I am utterly speechless.

It seems obvious to me that when people idolise the 90s and before, they're mostly talking about the fact that there were still significant areas of life that had avoided complete atomisation. I don't think many people are really arguing the law was better, or that peoples' material conditions were super amazing, just mainly that it was actually slightly achievable to go out and TALK to people.

It at least feels, to significant numbers of people, that atomisation has significantly increased in the couple decades since 2005. And for all the horrible things you can rightly point out about the 90s, being able to actually have a fucking friendly conversation or a friend or two, basically on demand, certainly made it a lot better for people.

I remember as a kid we would regularly go to the town square, have a friendly chat with the baker, have a friendly chat with the greengrocer, friendly chat at the corner shop, get some advice from the ironmonger, talk to some weirdo while we waited for a bus, regularly asked people for directions, etc. All in a single morning. Because going out of town to shop was much rarer, we were known locally as a poor family, so half the shops gave us an unofficial discount and a smile. And all that didn't happen because I was a kid, it happened then because the bakery is now a chain where you can only order on a computer screen, because the greengrocer and ironmonger shut down, because the corner shop is now a supermarket and the staff change every week and they give 0 shits because they only pay minimum age, because there is no bus where we're going now (and talking on the bus is seen as weird now), because nobody is supposed to need to ask for directions anymore. These are all things that have changed just since the early 2000s, and whether they realise it or not, this is what made the 'vibe' that people miss.

The 90s could've been hell on Earth, but if you got to experience it with some fucking company, then people will be nostalgic for it, and I don't think that's necessarily wrong.

