The late 80s & early 90s was the Peak of Human Civilization

[Cognisant]

Not literally, I hope.

Rather just before the internet really took off, before streaming services, before pay TV, before the games industry became bigger than movies, there was a time when you could talk to someone about media and they'd seen more or less everything you had. Do you remember gameshows and sitcoms? Do you remember MTV?

Do you remember The Nanny? You probably do, you wouldn't watch something like that today (I wouldn't) but back in the day when the family gathered around the old radiation box that's what we watched, hell I can even remember the jingle.

With the death of Betty White and the Queen (not Queen, The Queen) it feels like the world is quietly coming to an end, like everything's wrapping up and there's nothing new coming to replace it or at least nothing as significant as what had come before, so the world seems more diminished with every passing year.

Part of this is just the nature of growing older, the momentous events of our childhood don't seem so momentous in our adulthood, I was there at my local games store for the midnight launch of Halo 2, I barely remember Halo 3 and I haven't played 4 and I think there's another one now?

But there's also the fact that the internet and the wealth of entertainment we now posses means that there's no mainstream anymore, I haven't watched Game of Thrones, apparently it was phenomenal, I dunno it just seemed crass to me based what I was being told about it. Without this collective shared experience the world is in a sense getting smaller, back in my school days you had to watch cartoons because that's what everyone watched and if you weren't up on the latest happenings in Ash Ketchup's life you'd be left out of the conversation.

Well now everyone's left out of the conversation, we have in-groups but with everyone else we struggle to find things to talk about, we lack a common ground of shared cultural experience, it's the city problem on a global scale, there's more people than ever and yet we've never felt more alone.

Go to the mall, watch a movie, watch an advertisement, everywhere you'll hear the same songs from the late 80s and early 90s, the same music that has been used in everything for decades because it's the only music that has a reliable broad appeal, because it's the only music we've all heard, back when MTV was a thing.

Is this it? Do we never move on from here?
Is there never going to be another Betty White, another Queen, another Fran Fine?
Does our culture just dissolve into a billion obscure niches?

Perhaps this is what the Tower of Babel was warning us about, that as a consequence of the heights we have achieved there will be a loss of contextual language, of cultural identity, and a dissolution of our once mighty and monolithic society.

Spoiler: Ehh I suppose it's not so bad.

 

[scorpiomover]

According to Agent Smith, The Matrix was based on the 1990s, because humans wouldn't accept a perfect world.

Spoiler

"Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at it's beauty, it's genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world would dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization." (Agent Smith, The Matrix, 1999).

 

[Cognisant]

I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about.

Lol

 

[onesteptwostep]

Perhaps this is what the Tower of Babel was warning us about, that as a consequence of the heights we have achieved there will be a loss of contextual language, of cultural identity, and a dissolution of our once mighty and monolithic society.

Oh making use of Christianity now huh?

But yeah in realist terms the 90s was when the Cold War was over with the dissoultion of the Soviet Union. So all the geopolitical tension went away and people were able to focus on developing the economy, which the US did. That's how Bill Clinton was able to achieve a surplus during his term with a roaring US economy (which pretty much is the marker of the larger and more general world economy).

I tend to look at my childhood as a time of development and peace. Things were pretty nice- until 9/11.

 

[Cognisant]

Oh making use of Christianity now huh?

I enjoy classic fiction

I tend to look at my childhood as a time of development and peace. Things were pretty nice- until 9/11.

I don't think world trade has been that badly impacted by war, if anything the frequency and scale of war has been steadily decreasing (from a broad view), rather I think the boom-bust cycle of loaning fiat currency is damaging productivity. You have people who were once productive members of society who over leveraged themselves because interest rates were low only to end up losing everything and spending the rest of their lives homeless or simply demotivated.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

I think it is the ideal that there will be no centralized culture, rather people will each belong to their preferred sphere of interests and activities.

