This is the full transcription of podcast 'Hidden Forces'.
The 1990s and the Cancellation of the Future Chuck Klosterman #Podcast #Transcription #ReadAlong #KnowledgeUnlocked
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This is the full transcription of podcast 'Hidden Forces'.
The 1990s and the Cancellation of the Future Chuck Klosterman #Podcast #Transcription #ReadAlong #KnowledgeUnlocked
thing. Within that though, the phone mattered less. Nobody loved their phone the way people love their phones now. Nobody would buy a new phone every other year. That would never happen. The phone was an appliance. It was like a television or a dishwasher or a radio. It was just kind of in your house. Now the phone has a totally different meaning. It's sort of like if you ask somebody, what would you rather lose, your wallet or your phone? Everybody would say, I would rather lose my wallet because at least I can cancel the stuff with my phone. Your phone is the most important thing that's on your body. It seems now that life of course was slower in the 90s and that it was more like that what I recognize now is that you were able to sort of be an autonomous being in a way that's become difficult. You didn't need to express your opinion about anything that happened. People didn't care if you never did. In fact, it was kind of seen as somewhat obnoxious if you were constantly telling (41/57)
What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and to learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in today's episode is Chuck Klosterman, a best-selling American author and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. His most recent book about the decade of the 1990s was an instant New York Times bestseller, and reading it conjured up in me a wellspring of beautiful memories about a time that I've often described as feeling like it was almost a dream. What it is about the 1990s that makes it feel this way is something that Chuck and I explore in this conversation. It was, after all, the last truly analog decade. There was no YouTube, no social media. Most people didn't even own a cell phone, and the internet was still a place that you had to go to, which often meant dialing up from a (1/57)
landline at home or going to an internet cafe. The feeling of the era writes Chuck Klosterman, and what that feeling supposedly signified isolates the 90s from both its distant past and its immediate future. It was a period of ambivalence defined by an overwhelming assumption that life, and in particular American life, was underwhelming. That was the thinking at the time. It's not the thinking now. Now the 90s seems like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the 20th century, but also the end of an age when we control technology more than technology controlled us. It was, as Chuck Klosterman writes, a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems. This conversation fits into a series of episodes that we've published over the years on television history and culture, technology and the human experience, and the transformation in our perceptions of the world and what it (2/57)
means to be a human being. You can find these and other related podcasts on this week's episode page at hiddenforces.io, where you can also access the second part of today's conversation by joining one of our three content tiers. This gives you access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the second part of today's conversation on your mobile device, using your favorite podcast app just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to info at hiddenforces.io, and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this absolutely wonderful episode with my guest, Chuck Closterman. Chuck Closterman, welcome to Hidden Forces. It's (3/57)
my pleasure to be on the Hidden Forces. Am I now a Hidden Force? Does this make me a Hidden Force? I don't even... Were you ever hidden? Maybe when you were up in Fargo, you were a Hidden Force. Well... It's been uncovered and discovered and you're a very acclaimed author. So that's actually my first question for you, Chuck, before we get into the book itself. I'm curious, when you meet people who haven't... Not just haven't met you before, but don't even know who you are. They might have read your work, but didn't know it was you. How do you describe who you are and what you do? So you're saying if I meet someone who doesn't know who I am or if I meet someone who doesn't... You're like you're invited to a dinner by your wife or something and no one knows who you are or you're like at a cocktail party and no one knows who you are and you get that question. So what do you do, Chuck? Oh, I would just say, well, I'm a writer. I was a newspaper journalist for about eight or 10 years and (4/57)
then I worked in magazines for a while and then I write books. And the follow-up question to that is, well, what do you write about? I would say, well, the only book you might have heard about came out about 20 years ago. It had a title called Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. People remember that title. If you know who I am, it's probably because of that, but don't read that book. So the reason that you're here today is that you've written your latest book, which is titled The 90s. People can guess what it's about. It's a wonderful book. I so enjoyed reading it. I was a child of the 90s. I was born in 1981, so I was 10 years old in 1991, which begins your formal decade. People get into that and how you chose it. And I graduated college as a teenager. High school as a teenager. So I came of age in a sense in the 1990s. And therefore, my experience of the decade was somewhat different than the experience of, say, someone like you, who was, I guess, how old were you when the decade started? (5/57)
