War stuff a few years later where the group was now deciding over if their commercialist identity should Evolve With The Times or not.
Geek Culture is not real and it never was. It’s a false identity made to turn you into a brand cultist. The entire project of “lifestyle brands” was to make you loyal to companies as religion replacement which, hey convenient again, rolled over into nu atheism a few years after THAT.
The only thing it did was create entire swaths of people hostile to “normies” while the abnormal people they gave power to demolish everything around them.
Great articulation of stuff I’ve been trying to say for a long time. The Big Bang Theory and the creation of “Geek” as a socially acceptable and promoted identity in the mid 2000s pretty much destroyed my interest traditionally nerd culture and properties. It felt like giant corporations were strip-mining my culture, or whatever passed for it, and turning it into a commercial product and identity to be consoomed. By the time they were cranking out Marvel and comic book media nonstop in the mid 2010s, I’d moved from indifference to active revulsion.
May have been some “Geek Culture” precursors in the way folks lined up, and camped out, to see midnight showings of the Star Wars Prequels. That turned into midnight release events for Harry Potter books, and similar reactions to every other franchise the Pop Cult hierarchy wanted us to be very, very excited about. Every new franchise became an identity – The Matrix, LoTR, Dr Who, Twilight, GoT, Supernatural, BattleStar, Hunger Games, Star (Wars|Trek), Studio Ghibli, and all the cape crap – complete with merchandising to the extent folks starting importing the convention silliness, like dressing up in character, to those release events. They tried with others as well. In a way, the manufactured geek culture is westernized otaku culture, complete with cosplay and incels.
I don’t remember something like that happening before the late 1990s, with The Phantom Menace. It’s also dropped off these last few years. I think it probably died around the time Covid made those kinds of Pop Cult festivities infeasible, though the IP Death Cycle probably contributed to normie franchise fatigue. I think one might almost track the rise and fall of the pop cult based on how much floor space the lifestyle brand garbage took up in places like Hastings, Barnes and Noble, and Books-a-Million, compared to books, movies, music, and console games. Increasingly large sections of places like those turned into a geek-brand version of Hot Topic, right up to the time e-commerce killed bricks and mortar stores lack those. I remember noticing how huge the funko pop section had gotten when the Hastings in Abilene, Texas went out of business. You had to go past it to get to the actual books and movies, which were at least in theory Hastings actual stock in trade.
I had a pretty good experience growing up in the 90s, as a latter Gen Y kid. I went to a Christian elementary school and had parents who actually cared about me, but I also watched way too much TV, played a lot of video games, and was obsessed with accumulating toys and consooming products. So I sort of indulged in the most nostalgified aspects, while dodging the uglier ones.
It’s not hard at all for me to see why so many dudes in their mid-30s think we just need to go back to the 90s Golden Age; most of us were too young to notice, or be particularly affected by, the various negative things going on. My mom was always complaining about how bad Bill Clinton was and listening to Rush Limbaugh and I guess I’d nod and agree, but I thought, who cares? It’s just sports, TV drama. Nothing Clinton does affects me.
To hone the analogy a bit, maybe the nostalgia isn’t really for the Stage 3 Cancer, but sitting in the hospital bed playing Game Boy and watching Nickelodeon on TV and calling your best friend and gloating about how you don’t have to go to school, while the grown-ups and doctors get all nervous about boring paperwork and reports you couldn’t care less about, and the whole cancer thing is just some poorly-remembered incidental factor that was over your head.
Yet at some point, we all need to grow up and face reality; and – as has been discussed here many times – this is Gen Y’s central shortcoming. We don’t want to face reality, we want to retreat into a fun-bubble while the world burns.
Sooner or later, the bubble always pops.
The 90s was the decade that had the most comforting Thorazine drip. That’s about it.
That’s perfect.