This is 100% it for me
The 90s were shit politically and socially. 1996 was when welfare was destroyed. Rodney king. Desert storm. “Colorblind” racial awareness. “Don’t say gay”. Etc.
But when I think of that era, when I was in middle school and starting high school, before the walmart came to my smallish town where I grew up and wrecked the economy, things were genuinely and observably different.
It’s basically concurring what you say. We would walk home after school and stop by neighborhood shops, owned by people who lived in the community, and were amongst our homes. Suburbia track homes didn’t exist yet so the idea of a small store in your neighborhood wasn’t so foreign even though it was a small town and not a city. It was probably about 4-5 miles between the furthest of my friends houses and we would convene at a central friends house or a park or something. And like you said because the shops were all run by people in the community they got to know us. I’m not gonna lie, I wasn’t a poor kid, I was solidly middle class, but there would still be shop owners that would throw me a free drink or whatever every once and a while because I stopped by every day after school
When I was in high school walmart came to town (probably like 2001?). People protested in town hall meetings and a ton of dissent was raised but it was allowed anyway. Looking back as an adult im betting walmart just paid off the council members or whatever. They built a fucking huge one and disrupted the town for literal years. It was a small town with an actual “main street” and the construction closed this for years which starved a ton of the local businesses and closed off a bunch before it even opened (again looking back as an adult this was probably a tactic, walmart had the resources to get that building up in like 6 months and it took like 4-5 years).
By the time it opened I was at college. It quickly started closing other local businesses. Every summer I’d go back and the town would be a bit more dead. By the time I graduated basically every shop I had gone to was closed, replaced by walmart and a few other big chains that had moved in like home depot and autozone, putting everything else out of its misery. At this point the development of suburbia track homes had been ongoing as well so you’d drive past these monstrosities of the same fucking house copy pasted 800 times with nothing to do for miles.
It’s been like 15 years since then and the last time I went back it was just so depressing. There’s nothing to do there now. The only stuff is bars and restaurants. The only non conglomerate stores are weird shit like spirit Halloween, hair salons, yoga studios, and there was actually a trump memorabilia store where my favorite hangout used to be which broke my heart
I do mental health stuff and when I work with people who are under like 20 years old I feel so bad because they just never got to experience that. Their version of america has entirely been overtaken by corporate overlords. It’s crazy bc it wasn’t always like this. Like there were always corporate overlords, in the 80s and 90s they were telecoms (and they were actually declared monopolies and broken up! Only to eventually reform into basically the same monopolies 20 years later) and the emergence of big tech (the lack of any kind of regulation on microsoft in the 90s is something we are paying dearly for now). But when I work with a teenager who lives in one of those suburbia environments and struggles to make meaningful social connections because they can’t hang out with people unless their parents drive them around I feel awful for them. Utter failure on so many levels. Civil planning, zoning, regulatory, economic, etc.
The idea of actually being able to start a retail business and have a 3rd place in your community is basically unheard of now. Even service businesses (like repair shops) are basically extinct outside of auto repair because tech and appliance manufacturers have conditioned us to accept that everything is disposable even if it’s like 2 grand and our regulatory bodies are worthless. You can’t build anything anymore, you can only slave for the bezos/walton empire
I remember as a kid we would regularly go to the town square, have a friendly chat with the baker, have a friendly chat with the greengrocer, friendly chat at the corner shop, get some advice from the ironmonger
I'm sorry did you live in the fucking Hanseatic League or some shit? Fucking iron monger?
- It's Brit for local hardware shop
- I know some parts of the world use "ironmonger" for "hardware store" but the number of people using that phrase unironically must be quite low nowadays
- Sometimes you just need some spare iron mongered.
I think the telling thing about Cyberpunk 2077 (the original TTRPG of course is written by a communist) is that to achieve a dystopian hellscape worth looking at they needed to blow up the internet. Realistically you are not going down to the local hyper-cool nightclub with your best friend to dance the night away while hooking up a risky job involving putting a laser sword through the brains of some chuddy corpo. They're gonna Whatsapp you in your timeshare pod and use time tracking software and real time AI guidance to optimise your hits/time ratio on your 18 hour day.
- Cruelty Squad, underneath it's sewer candy aesthetic, is premised on this idea: that you're a gig economy hitman. The reason you can replay missions is because your targets are so rich they can't actually be killed, and are replaced by new clones (or something equivalent) after every mission.
It at least feels, to significant numbers of people, that atomisation has significantly increased in the couple decades since 2005.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the internet is responsible for most of this
- I was extremely online in the 90s, but there was a real feeling the internet was "somewhere else". Because you had to find a desktop and shut down the house phone to get on it, it took effort and planning, almost as much as walking down to the local shops. And because it was "Somewhere else" you had to weigh up being there over doing other things, in other places.
  I'd say the smartphone, and really, proper 3g and substantial data allowances killed real life.
  Additionally, at the same time there was the slow monetisation of the commons. Libraries shut down, squares and pavements lost public seating and became places for outdoor cafes that weren't the type that let a kid sip a coffee for 5 hours with friends because they knew they'd be back as cashed up adults. Quiet local dive pubs became either overly loud clubs or sports bars, or shockingly expensive gastros. So not only did the internet go from "somewhere else" to "Right here, all the time" but all the other "somewhere else"'s disappeared.
- I'd have to agree. The internet combined with the capitalist model, anyway. Bourgeois control and mindless pursuit of profit, regardless of the not-directly-monetary benefits of previous methods, was an essential element.

THERE'S A GOTTDANG MUTHERFRICKIN CHEETO IN THE WHITEHOUSE YOU STUPID TANKIES!!1!

The conditions of the past are the context from which the present evolved. Forgetting this is how reactionary movements begin!

Remember when things weren't like they are now, wouldn't it be better if we could wipe the slate clean and return to that?

Hell yeah, I remember. I remember yesterday becoming today!

You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? ---Karl Marx
- Girlbosses make their own coconuts, but they do not make them as they please; they do not make them under self-selected coconut trees, but under coconut trees existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead election cycles weighs like a nightmare on the hot button issues of the living.
  -- Kamala Harris, Eighteenth of Brat Summer
- The chuds were right. Kamala is a commie deep agent arguing for the need for historical understanding and dialectics.

The 90s were great idk what you're talking about. I wasn't born yet.