Yeah, I graduated high school in 1990. So I was 18 in 1990. And then the decade ends. I was living in Akron, Ohio in my late 20s. So really, the 90s do encapsulate the first stage of my adulthood. So you were kind of the age of Ben Stiller and Ethan Hawke's characters in reality bites, right out of college in the middle of the decade. I went to reality bites the last semester I was at college. The movie was about kids finishing college and going into life. That's the exact status me and my friends were at. It was like it was in the spring. I very clearly remember the group of us who went to that. Yeah. So what was the hardest thing about writing this book? Well, the hardest thing, I guess, was not so much the process. Well, I mean, OK, the first thing was I had never written a book like this, right? I had done some books that are about the 90s. I guess, you know, eating the dinosaur was kind of about 90s type stuff. The Coco Puffs book was. But those were all my personal experience of (6/57)
that period. Like everything I wrote about all the media, all the culture I wrote about were essentially connected to my experience with those things, like almost explaining what my life was like through these things that I was into. This book had, you know, more detach. There was more detachment to it. This book also sort of, I mean, comprehensive is the wrong word to use because you can't be comprehensive about a time period like that. It's just impossible. But the fact of the matter is the other 11 books I've done, you could say they're good, you could say they're bad. The one thing you would have to say is like, I'm the only person who could have written them. Like they're very personal or specific to me. But there have been books like the 90s before, you know, there's a book called The 60s. There are books about the 70s. David Helvisch Dam famously wrote The 50s, you know, the book I was doing sort of already has a template to what the expectation is. So I guess for me, that was (7/57)
the hardest part, where in the past, my gauge of how successful a book was was simply how much it matched my kind of interior idea of what it should be. Like if the book in my mind and the book that came into existence were somewhat similar, I was satisfied. But this one was a little different in that way, in that my perception of it really isn't enough. Like if you're trying to write contemporary history in a way that will accurately sort of reflect the actual experience of living through that period, you can't only use yourself as a guide. So I mean, that was hard in a sense. It was hard to sort of realize that the success or failure of this book is less connected to me than the other ones I have done. I guess I also knew that it was probably going to be read by people who typically don't read my books. I mean, this is the kind of book where someone's walking through an airport or looking on Amazon or, you know, and they see a book about a time period and they're like, oh, the 90s, I (8/57)
lived through that. Or I came just after that or whatever the case may be. They have no interest in sort of me as the person doing it. They're interested just in the subject matter. So I kind of realized this has to be done in a way that extends sort of beyond who I typically think reads my books to a different kind of person. So that was actually going to be one of my next questions, which is how do you differentiate between your subjective experience of a time period and this fuzzy collective sense or objective sense of what it was? How did you go about trying to apprehend that? Well, you know, it's an interesting thing in that. So I was a journalist in the 90s, a straight newspaper journalist. And at that time, the goal was objectivity. And over time, that concept has sort of been, the common was pejorative, that there is now sort of this sense that no one can be objective. It's impossible. It's an impossible goal. So you should actually be as subjective as possible. You should kind (9/57)
of steer into that subjectivity. But that's to me the wrong way of looking at objectivity. Like the goal of objectivity is not to be perfect. It's to come as close to that as possible by sort of thinking of your biases, recognizing them and sort of implementing that into the way you investigate or explain a situation. So when you're working from a subjective point of view, you are the arbiter, you are the judge, you are the jury, you are the executioner, you're all of it. OK, if something feels true to you, like there are things, I wrote a book called Frogger Rock City about listening to like hair metal bands growing up in the Midwest. And if I had a feeling about Cinderella or I had a feeling about Judas Priest, that was enough. What I'm trying to translate is that feeling. When you're working in a more objective paradigm, you're not trying to translate a feeling. You're hoping that a feeling emerges from the fact that you are looking at this thing from a degree of attachment and (10/57)
detachment and separation. And how do you do that? Well, you just try to stay constantly aware of what you think personally about a situation and recognize that that understanding or that perception is in your consciousness and that you can't let that thing that's there, this idea that's there kind of preexisting way you feel about it. Emotively, you have to try to keep that from coloring what you end up writing. That's not a great explanation. I realize it doesn't feel that unnatural to me, though, because that was just kind of so ingrained in me when I was a young reporter. That was that was just that was everything, you know, and that I wanted to move into book writing to get away from that. But now all these years later, I find myself gravitating back toward it. It's interesting because when I was preparing for this conversation, I didn't just rely on your book and reading the book, but I also went back and watched some of the clips that you referenced, watched a couple of movies, (11/57)