Like the immigrants in the UK do know your culture or your queen, but they don't care. They go to their own churches, they pray to their own gods, cook their own food, teach their kids to speak their own language. English culture is the lingua franca, but it's also like a tool meant for trading and working, it's not as much what lies deep in your heart, unless you were born with it I guess.

Sometimes I get so blasted tired of speaking and hearing english that I just have to switch to a different language. Even knowing it for 20 years doesn't make it completely natural or less tedious than my native language. There are times when I prefer to hear a random Gujarati or Mandarin Chinese just to wash down the slow and obtuse sounding English. It's like English has obesity built into it, that's the feeling.

Honestly bless the queen granny, but nobody outside of anglophone culture cared even for a second about these news. Maybe sad to lose a nice granny, but we generally don't care about losing strangers. We knew about the queen because media keeps repeating what you know in the west, but we don't care, it's just empty information.

One of the best things for Central Europe that had happened in the 90s was the collapse of Soviet Russia. And again the hostile state today known as the Russian Federation is in the process of another collapse that will mark yet another improvement in peace and stability for the region.

Things got much better after the 90s rearrangements and things will get even better still once we have 10 years after the war ends and Russia maybe decides to stop being hostile and force projecting.

And the worst thing about Russian occupation wasn't the lack of our own government. It was the Russian attempts to erase our national culture and language and brainwash us into a Soviet way of thinking and doing.


A lot of it is nostalgia. Most people remember their childhood favorites more strongly than their current shows, games or books and they sometimes go back to listening the old music from their teenage years.

You also probably didn't belong to any major counter-culture groups that tried to have nothing in common with the mainstream or other groups because your impressions of today would be quite different I think.

 

[Puffy]

I don’t necessarily disagree with your sentiment OP, I’m unsure people watching the same show on TV is the peak of civilisation though.

There was a time - and there are existing traditional cultures in the world - when people created their own evening's entertainment as a community. I can think of multiple times in my life sitting around a fire all night with friends - singing songs, co-creating music, sharing stories. This is a higher form of community and culture to me as it belongs to and is co-created by everyone, rather than culture created by some rich organisation or business for others to passively receive.

This ties into my personal theories on art that I've probably expressed elsewhere on the forum though.

 

[scorpiomover]

Not literally, I hope.

Rather just before the internet really took off, before streaming services, before pay TV, before the games industry became bigger than movies, there was a time when you could talk to someone about media and they'd seen more or less everything you had. Do you remember gameshows and sitcoms?

Yes. People used to enjoy watching them together on TV.

I still watch TV. Gameshows and sitcoms are shown much more often now, than they were in the 80s and 90s. The difference is that nowadays, most people no longer watch TV together.

Do you remember MTV?

Yes. Like gameshows and sitcoms, it was fun to watch Madonna, Duran Duran for its silliness. People would go out clubbing with their friends, come home at 2am, and then watch a bit of MTV together before passing out.

Do you remember The Nanny? You probably do, you wouldn't watch something like that today (I wouldn't) but back in the day when the family gathered around the old radiation box that's what we watched, hell I can even remember the jingle.

No. I didn't even hear of it until you mentioned it here.

With the death of Betty White and the Queen (not Queen, The Queen) it feels like the world is quietly coming to an end, like everything's wrapping up and there's nothing new coming to replace it or at least nothing as significant as what had come before, so the world seems more diminished with every passing year.

Sure. Betty White and The Queen represent the Old Guard, the sorts of people who liked the 1950s and pre-war attitudes, which included discipline and decorum, But Milllennials see people with those sorts of attitudes as racist/sexist/homophobic anti-science dinosaurs that belong in the past.

Part of this is just the nature of growing older, the momentous events of our childhood don't seem so momentous in our adulthood, I was there at my local games store for the midnight launch of Halo 2, I barely remember Halo 3 and I haven't played 4 and I think there's another one now?

The events of the past few years are far more momentous than the events of our childhoods. War between Europe and Russia, the rise of China, the global pandemic, and the 2010 global financial crash, and 9/11, are all far more momentous than what came before.