Can confirm the 90s were great I was literally a child.
- For children it was perhaps the last time where at least a bit of your innocence could last beyond age 12 or 13. Less control, more "well, the sun is shining, let's hope they will be back by dinner". I've probably never have known a neighborhood in more detail than when i was 8. You could do something stupid and it wouldn't be filmed or photographed, with date and location tag, immediately uploaded into the cloud and available at a buttons press. You could get BORED, and then you'd do something that you hadn't tried before, because you couldn't just grab your phone and bombard yourself with tiny dopamine hits.
  My nieces/nephews are struggling with this so hard. They are good kids and their parents are doing a commendable job, but they are lucky to have enough time and enough awareness to strictly limit their kids access to media.
- Being a child was nice. Always knew I'd hate being a grown up.
- i was a child too and it was mostly great, except for the massive inflation and my dad's job suddenly paying absolute dogshit and the family becoming poor. anxiety about money never really ended, even when our situation improved.
  but there was that brief moment of incredible optimism that with the soviet union fallen, everything would finally be great. how'd that turn out, btw? :D
The 90's were great, I was living with my grandparents in a retirement community built by the state for retired Communist Party cadres, revolutionaries, veterans, etc. Some of my neighbours literally participated in the Long March.
Why the fuck did I leave China again?

there...

...is...

...a...

...god-DAMN...

...CHEETO...

...in the WHITE house.

I personally love when people do the I miss the 90's thing because I get to ruin their vibes be explaining how my parents became felons for growing weed and all I got was a summer in foster care. Yes, I very much want to go back to that treatlerite fucker.

I miss the 90s because in 1999 I was 14, the Matrix and System Shock 2 had just come out, and the radio was nothing but optimistic pop and dance music. It was a time of high optimism, there was a real feeling that the new millennium was ours, that we were going to make the world better. Life was never going to feel like that again.

Then Bush, then 9/11. In 2 years I went from starry eyed high-school naif to being a politically engaged college student. It's hard after that to separate my feeling about whether the world (USA society specifically) really did get worse or if I was just old and politically aware enough then to notice.

It certainly feels like things declined pretty steadily. I think a lot of us were lured into comforting nostalgia by Obama. A nice little warm dose of return to the good days of before Bush! It put us to sleep like warm milk. Then waking up to realize that Bush-ism never ended.

I mean most of that tends to be peak childhood period nostalgia. I still have a sweet spot for the late 2000s for similar reasons, swap the music genres around, change the games and shows and it all applies.

CHEETO... HITLERPIG.. IN WHITEHOUSE!>!>

Things that were better in the 90s:

The weather was less shitty because climate change had 3 less decades to do its work.
Light pollution was less in where I live. I went from seeing 15+ stars to <10 stars lol
Gaming was genuinely more exciting, mostly because gaming hasn't matured as an artform and undergone enshittification yet.
Average household devices were slightly better quality although nowhere near as good as stuff made in the 70s/80s.
Cost of living was cheaper.

The joke is in the reply. This is the HitlerPig guy saying everything was better before Drumf.

This?

I will say one thing that was better in the '90s and it's a small, pointless thing. Is that the gaming industry and specifically the more complex 3D games kinda' grew up with you so as you got the latest console the complexity of the games increased and all of those old 3D games had actual tutorials for stuff like operating a 3D camera, aiming (Zelda, cough cough), using both hands complexly, context-sensitive inputs and combos, etc. A lot of modern games just expect you to already be proficient in these skills and their 'solution' for beginners wanting to play is to force the player to play on the easier modes but still with no actual instruction. In the retro space I've heard of gamer parents starting their kids out on NES/SNES as kids and slowly introducing newer gens via emulation/actual hardware/retro collections, but that seems like more of a hassle for an issue the industry presumably would want solved.

People were not nostalgic for the 80s in the 90s, they were nostalgic for the 70s

Aww come on, Creed wasn't that bad. Some of their guitar riffs are pretty solid. Leagues above Nickelback and Limp Bizkit.

Both Creed and Nickelback were part of (in my mind anyways) the wave that bastardized and corporatized early 90s alt-rock/grunge. Limp Bizkit at least had a somewhat original sound when they appeared.
Honestly though, the best 90s music came out of the early 90s.
can't really compare them to limp biscuit imo too different