listened to a lot of music and tried to immerse myself in the cultural milieu of the decade. And that made me wonder about how do we separate the feeling of what it was like to live through a time versus how we remember that time later on as we've retrieved the memory, worked it over, integrated it with other people's memories and fiction that references the decade and makes it mean something that it didn't necessarily mean for the people who lived in it. So how do you differentiate between those two things and which one were you trying to capture? Well, I mean, that's an excellent question because what you're really talking about is the problem of nostalgia. OK, so someone looks at a book called The Nineties. They see a picture of this old phone on the cover. Their natural inclination is to see this as probably an exercise in nostalgia and that maybe that they will enjoy the book or maybe be repelled by the book because they assume it's probably going to traffic and nostalgic ideas (12/57)
and and sort of the whole concept basically of reliving the life that you once lived. But honestly, this book isn't nostalgic at all. And I say that because I, at least to me, have a very specific definition of what nostalgia is. Nostalgia is not just remembering something that happened to you. Nostalgia is looking back on an event that you experienced and injecting sort of this emotional memory of the person you were at the time and then thinking about the event differently because of that. This is why someone can look back at a really terrible period of their life with a sense of nostalgia because they can look back on it with this understanding that the event made them who they are and sort of built the way they think about the world and that they were a person who experienced that that they kind of miss. And then they remember the event itself. I mean, you just my dad would talk about the Great Depression with a sense of nostalgia. And he's always, of course, was talking about how (13/57)
terrible it was. But what he was really talking about was his memory of being like a six year old and a seven year old kid and the things that he did in this time that sort of just gone forever. You know, that's what nostalgia is. Nostalgia is changing the meaning of the thing. And I would say my principal goal with this book was not to do that to the 90s. There is a real desire now with contemporary history to look at it through this subjective lens and kind of take the way we think about the world now and push it back through the expanse of time. So the way we would understand any issue about society or film or, you know, identity, any of these things. Now, the desire is to look at the past and kind of jam those ideas into it and then re experience the time as if like almost we're inventing what 1994 was like or what 1997 was really like. My hope was to reflect the way it felt at the time to live through this period. This is why I didn't do a bunch of new interviews for this book. If (14/57)
you talk to somebody about, you know, what the 1996 election was like and you talk to some political analysts now, they will take their understanding of the world now and say, well, OK, I see these fragments of this in the 96 election and that there's certain things about Bill Clinton and Bob Dole and all this that we that we kind of understand now because we see how the world is unspooled. What I wanted to do was talk about something like the 1996 election. The way it felt at the time and the way to do that is to go back through what was written and said about these things as they were happening. For instance, like when I read about Y2K, I don't know how many people listening this are familiar with this, but when we were moving from the year 1999 to the year 2000, there was sort of a widespread panic that computer chips were going to all fail because they were designed to understand time through two digits. So it was like 79, 80, 81, 82, up through 99. And then we went to the year (15/57)
sense, you can't. But what I was hoping to do is that by kind of sticking to what seemed like straightforward information from the time that the texture that once existed could be sort of recreated, that it wasn't a new kind of understanding of the 90s, but an accurate one. Yeah. So many thoughts about that. One, obviously, I'm reminded. I mean, the quintessential movie that captures our obsession and concern over Y2K was Office Space, where literally the guy's job was to recompute the numbers or transfer the dates to new spreadsheets so that the world wouldn't come to an end. And what's interesting also about that movie is there was this kind of sense of like real boredom. And so I'm curious, looking back on it, what do you feel were the actual feelings that pervaded the time? What did people feel during the 1990s? If we could talk about something like that in the aggregate, what was the feeling of the time? Well, I mean, Office Space is an interesting example, because you say there (17/57)
was this this sense of kind of tedium of boredom, of being sort of trapped by your job. OK. The Cold War had ended, history had ended, everything just kind of felt safe, cocooned. Is that just us looking back on it now? Or was that actually something that we felt? Maybe not realizing it, but we did. At the time, there was a sense in the culture that life was somewhat underwhelming. That the 1990s, if you're using like the broadest possible strokes, are kind of categorized by this idea that people were potentially optimistic about their own life, but generally pessimistic about society. There was a sense there was an interest in the 1970s. And part of that is because there's just always an interest in every generation about a generation that happened just before they were born. So you always kind of go in the 70s, people were interested in the 50s. In the 80s, people were interested in the 60s. In the 90s, people were interested in the 70s. So in some ways, it was the natural (18/57)
