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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26965 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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Humanity Peaked When I Was In High School.

Hypothesis: The reason there's such a broad nostalgia for the 90's and 00's is because that was actually the highwater mark for human aspirations (at least in the West). This is not because of any particular bit of art or culture or anything like that, but for boring historical forces type reasons.

So let's start by talking about art and culture. There's an image that every one of us has of the International Man of Mystery. James Bond. Jason Borne. Raymond Reddington. You can probably imagine your own version of this archetype. What does his background look like? Upper-middle class family, highly educated, top of their class, summers in [European location], winters in [different exotic location]. Military, special military, two decades of nebulous experience in fieldwork. Rafa can probably bang out a dozen plausible Early Life's without pausing for breath.

The end result is a man of spectacular and all-consuming agency. He is unparalleled in his ability to navigate and manipulate the world around him and the reason for that is his knowledge and experience. He speaks six languages, is familiar with a hundred cities, a thousand weapons and ten thousand wines and liquors. He knows the classics, knows the latest tech, knows fashion, watches, cars, boats, aircraft - everything. He is the embodiment of generalized domain-specific mastery, the culmination and exemplar of centuries of traditions that reached their crescendo when I was in high school, at the turn of the millennium.

Between 1990 and 2015, the plausibility of that man failed.

I don't mean that he was ever truly realistic. But most of us here can probably think of people who were reasonable understudies for at least a significant portion of that totalizing skillset. If that one professor we had who seemed to know about everything had gone special forces instead of into economics, yadda yadda.

The problem is that the world of 1990 was both smaller and had a stronger foundation. A well-bred prodigy who reached his prime in 1990 could plausibly speak English, German, Latin, Russian, a Romance language and a random other and thereby talk to anyone who probably mattered. There was enough commonality and overlap in those cultures that he could believably move between them with grace and comportment.

The world of 2025 is bigger. Now he needs to also speak Chinese, Japanese, 8 Indian tongues, Korean, Arabic, Farsi and a couple African languages. Where is he going to learn all of those? Boarding school? Dramatic 20-something romances? It's just too much. It breaks the bounds of plausibility. The structures and support, the cultural traditions that elevate the best of us, they don't exist for this scale. They're not up to the task. The closest we have to a man who can weave between English and Mandarin is John fucking Cena. When is the next (black) James Bond going to solve a puzzle based on his understanding of the Dao and the 4 Classics? It will land with a fraction of the 0.01% of the audience that reads xanxia and whiff for everyone else.

The world of 2025 is too complex for a single man to navigate it like that. Sure, Jason Borne can use Google translate, but that hamstrings his omnicompetence. Taking that tact just highlights the extent to which even the best of us can't master the world anymore. Reddington might know how to manipulate the phone lines, but how is he going to manipulate The Algorithm, which completely changes every six months? Do the highly specialized tech geniuses even understand what they hell they've called up enough to twist it to their own ends?

That's why I think nostalgia has locked onto the 90's. It's the last time the world felt fully human-comprehensible. Hans Gruber seemed like a man who generally knew what was going on in the world - and we could imagine such a man existing.

Now it's beyond that, it's systems of shoggoths that we can tweak and manipulate, but none of us can truly grasp as a whole - and we can't even really imagine someone who can. We've seen too deep into his Twitter feed and know he has utterly retarded opinions about things we do know a bit about. Worse, we have no institutions and traditions to wrangle the shoggoths. That's likely a factor in the AI frenzy - the hope that we can build a shoggoth-wrangling shoggoth, a sheepdog mi-go, while EY screams in horror at the blind arrogance of that plan.

Well, like I said. A hypothesis.

Humanity Peaked When I Was In High School.

Most people think that. Regardless of when they were in high school. The exception is the people who were losers in high school, who think humanity peaked slightly later when they stopped being losers. Compare "50's" (actually early 1960's) nostalgia among high-functioning Boomers and "60's" (a period that started in 1968 and continued well into the 1970's) nostalgia among left-idiotarian Boomers.

The golden era for everything is always 20 years ago. That's how long it takes society to weed its collective memory of the bad and keep the good. Everything people say about the garbage we have today vs. the awesome stuff we had yesterday was being said yesterday about the stuff we had the day before and so on. That goes for pretty much everything - cars, appliances, movies, etc. Really, it's a mix of good and bad, but given enough time, it all becomes good.

