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To anyone old enough to have seen the first few years, it was awesome beyond description. Just totally great.
‘Take on Me’, ‘Walk like an Egyptian’, ‘Come On, Eileen’…. That was peak entertainment, the likes of which we have not seen again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’re quickly entering a new era of energy abundance, without needing to constantly dig up, process, and cart around enormous amounts of oil. And solar has recently gotten cheap enough that people in poorer countries around the world are deploying huge amounts of it. That’s pretty amazing!
What does this have to do with my question?
A thought I often have - older millennials and younger Gen X have a unique obligation to fix certain parts of society because we are the youngest generation old enough to remember how to operate in and enjoy a world that wasn't A/B tested into a gray, lifeless background hum.
I remember early, invite-only Facebook before it got heavily monetized and it was such an amazing tool to bring people together, keep you connected with old friends, organize group events, and stuff like that. Then it... changed.
But they were also my high school and university years, and as many other comments have pointed out, we tend to remember those years as the best of our lives.
Your perception of the best decade is correlated with your age https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/53769-what-are-the...
I think that suggests:
1) Things are getting worse from decade to decade and,
2) If you weren't alive in an earlier decade you don't know how great it was.
(Personally, I saw the creek start running with shit when cable TV exploded and at the same time trash AM talk-radio began. The 70's were the last decade when we weren't hating each other.)
As Douglas Adams and xkcd #1227 have pointed out, the older generations have complained about this sort of thing since Plato. However, I do not believe this observation settles the matter, because it does not seriously contend with the null hypothesis: that we really have been steadily enshittifying the human experience since Plato. Who has the right of it? Do the new generations simply not know what they are missing…
I don’t know that this is true, and I doubt it meant the same thing to Plato as it did to us; I read somewhere that in ancient times, nostalgia would have been for the world of the gods, not a specific time and place.
The thirties and fourties’ were probably not more alive and authentic than the 50’s and 60’s. The 1920’s were a cultural peak that retreated until the 1960’s, and prior to the Industrial Revolution, things didn’t change fast enough for like decades to be significant. The original documented example of nostalgia was about soldiers nostalgic for home, not explicitly their youth or another time.
All these feelings, “nostalgia” are going to hit different without shared cultural experiences, and changing technological and aesthetic context,
As an old-timer, the biggest difference between now and the 80s and 90s is that in the 80s and 90s entertainment was relatively scarce. An album cost $20, which was a lot in those days. You could get movies, but you had to go to the video store and remember to return them, and the selection was often limited. If you liked some weird band, most record stores didn't have it. In the 80s TV was very limited and you had t…
Some thing has obviously changed in society, but what are the other people doing who aren't so insular like we say most of the new generation are? Why doesn't it affect them?
I was hoping this would be more fleshed out as an article, but the sentiment is understandable. Want to throw some of my knowledge of digital music, as you called it out specifically. In the late 90s most digitally arranged music production was relegated to trackers (think Amiga trackers) and sequencing samples and loops, because the storage simply didn't exist. Then that would be committed to tape, sometimes on a 4-…