progression. But I think part of it had to do with the sense that during the 80s, there was a shift. And the organic nature of culture was no longer a legitimate force, that now every decision was pre-made or manufactured or very consciously created. So you were looking back at the 70s almost with this idea, not that it was a pure time or that it was like an easier time or any of these things or more political or less political time. It was just that, well, it seems like if there was a blockbuster movie like Jaws or Star Wars or whatever, that happened naturally. It was legitimate interest from people and that they made these things happen. Whereas in the 80s, we got used to the idea that, well, we make blockbusters every summer. People assume that there's going to be a movie that's designed for them to see 14 times if it works. There was a kind of a belief that we were now kind of in America on autopilot, that the Cold War had ended so we were the only superpower and things were just (19/57)
going to kind of continue to be in sort of this kind of static. I don't know how to describe it. Like now it's tough, of course, is the idea that like, well, are these things that we are now saying retroactively or do we actually feel at the time? Not everybody did, but I mean, it seemed pretty symptomatic of living through that period. That it was an easier time to be alive because the stakes were lower, but we didn't recognize that in the moment. It was a very luxurious decade. You know, there was a feeling in which I always point to the movie, Smack in the Middle of the Decade, Independence Day, where basically all the battles that Earth had to wage had been waged in one. And now we had to look outside the Earth to find an adventure. And so I think we took my senses, reflecting on this also in preparation for this conversation. I do feel like looking back, we didn't really realize how incredibly privileged we were living through that time and maybe living through such a comfortable, (20/57)
luxurious time also created not just a sense of complacency, but a kind of boredom that made it not necessarily worth living. Because I feel like there was also that sense of it too. Before we go any further, there's something I want to do, which is to actually delineate what we're talking about here. Like, what is the 90s? And you start the book by saying that the quote, 90s began on January 1st of 1990, except for the fact that, of course, they didn't. What delineates a decade? How do you decide what the start point and the end point, the bookends of a decade are, so to speak? This seems like a strange answer, but in a way, a decade is built around sort of framed by the period where our cliche and caricature of that time begins and when that cliche and kind of caricature ends. And what I mean by that is, say you're going to a 1960s themed costume party. Everyone knows, hey, we're dressing like people from the 60s. No one's going to dress like it's 1962. That's not going to happen. (21/57)
People are going to dress like it is like they're a beetle or they're hippie or these things that really start around 1964 moving forward. You know, there is a sense about the 90s that like that, at least the sense I'm projecting in this book, I guess, is that when we think of that time period, but we're really thinking about as kind of a way of life and a way of being that comes after the release of Nirvana is never mind. I mean, like a lot of historians will say that the 90s really began with the fall of the Berlin Wall. That makes a lot of sense to say like, okay, so the Berlin Wall falls in 1989 and then 9 11 happens in 2001. And this is really the framework we use to understand the 90s. The fact of the matter is 1990 was still very much like the 1980s. When you look at like that, you know, Cheers was the biggest show. Joe Montana was still the best quarterback in the NFL. You know, like, you know, like Twin Peaks had come up that out that year, but Twin Peaks seemed like a real (22/57)
kind of fringe thing. You know, like Warrent was touring with Trickster and, you know, all these bands like the New Kids on the Block had a major tour. A lot of these things that we think about as kind of like 80s ideas, they were still happening in 1990. But starting with the release of Nevermind, there was a real shift in what the way it was perceived to understand a young person. Then in order to understand the modern young person, you almost had to understand it through Kurt Cobain and through the idea of these kind of the aesthetics and the values being propagated by this movement in music. You know, Nirvana was the most important band in the 90s, but not for musical reasons necessarily. I mean, their music was important, but more so had to do with non-musical reasons. This idea that the most important thing about Nirvana was that they perceived their success as humiliating, that they were embarrassed to be the biggest band in the world, and that they were constantly seemingly (23/57)
trying to undercut that despite essentially staying in the same cultural spot. You know, and that to me is when the 90s really start, when that attitude becomes normative. So explain that. And before you do actually, let me see if I can find a quote where you actually say something like this. Right. So you say, in the 90s, doing nothing on purpose was a valid option, and a specific brand of cool became more important than almost anything else. The key to that coolness was disinterest in conventional success. The 90s were not an age for the aspirant. The worst thing you could be was a sellout, and not because selling out involved money. Selling out meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible. So where did that come from? This idea that trying too hard or wanting to be somebody was so bad. A lot of it comes from, I guess, the sort of splitting of the culture into a clear underground and mainstream to these two sort of (24/57)