But they feel less meaningful.

Compare the attitudes of people and the news to the war between Afghanistan and Russia, to the war between the Ukraine and Russia.

Back then, was anyone saying that it was caused by Brezhnev? Nope. But today, people are saying that if Putin was replaced, that the war would be over in a flat minute.

Was anyone saying that the Afghans had a hope in hell of winning? Nope. The general view was it was amazing that the Afghans could hold out as long as they had. But in the past 6 months, lots of people keep saying that the Ukrainians will win.

If the Afghans had entered a song into the Eurovision Song Contest, would anyone have voted for it to show solidarity?

It's like people and the news now describe the world as a sitcom, or a teen drama.

But there's also the fact that the internet and the wealth of entertainment we now posses means that there's no mainstream anymore,

There's definitely a mainstream. It's just that today, the mainstream consists mostly of people claiming to be counter-culture.

I haven't watched Game of Thrones, apparently it was phenomenal, I dunno it just seemed crass to me based what I was being told about it.

Porn, gratuitious violence, dragons, and the most twisted dialogue.

Without this collective shared experience the world is in a sense getting smaller, back in my school days you had to watch cartoons because that's what everyone watched and if you weren't up on the latest happenings in Ash Ketchup's life you'd be left out of the conversation.

In the 80s and 90s, there were lots of people who watched Poke-mon, and lots of people who didn't. Those who watched Pokemon had a collective shared experience, precisely because lots of people didn't watch it, which made watching it special.

Well now everyone's left out of the conversation, we have in-groups but with everyone else we struggle to find things to talk about, we lack a common ground of shared cultural experience, it's the city problem on a global scale, there's more people than ever and yet we've never felt more alone.

In the past few years, it was announced that for the first time ever, more people live in cities than not. The majority live in cities now. So of course the majority have the same problems as city-dwellers. The majority ARE city-dwellers.

Go to the mall, watch a movie, watch an advertisement, everywhere you'll hear the same songs from the late 80s and early 90s, the same music that has been used in everything for decades because it's the only music that has a reliable broad appeal, because it's the only music we've all heard, back when MTV was a thing.

This is what's bizarre. I remember in the 80s and 90s, listening to the Beatles. Back then, 60s music was considered "retro", because the majority of popular music was new songs. These days, it seems like there's more 80s and 90s music than 2020s music.

Is this it? Do we never move on from here?
Is there never going to be another Betty White, another Queen, another Fran Fine?
Does our culture just dissolve into a billion obscure niches?

If you want more modern culture, you'll have to start looking forwards, start coming up with new music genres, new songs, new ideas for films, and stop looking backwards.

E.G. praise Inception and Looper, and stop talking about Terminator and GOT.

Perhaps this is what the Tower of Babel was warning us about, that as a consequence of the heights we have achieved there will be a loss of contextual language, of cultural identity, and a dissolution of our once mighty and monolithic society.

Commentators on the Tower of Babel say that the problem with the Babelites, was that if there was an accident that killed people and destroyed bricks, they'd say "what a waste of bricks", but nothing about the death of the person.

The purpose of the Tower of Babel was that there would be a shining monument to the people who built it, that the people would never be forgotten, or that the people would reach the stars and be like gods, that everyone would have all that they wanted and needed. The tower itself was just a means to that, and the bricks themselves were just a means to the tower.

So when people cared more about the loss of bricks than the people, it meant that they cared more about the means than the ends. Since the only reason for the means was to service the ends, if they didn't care about the ends (the people), then the means (the bricks) were meaningless. So it was inevitable that they messed up so much that it never got anywhere.

If today is like that, it means that modern movements are meant to make life less oppressive for humanity, but actually oppress more people than they free, and so are not fit for purpose.

