I was born in '79. I know a lot of 1980s/1990s stuff that’s floating in popular consciousness right now is fictional romanticised bullshit, because it’s based on romaticised fiction made in that era.
For example, I knew most kids didn’t hang out at The Mall. I was a kid. We didn’t have a goddamn mall. American movies and TV showed kids hanging out at The Mall. Maybe hanging out at the Mall was an aspirational thing. Or something.
It’s a thing that happened for some people but it’s not the entire truth about the era. It’s not just that people tend to remember the good bits, they tend to remember the good bits that happened to someone else.
There’s a reason why nobody makes AI slop about the Finnish 1990s banking crisis and its wide systemic repercussions felt to this day. Edit: Sorry if none of this makes sense, just ate something other than cheap potatoes for the first time in a week
It’s true that this is all AI slop and that they are disgustingly manipulative videos but I do disagree with the notion that the nostalgia and The era was fake and never existed. As a child of the '80s and '90s we really did stay out all day until the street lights came on, and hang out in pizza places and malls and the internet and our screen life has played a major role in changing that. What is heinous here is that people are creating triggers just to manipulate generations. Not the nostalgia.
Yeah, the article repeatedly suggesting it was a disingenuous depiction of the era, but didn’t seem to make any attempt to support that assertion.
I’d love a breakdown as to what specifically was disingenuous.
I mean, like any social media, it’s selectively showing “the good”, and ignoring the bad. Is that it? Like, they can’t (and wouldn’t even if they could) put the heavy cigarette smell of any restaurant of the era through the phone.
If you watched Stranger Things, the depiction of Nancy going to work and being relegated to making coffee for the boys instead of being taken seriously at an actual job is an iconic representation of women’s struggle in the workplace. Remember, women were only allowed to have their own bank accounts, credit cards, and home loans as legally protected assets, starting in the late 1970s. We were deemed more incompetent, and more wards of our husbands in those respects. Inertia of those notions remained even after the legality changed. That whole bit in Delores Claiborne, where her husband finds her “private”, “personal”, only her name on it bank account and just empties it: real. (That is what RBG had a deciding vote on btw, what gave her such credit back in the day, changing financial freedoms for women to match those of men.)
Yes, this may seem a little focused on women, but it’s a significant piece of the “things were better” push on the right. The right did grow, in part, as a reaction to the loss of the more controlled, traditional, “kept” female. It’s important to keep a full visual of what going back could mean. Roe has already fallen.
Moving away from screen time to more face to face is good. Doesn’t mean texting is bad, it’s fantastic, amazing even, how easy it is to communicate. I love it. But I still drive 10-15min to sit down in a living room face to face with people. I feel little to no stress when disagreement, argument, or even anger occurs. Facing the normal range of human emotion in another doesn’t make me want to hide.
Even just moving back to more long form media would help stop the destructive, anxiety perpetuating, focus reducing rewiring happening. YouTube statistics are now saying anything over 10 minutes is doomed to die based on viewer preference. 9 minutes or less or gtfo. Shorts are quickly taking over and perpetually rewiring people on the daily.
I guess so. This is from the article:
Their political project uses the aesthetic of the past to sell a future where minorities are marginalized, women have no political power, and white guys are in charge. That’s how they think it all worked in the past and they’d love for it to happen again.
What the videos don’t show is how bad racism was before everyone is able to record at anytime. Shows and movies were very streotypical. Actually since cancel culture wasn’t a thing for not famous people, people were really racists in just everyday conversations.
The government’s war on immigrants is very much like the war on drugs with were specifically created to target hippies and black communities while at the same time suppying the communities with the drugs they deemed illegal.
In terms of the environment, lead was banned in gasoline in 1996. I thought it was way earlier than that when I looked it up. Shame really. I am no a scientists and the results of microplastics in our system is still being researched but lead poisoning effects are very well documented and I believe the pernament mental effects of it can be seen in a large portion of the boomer population.
Yeah, I kinda imagined this was the nature of the issue.
Not really sure how I feel about the implied argument, though, which appears to be that it is wrong to create period art (or ask an AI to generate a video) which doesn’t include some (all?) negative experiences of that period.
May I paint the view from my balcony, omitting the mosquitos biting me while I paint?
I think the crux must be intention… Which is notoriously hard to prove.
It’s really not. We know foreign countries are using ai to radicalized boomers and incels. So it’s just safer to assume the worst until we are back in control of our society
Why does someone have to be in control again?
Because inevitably someone has to be
It’s all real here, no filters, no screens.
… said the AI.
Fuck I hate that garbage. The 80’s were amazing. We don’t need new tech ruining that memory.
It honestly fits tho. It was an era of rising neoliberalism and technology, establishing the cyberpunk critique of the world we’re currently living.
what confuses me the most about these videos is the call to action. go back? that’s not how time works!
Anyone who actually knew a damn thing would want to stop right at 2015 abd stay there forever
2012 was pretty much peak imo. Cant really think of anything after that thats worth saving. Guess the mayans were kinda right after all. Smartphones had come out and evolved into something decent but weren’t terrible yet, facebook was still kinda useful and not a propaganda cesspit, google would give you useful results, reddit was full of unique and interesting information. Tv and movies were really hitting their stride with some of the most bou dary pushing original tv series and movies hadn’t all devolved to remakes and superhero rehashes, global warming was bad but people seemed concerned about it and it wasnt past the point of no return yet, youtube didnt shove a million ads down your face. Netflix was streaming content but didnt have any competitors buying up rights yet, spotify was fairly new and revolutionary still, forums still existed for all sorts of niche interests, ads werent completely pervasive everywhere, google wasn’t an evil monopoly sucking up everyones data, memes were still fresh and original, gaming pretty much hit its pinnacle of graphical fidelity relative to performance costs, you could order awesome drugs off the internet unregulated (not even just the dark web, research chemicals were fucking great and hadnt started to be banned yet). Idk i could go on and on but literally everything felt like it got worse from there. I didnt even touch on productivity or the economy but it still felt like a bit of a boom in the wake of the rebound from 2008. If im missing anything good that happened post 2012 please let me know.
Obergefell was in 2015 I believe
I had to look it up because its been since 2005 in Canada, but wow you’re right. I wish that madw me feel differently about the content of my comment, because that is one objectively good thing that happened after 2012, but the fact that it didnt happen until then and that its so recent still just feels really bad.
I hate to tell you this, but the mullets were very real. It was a dark time and we’re all glad it’s in the past.
Mullets are back, my dude.
Like actually back. Popular, even. I get downvoted to oblivion for making fun of mullets. I don’t understand a world where mullets are not just here, but defended as a legitimate hairstyle.
The 80s were already the second decade of the decline after the gold standard was revoked in 1971 and wages became decoupled from productivity. Everything was on a slowly accelerating slide downhill from there, although it took until the 90s for the first people to truly notice things were going sideways.
You want a real economic golden era? Try the 50s and the 60s, where a single wage earner could work a low-end service-level job (selling shoes, for example), and make enough to own a detached SFH, a car in the garage, support a SAH spouse and several children, go on modest vacations every year with at least one more ambitious one every few years, and still have enough left over to save generously for retirement.
I think you may be missing the word ‘white’ somewhere in your analysis