adversarial channels that happened during the 70s and the 80s. You mean that dichotomy emerged in the 70s? Well, yeah. I mean, say you look at in 1967, who was the most critically accepted band? It was the Beatles. Who was the biggest band? It was the Beatles. OK, those things could exist simultaneously. This begins to widen as we move into the 70s and even more so in the 80s, where there's an idea that there's things for the mainstream audience, which became to mean an unserious casual consumer. Somebody who basically just accepted what was given to them through marketing or through media. And then sort of this uncompromising underground culture. For people who have taste? Well, people who have taste or people who more often just disliked what they saw as a mainstream idea. That they, you know, these things split, right? And then you get these weird situations where a band like Nirvana is like the Beatles again very briefly. They're the most beloved band by critics and they're the (25/57)
biggest band. And that kind of causes a sort of a paralysis of self identity. Like the anxiety Nirvana seemed to feel from the position they occupied in the culture was very palpable. And that then sort of like, you know, became kind of endemic with with anybody who wanted to be interested in culture. This idea that when you looked at, say, the previous decade where there was a real desire for hugeness, where like the idea of being commercially big in any idiom of art. The idea of being big almost like the ends just for the means or whatever. It's like if you're you're massively successful, the meaning of what you're doing almost becomes secondary to the proof that you are succeeding. And the 90s had a discomfort with that, that a lot of people saw that as really kind of cheap. And that's the whole idea of like selling out. The idea of selling out has existed for a very long time. I mean, you know, people would say Bob Dylan sold out by going electric, you know, the whoever record (26/57)
called the who sell out. And this was way back, like, you know, 30 years before this were, but it was at its apex in the 90s. And I do think that in a lot of ways it was psychologically damaging to, you know, people who sort of experienced it. This idea that if you wanted to do something, there was kind of an emptiness in having what you do succeed because it illustrated a kind of desperation on the part of the creator. That it was less artistic to sort of look at what you were doing as a commodity of any sort. So you always had to fight against that, even though you also understood it was ridiculous. It made no sense to make something and have no one experience it, you know. So that was the huge sort of like just crazy thing about the idea of selling out, which is that everyone understood it to be ludicrous. And yet you still had to play within those rules. Like you had to accept something and try to almost perform this thing that you consciously understood to be crazy. So I'm curious (27/57)
to understand, I don't want to dwell on it too much because there's so many other things that I really do want to talk about. But did that stem from the fact that 90s culture was predominantly and this actually gets us into a secondary question, which is also very important and elicited some confusion for me. During the course of reading the book around generations because I'm technically a millennial and you had these two different generations that kind of remembered this period that were old enough to remember it and live it and be culturally influenced by it, which is the Gen X and the millennials. Is the reason that this allergic reaction to mainstream success in the sense that somehow if my artwork is assimilated and becomes mainstream, that it's something happens to it, that it's no longer what it was. Is that in part because the mainstream culture, at least to begin the decade, was Gen Xers and Gen Xers were a smaller cohort and they felt sort of bullied by the larger cultural (28/57)
forces of their previous generation of the baby boomers? Huh. I wouldn't say that. I can understand that argument being made. But I don't know if that was really the case. I mean, this is always the things you got. This is why a book like this is complicated to do. First of all, we have the idea of what a Gen Xer is and what a Gen Xer wants and what are the values of Generation X and all of these things. But of course, with any generation, be it millennial, baby boomer, whatever the fuck you use is your generational example, a small sliver of that generation actually adopts all the characteristics they're supposedly supposed to hold. I mentioned how we look at someone like Courtney Love as a real 90s figure. Shania Twain in the 90s sold 14 times as many records as Courtney Love. My so-called life is almost like a defining Gen X show, like Angela Chase and like Jared Leto's character in that, you know, in Brandt Crackauer and all this. These are almost like these Gen X teens from (29/57)
Central Casting in a way. When that show came out, it was on ABC on Thursday night and I watched every episode. I was really into that show from the very first episode, but the show that its rival that was new on NBC was Friends. Okay. I think it's pretty clear that my so-called life lasted one year and has still some kind of, you know, cultural residue. But Friends became one of the biggest sitcoms that ever existed. Okay. Now Friends is a weird example of something from the 90s in the sense that these are young people in their 20s trying to find, you know, their way in the world. It seems like that should be very indicative of the Gen X mindset and it should be a Gen X show, but it's not. That show kind of exists out of time. The characters on Friends don't look like Ethan Hawke and reality bites. They don't have those kind of conversations. They almost exist as though, you know, we could be living through any period of time. The problems we're dealing with, the relationships we're (30/57)