But I'm not sure that is the case. Rather, I get the impression that people are so overwhelmed with choices, and so overwhelmed with emotionally-laden news and emotionally-laden social movements, that you can't single out anything long enough to enjoy it. So it all feels quite bland and meaningless. Like a billionaire who can have any woman, and so no woman means anything to him.

 

[Cognisant]

The events of the past few years are far more momentous than the events of our childhoods. War between Europe and Russia, the rise of China, the global pandemic, and the 2010 global financial crash, and 9/11, are all far more momentous than what came before.

But they feel less meaningful.

Compare the attitudes of people and the news to the war between Afghanistan and Russia, to the war between the Ukraine and Russia.

Back then, was anyone saying that it was caused by Brezhnev? Nope. But today, people are saying that if Putin was replaced, that the war would be over in a flat minute.

Was anyone saying that the Afghans had a hope in hell of winning? Nope. The general view was it was amazing that the Afghans could hold out as long as they had. But in the past 6 months, lots of people keep saying that the Ukrainians will win.

If the Afghans had entered a song into the Eurovision Song Contest, would anyone have voted for it to show solidarity?

It's like people and the news now describe the world as a sitcom, or a teen drama.

I think the difference is that Ukraine is seen as part of Europe and therefor a Western Nation, a bit like how Australia is a "Western Nation" despite being located directly below the Far East. Whereas Afghanistan is seen as Middle Eastern and I think many people are simply resigned to the idea that the desert nations are all war torn shit-holes and if it weren't the Russians it would be Islamic sects killing each other.

 

[ZenRaiden]

I think the difference is that Ukraine is seen as part of Europe and therefor a Western Nation,

First time I have ever seen this sentiment in this form.
Personally I have never seen Ukraine as western nation. Heck I don't even see my country as western nation. Westernized yes. To some degree, but what in Ukraine aligns with the west?
Even Iraq is probably some what westernized, or Kabul is westernized after being under western NATO influences politically and culturally.

Geographically Russia is part of Europe. The major part where most people live, the 150 000 000 people mostly including Moscow is part of Europe.
In fact even historically, after Peter the Great Russia has been to some degree westernized.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Is this it? Do we never move on from here?
Is there never going to be another Betty White, another Queen, another Fran Fine?
Does our culture just dissolve into a billion obscure niches?

People mimic economy.

If effort and gain are so that when you put a lot of effort and get little reward most people will look for short work and higher reward.

This is true of food that uses food science principals to get people eating it.
This is true of entertainment.
This is true of music, and everything and even games to some degree, though games seem to also take a weird turn towards graphics rather than actual gameplay.

Appealing things make more money than things that are less appealing.
The problem is that making things appealing or rewarding is much easier than making the high quality.

But in capitalism this has been known for so long, because everyone knows marketing works.

It works on basis of appeal.
It means you can have low quality and great appeal and then make more money.
Sometimes appealing things and quality can align like in case of Matrix movie.
Generally liked movie, but also it was well made that it became a hit.

So why was the past better?
It was not necessarily, but it forced to some degree people to shoot for long term goals as the rewards mostly were more far away.
This also meant that to some degree people had to learn to cope with stuff more.

The problem for me today, is that I need a pretty strong filter to work around all the things that could bring or be potentially good, or simply help.

There is a lot of good stuff out there, and some of it is very good, some of it gives to time loss, and so on.

For instance TV takes a lot of your time.
Back in the old days, TV stations had greater amount of views, so they had to work for it.
Today TV and cable TV is for less people, and aims to appeal for spread of demographic of people.
So they have to also compete with other TV stations and satellite and internet.
That is huge pressure, means that if I can watch 1 hour of anything I can choose to watch something, but in the past if I had 1 hour to watch Id watch as you say what most people do.

 

[scorpiomover]

I think the difference is that Ukraine is seen as part of Europe and therefor a Western Nation, a bit like how Australia is a "Western Nation" despite being located directly below the Far East.

Australia was considered a Western nation because until recently, 99% of them were either people from Britain or descendants of people from Britain, who also carried and established technology, culture and infrastructure that was eerily similar to Britain, except that it was much hotter there.