having could have happened in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s or beyond. And as a consequence, Friends was much more popular and is still popular today in a way that my so-called life can't be. Yes. So first of all, whenever we're talking about like, like just these these ideas of like what, how a Gen X person thinks or whatever, we're just talking about the kind of person who actually cared about those things. You know, it's actually kind of a small, you know, everybody had some elements of it, but few people had them all. So when you're talking about like, is this idea of selling out does ever do with the 90s or does it have to do specifically with this Gen X mindset? I see what you're saying, but like throughout the 90s the Gen X person was the center of youth culture. And that's what we're always talking about with generations. We're always talking about the youngest adults. You know, it's always, it's very interesting, you know, we think about like what people were like in the 80s, you (31/57)
know, like, you know, we think about, oh, you know, there's all this cocaine and people just wanted to get rich and MTV sort of became the way we understood everything. We're not really talking about 75 year old people in the 80s though. Like when we talk about people of the 80s, we're talking about young people of the 80s. When we talk about the 90s, we're talking about young people of the 90s. You're saying like, you're a millennial, right? I think it's hard for people to accept that millennials are now in their 40s. It doesn't seem like that should be how it is. Millennials are supposed to be 20 year olds. Yeah, who don't want to, you know, upset at work or whatever, you know, but that's hard for people to get around these cliches. I mean, and that's the trouble. Like there are a lot of people who say like generations are stupid. These ideas that all people share characteristic, it's not that different than astrology, you know, like it makes no sense that everyone born in March (32/57)
would have the same personality or whatever. They're like, it's the same way with Generation X. Just to apply these characteristics to the entire populace is like, you know, idiotic. And I understand that. I actually don't think it's idiotic. I think it's idiotic to deny it. I look at people that are my exact age and we share so many cultural reference points. I mean, we're able to just flow in memory and remember things and things that spread like wildfire throughout our generation, throughout our age group from school to school. No one had met anyone else, but we all had some of the same reference point jokes, the same things made sense. I mean, there's a real intelligence that travels there in the culture. No, it's an interesting deal. I think like the movie The Big Chill from the 1980s, which is a movie about the 60s, is interesting in this regard because that's a movie about people later in life realizing that these shared ideas that they had in the 1960s are kind of falling apart (33/57)
and dissolving underneath their feet. And it's sort of the recognition that like some of the things that we all believed in that we sort of remember as being important and integral to society were very flawed and sort of false and all of these things. You're probably having the same experience with people your age now. It's like a lot of the things that you might see as connecting fluid, you would not have identified as such at the time. You know that at the time it just seemed like, well, I like this and my friends like this, but it doesn't have a lot of meaning. But when you get older and you start seeing that everybody seemed to have some understanding of this, and it's so hard in life to find these unilateral points of understanding that when you do find something, almost amplifies its significance. Some people who read this book have said like, in fact, strangely high number. I said, like, why don't you talk about pogs? I don't remember what those were. There were this thing in (34/57)
the 90s that people were into. It was like a little game. It was sort of like, I think it predates magic, the gathering, although I don't know. It was something that I remember. I remember them happening, but I no way thought of it as a significant thing. But to some people it was, more people than I would have guessed. Yeah. Another thing that strikes me is when we talk about this kind of a version to success and concepts of selling out, I'm struck by the comparison to the 80s where success really was kind of the celebrated thing. A lot of these 80s movies, whether it was Michael J. Fox, The Secret of My Success, it was a lot of characters kind of made it, made a lot of money. Money was a big deal in the context of those films. And it kind of makes sense also when you combine it with the Reagan Revolution and the end of the 1970s and the reduction of taxes and deregulation. So like, the political elements are really interesting. I want to quote you one more time here because there's (35/57)
something that you said that kind of reminded me of this. So this is a quote also from the introduction, actually, I think both the quotes that I pulled from the introduction. You write, for much of the decade, Seinfeld was the most popular, most transformative live action show on television. It altered the language and shifted the comedic sensibilities and almost every random episode was witnessed by more people than the 2019 finale of Game of Thrones. Yet, if you missed an episode of Seinfeld, you simply missed it. You had to wait until it was reared the following summer when you could try to manually record it on VHS videotape. If you missed it again, the only option was to go to a public archive in Los Angeles or Manhattan and request a special viewing on 8mm videotape. But of course, this limitation was not something people worried about because caring that much about any TV show was not a normal thing to do. And even if you did, you would pretend you didn't because this was the (36/57)
90s. I love that paragraph. I'm not sure what it was that you said that made me think of it. It may have been this idea of like, what was a normal thing to do? Because now we're so used to having these kind of like, you want to talk about multiple tiers? I mean, there are niche groups of people that are obsessed with one particular thing. And with the internet and YouTube and the reduction in the cost of storage space on hard drives, you have the ability to access all sorts of content from all sorts of periods. And, you know, if you want to watch all the Seinfeld, you can do it. It's not a problem. And it's easy to forget that the 90s was the last time. And this is something that I I'd like to reflect on with you, where it really feels like the last analog decade, the last period where being human felt a certain way, where life felt grounded, and where our sense, and this is where I really wanted to take it, our sense of time and space felt the way it had. I mean, look, there's no (37/57)
doubt that technology alters this. There are wonderful accounts of the invent of the locomotive and people's, the transformation of time and space, the ability to go from one place to another. But something about the digital revolution, the introduction of mobile computing and hyperconnectivity and always on technology that collapsed time and space, outward time and space in the world, and also dissolved the barrier between our internal world and this external world that has collapsed into a singularity. And in fact, it's the inviolability of the internal world in the 1990s that sat with me the most in preparation for this conversation, thinking about the phone. I didn't actually have a phone in my room, but, you know, we had a phone in the house. And if someone was going to call me, and I was expecting the phone call, I was going to stand by the phone and be physically there. If I was going to go on the internet, I was going to physically go on the internet, you know? And so there was (38/57)
this, I bring that up, I guess, there's no clear question. I do this sometimes, I try and avoid doing it. But I'm, I'd like to kind of talk about that, how the feeling of living in a time where you still, you were kind of grounded in the physical world and not in this kind of world that we've moved in today. Okay, that's very interesting. I guess I have a lot to say on this. I'll try to be brief and not get off on too far a tangent. But okay, first of all, the feeling you're discussing is a retroactive feeling that you did not have in the 90s. And I can kind of prove why that was. You look at a book like Generation X, the subtitle of that book is Tales from an Accelerated Culture. The idea of the acceleration of culture was an omnipresent concept presented through the media throughout the 1990s. There was this idea that culture was accelerating too fast for us to fully sort of control, that we were losing control of these things as they were happening, or that we already had. Now what (39/57)
they're talking about are things like the proliferation of cable television. That was seen as almost like too much media, right? We have 24 hours of channels now. We have 24 hour sports. How could this be? The phone is a massive thing. I think from a day-to-day experience, nothing has changed more about being alive from the 90s to now than the phone, even in some ways more than the internet. Because the phone was anchored you to a place that if you wanted to be able to communicate with people who were not in front of you, you had to be in your house. Long-distance calling used to cost money, right? People would complain over how much long distance calls cost. Maybe they thought it was too high, but nobody thought it should be free. Nobody was like calling should be limitless. People would go to college and they'd break up because they went to different colleges and they couldn't afford to make long-distance calls. Things like that, the centrality of the phone to our lives was a huge (40/57)
people, broadcasting your ideas about the world. I always think it's funny when people who love Twitter, they'll say it's like, well, it's sort of like a huge party for all the world. It's like the town square. Can you imagine a party where somebody stands on the table and just spouts political ideas for four straight hours? They would not get invited to a lot of parties. Twitter is not like a party. It is not like any kind of actual human interaction because humans don't do that when they've actually got to be people. I think that as we look back, when people say they miss the 90s, what they're really saying is they miss the thing you described. This idea that just the experience of being a person, of being a singular person or whatever separate from technology was still possible. But this is what's always tricky when it was actually happening in, say, 1995, which is a real key year for the internet because of Amazon starts, Craiglist starts, a lot of things begin in 1995. Nobody in (42/57)
1995 felt as though life was placid and slow. It only seemed to be accelerating. We then hit a point where things changed so radically that moving back in time almost seems going back to 1992 now, I think almost feels like to people like going back to 1952 because everything would be different. 1900. I feel like it's 100 years ago. It feels like to me, when I look back at that period of time, I actually feel like it was a dream. It feels like it didn't happen. It feels like the memories have populated, but it can't possibly be. This is the most interesting thing about being, I mean, you're, I guess, on the cusp of this, but of being like a generation X person or a baby boomer or I guess a older millennial, is that we are going to be the only people in the history of humankind who understand both experiences of pre and post internet that we just by chance happen to live through this period of this transformation. There's been other people like this. I mean, people who remember pre and (43/57)