Most Eastern European nations were the opposite.

Whereas Afghanistan is seen as Middle Eastern and I think many people are simply resigned to the idea that the desert nations are all war torn shit-holes and if it weren't the Russians it would be Islamic sects killing each other.

I've met Afghans. They're very intelligent, and very cultured. They're far more like how Brits used to be, than the Ukrainians.

It would make a lot more sense, if people who thought that of the Afghans because of their location, thought that Australians were like the rest of the Far East, and Australia was not a Western nation at all.

But OTOH, the media seems to say all the things you've said people think. So it would make more sense to say that these days, most people say what the media tells them to.

 

[BurnedOut]

Well now everyone's left out of the conversation, we have in-groups but with everyone else we struggle to find things to talk about, we lack a common ground of shared cultural experience, it's the city problem on a global scale, there's more people than ever and yet we've never felt more alone.

And in the naked light, I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Go to the mall, watch a movie, watch an advertisement, everywhere you'll hear the same songs from the late 80s and early 90s, the same music that has been used in everything for decades because it's the only music that has a reliable broad appeal, because it's the only music we've all heard, back when MTV was a thing.

In this video Ted Gioia makes a similar point about how 90s and 80s songs still top the ranks in Spotify which is a real big shame. The good shit is buried in the underground scene. It is extremely poignant to note that most of these talented artists are not able to break into the mainstream because of lack of funds and the amount of fiduciary and societal cocksucking they have to do to simply get their shit anywhere popular enough to help them at least break even. In other words, most of the good music is lost somewhere in the deep recesses of YouTube or simply unreleased. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify is a good place to begin with. I recently replaced Spotify with Firefox replete with good addons on my girlfriend's phone because of the amount of trash she was listening which was ruining her good musical taste. Suddenly she's begun listening to songs that are much better and nice to hear and not typical garbage from Imagine Cocks and their ilk. I had also observed that the songs she had liked, at least 60-70% of them very extremely similar sounding.

Is this it? Do we never move on from here?
Is there never going to be another Betty White, another Queen, another Fran Fine?
Does our culture just dissolve into a billion obscure niches?

I am afraid that has already happened. But, there is a still to reclaim your sanity. Get rid of all and any apps which bullshit about 'specifically tailoring experience for you'. The reasoning is very simple. The algorithms work on recursive feedback loops that do not factor in spontaneity of human nature. If humans are being reduced to data that can be distributed across capitalist whores then you know what kind of world you are already living in. When I look at people of my age, I see a bunch of sex dolls roaming around commodifying themselves and selling themselves online in the name of Free Will. They have zero self respect, no self awareness and the little gadget in their pocket dictate their lives more than anything else. My girlfriend and I have this pact of not using our phones while we are together except until we are watching a movie or listening songs. And that alone has made our relationship a billion times better than all others.

Perhaps this is what the Tower of Babel was warning us about, that as a consequence of the heights we have achieved there will be a loss of contextual language, of cultural identity, and a dissolution of our once mighty and monolithic society.

Good morning sunshine. We are slowly turning into a species with a centralized brain. And those tendencies are amplified consensually as time passes

 

[gilliatt]

That is BS!

 

[The Grey Man]

I notice you happened to post this on the 11th of September. Around Sep 11, 2021, the tenth anniversary of the attacks, I became briefly obsessed with the events of that day and studied them from every angle possible. You might say that I had never really looked at them before because I was only a child in 2001. What impressed me, and still impresses me, the most is not the sheer magnitude of the loss of human life (though this in itself cannot but excite a certain morbid fascination), but the eerie synchronicity of it. It is as if it were a sign that the human spirit would not accept this 'matrix', would not be smothered by the safe, comforting womb of technological society. Every particular detail seems to symbolize some aspect of this refusal: the cloudless sky of the immaculate September morning is the consumer's paradise that was the U.S.A. in the 1990s, the 'peak of our civilization', which, it was felt, would soon cover the whole world and last forever; the World Trade Center buildings, by their titanic scale and their metallic Gothic arches at ground level the religious thrust of which terminates only in a large antenna on the flat roof of WTC1, represent the ignored truth that at the root of our technological and consumerist society, the society of the 'last man', is a Luciferian denial of God and a Promethean arrogation of the forces of nature, and that, moreover, our 'immanentized eschaton', our 'end of history', is a Tower of Babel (that the architect of the Twin Towers was Japanese, like the author of that monument to '90s optimism, The End of History and the Last Man, is perhaps not without its own significance); the collision of the fuel-laden passenger jet with the hive of sedentary office workers symbolizes the unstable equilibrium on which the whole edifice is based, that the Tower of Babel cannot but collapse; most poignantly, for me at least (I'll leave you to conclude as to what this says about me), the hijackers' invocation of the 'Clement and Merciful' as they prepared to deface his image on a massive scale bespeaks the intellectual bankruptcy of religious 'fundamentalism', which opposes the Prometheanism of modern 'scientism' while failing to distinguish the latter from actual science (such fundamentalism, which is to my mind a species of voluntarism which is mistaken as to what is really fundamental in religion, is also manifest in the hostility towards science of certain Christian denominations in North America, which scientists are bound to interpret as the opposition of Christianity tout court, so that both sides fail to perceive that their position is based on their acceptance of the false dilemma between faith and reason). I could go on.

 

[The Grey Man]

I, too, was deeply affected by the death of the Queen, by the way: her boring, but reassuring conservatism is now giving way to the blinkered 'New Age' religious relativism of Charles, which, like the fundamentalism of 'radical Islam' (which is not in fact radical, but brutally superficial), opposes scientism, but, rather than double down on some religion or other, resigns itself to a flabby indifferentist 'ecumenism'. Precisely when the Church of England most needs the leadership of the Emperor, just when they need a man of action to knock some sense into the ecclesiastical hierarchy, they do not find it. If I were Anglican, I would indeed suspect that the end was nigh, though one does not need to be an Anglican to see the havoc that postmodern nihilism has wreaked in the upper strata of political and religious leadership.

 

[The Grey Man]

I notice you...

TL;DR: 9/11 is at once an event in the history of modernity and a tragic condensation thereof, of which television cameras have made us the spectators. By becoming part of us, as it became a part of me in 2021, it shows us who we are, and its continuity with our own lives enhances our unconscious awareness that every 'player', from the zealous hijacker to the stoic firefighter to the doomed civilian, is a ray of light reflected by a facet of our own personality: Thou art that. As shocked as I am to hear myself say this, 9/11 is a minor theophany, in the sense of being a temporal window into a sempiternal world of archetypes.

 

[ZenRaiden]

I don't know if it was the peak, but it was not bad era in terms of music and entertainment, and free thought.
People also had more stuff to say and do, instead of looking in their tricorder.
Unfortunately I realized that if I actually had a real Star Trek tricorder Id actually have something. But a phone with internet connection is really not that important.
It helps, but every-time I have a conversation with someone looking into a phone I realized that internet replaced the thinking brain completely.
People no longer can talk and form their own opinions that make sense.

That being said we are facing another world war, and most likely anytime now a world scale economic depression. I already actually think we are in a prodromal phase of massive world scale depression.
Subsequently all the upheld realities of international social agreements between nation will reconfigure to a more aggressive and less longterm.

Which my guess is we are facing shit times.
Few nazis in government will no longer be a problem as we will have entire nations turning in that.
We can then kiss opportunity and freedom a goodbye.

Technically the 90s were best because they were furthest from two world wars, and we had highest technology improvements at the same time.
If world war III happens what we get is another mad cycle and 50 years of bullshit, then some growth, and societal longterm growth and we might again escape the quagmire of hopeless existence in another century.

But it took the world 100 years to get over two consequent world wars.