post television, that also had to be just a crazy thing that in the past, before television existed, the idea of seeing a non-live sporting event or a a political convention or what any event happening anywhere, which is it wasn't even something you missed. It was just an impossible thing to have. You know, then all of a sudden, it was possible. It's the same way with this. I mean, there's all these things now that the internet allows that we didn't really even, it wasn't even like something that was fantasized about before that. It was like no one ever thought of this, you know, no one ever thought that like, if somebody was say like the internet was the coming internet was described to someone in 1988, you went back to 1988 and you say, the internet's coming. This is what it's going to be. I think it's unlikely that the first thing they would think like, boy, that's really going to change pornography. You know, they are like, it's really going to alter our ability to gamble on sports (44/57)
or whether all these things that have happened that they weren't like things that we were waiting to see, you're waiting to sort of, they just changed and all of a sudden, they became completely normal. Yeah. I mean, I totally agree. I'm sitting here trying to think about really what made the internet and really for me, it wasn't just the internet. The internet alone isn't really sufficient to bring about the kind of socio-psychological spiritual shift in the zeitgeist that we've experienced and we've lived through. I think it was the combination of the internet and mobile. The ability, not just mobile now, but this is now where all devices have increasingly become intelligent and the combination of machine intelligence, increasing levels of machine intelligence and ubiquitous connectivity has to go back to what I mentioned earlier, kind of broken the seal between the external and the internal. And what's interesting about that, I'm curious what you have to say about this. First of (45/57)
all, I think it has violated our sense of privacy. People don't feel like there really is anywhere that they can be safe where they can actually be. I mean, I feel like you need to literally leave your phone at home, but even if you leave your phone at home, you've taken an action that's so unnatural that that in itself conveys important information about what you're going to do. So there's a sense of having lost much of that internal, private, sacred space. And at the same time, a kind of expectation that the external world should conform to your internal subjective experience of it. And there's a kind of rolling disorientation that I feel like we're all living through as a result of that. And I'm curious, I don't know if you agree with that, if that speaks to something that you think's accurate or maybe kind of overshoots. Well, I mean, okay, several things. First of all, the thing you mentioned about turning your phone off, that's really insightful. I mean, I know this guy who (46/57)
allegedly murdered these people in Moscow, Idaho, you know, you hear this about the like one of the things. Oh, well, this guy, he murdered a bunch of some college students in Idaho. This is recently or yeah, like a month ago. And one of the things that I have heard about this, I have tangentially heard about this. Going to be used against him is like during the time of the crimes, like his phone was turned off during that period, like turning your phone off now makes you suspicious. A privacy thing is a fascinating deal. And I write about this in the book, like the idea of doxing, for example, okay, you know, it is now actually perceived as a form of violence to dock someone online, to say where they are, to give their location, to give their real name. It's beginning of the 90s, most people dox to themselves, your name, your address, and your phone number was in a phone book. You had to pay money to keep it out of the phone book. You had to pay extra if you wanted an unlisted number. (47/57)
If you called up the operator, and if you knew the area code of the person you're looking for, they would just connect you to that person, you know, now that is seen as absolutely like beyond the pale, like you would never in a possibility. Now what changed? Did life become more dangerous from 1994 to 2004? It did not. It did not become more dangerous. All evidence shows that it didn't. But it's this idea that somehow because we haven't like we're complicit in this organism, this internet organism, that there is just this different kind of risk. I mean, it used to be that like nobody wanted to give their credit card over the internet. Like you didn't want to buy a book on Amazon, maybe you're like, I don't know. I don't want to do that. I'd call a bookstore and give them my credit card number, but I didn't want to put it into the internet. The magnitude and the size of it made it seem dangerous. And there was a third thing I wanted to discuss. I can't remember what was, you were (48/57)
talking about just sort of like the, well, this kind of sense of alienation, you know, it is weird. It's like we become alienated by this thing that in some ways we can't live without. I mean, I used to always use this example just about television and film. So how long have humans existed? You can use a whole bunch of different figures, 25,000 years, 250,000 years, all depends on what you consider when hominids start. We go to East Africa and decide like this is the first person. Okay. Regardless of when you pick, it's an extraordinarily long time or anything a person sees that's moving is there. That if you see a tiger walking in the grass, that means you're in front of a tiger. Everything about your physiology and your biology and the way your brain is constructed has been sort of built to recognize that if you see something in front of you, it's because it's happening. Then we start with film in the early 20th century. You know, they talk about, you know, the great train robbery. (49/57)