20 years ago it was 2005 -- if we aren't seeing nostalgia for whatever was going on then (it's so lame that I don't even know!), maybe it's because the 90s really were that much better?

We have such a man. Our very own kulakrevolt

Donald Trump is bigger and more successful than the idea of James Bond and he navigates the 2020s fine. Elon Musk too for that matter.

Musk is the real deal - obviously a very different paradigm, but Bond-tier apparently-superhuman talent. If James Bond shitposted for 20 hours a day when he wasn't saving the world from Spectre, I don't think he would have the reputation he does.

Trump played a superhumanly-effective CEO on TV, but he was a replacement level CEO in reality, both of his dad's company and of USG as a first-term President. Suggesting Trump as the answer to @Iconochasm's question makes as much sense as suggesting Lashana Lynch or Idris Elba as the next James Bond - they replace Craig, not Bond.

On the other hand, there is a possible mistake here. James Bond is employed on His Majesty's Secret Service. If he was real, we wouldn't know about him. The current C ("M" in the Bond movies) has previously been an elite athlete, a counter-terrorist field agent in the Middle East and served as Q immediately before taking over as C. We crossed paths at Cambridge and she also came across as someone who could hold her own in a poker game against Le Chiffre. She is exactly the sort of person who could win, perhaps even has won, the respect of a double-0 agent working for her. The culture that supposedly produced James Bond and the Ms he worked with still (just about) exists - it just produces talent which points in a direction other than tech entrepreneurship. (Bond, notably, was never a leader of men, a businessman, or an inventor).

Even when Fleming was alive, the idea of a Bond who also built his own gadgets was not plausible.

Trump took his father’s modest low-rent real-estate empire and turned it into one of the most iconic brands on earth. He built a tower at the center of the world and put his name on it. He succeeded at real estate and then transitioned into media, to the point that the name “Donald Trump” was synonymous with the 80s. (American Psycho, Back to the Future, the Wikipedia Page “Donald Trump in Music”, “You’re Fired!”).

After all that Trump ran for President, of the United States, president, with no political experience, and achieved the most shocking underdog victory maybe ever in American history. He then made in 2024 the greatest comeback in American political history since Nixon. And is probably the most consequential President since Nixon, if not since FDR.

“Replacement Level CEO”? Look at the objective facts of this man. Fred Trump owning some apartment buildings in Queens did not put Donald Trump on a guaranteed collision course with Michael Jackson and Mohammed Ali.

I sometimes feel as though the perception of TDS and “the MAGA cult” has created this third strain middle wave Trump revisionism that has to somehow desacralize him into being just some guy. Well, let’s not exaggerate, we have to be reasonable and acknowledge Trump’s flaws, he’s just a man after all… In some sense the TDS people have a more accurate view of Trump’s importance. “Replacement Level”? Trump is a Great Man of History. Acknowledging that doesn’t preclude us from discussing his failures in the same way we can acknowledge that Napoleon gave too much preference to his family or that Washington was actually mediocre at tactics. But Trump is undeniably a great man. And we’re fascinated by him.

Is that the same as James Bond? Trump is certainly a character that represents a huge domineering vision of the future. Maybe that vision doesn’t speak to you specifically, but it has completely changed the arc of American right-wing politics. Trump inspired hundreds of millions of people with a new vision for success. Maybe that’s not the same as James Bond, maybe the media category is a separate field and Jason Bourne and Liam Neeson are all derivatives and we still haven’t moved on from Sherlock Holmes. The sex(-less) appeal is all in video games now and Mario and Pikachu aren’t ideas of the Renaissance Man.

But in the real world the 2020s are full of colorful men-of-action, the fascination of the Tech CEO, scrying not the CCP but Xi Jinping, “Putin’s War,” the rise of the streamer and “content creators” personalized individuated “influencer” brands. The 90s was more obsessed with the corporate archetype than we are now (The Matrix, Fight Club, Work From Home didn’t exist, what happened to all the boy bands?).

After all James Bond is just a media image, he doesn’t exist, he is one archetype bubbling up through the collective unconscious by whatever arbitrary and random process that happens. He says more about the 50s than the 90s. But there are lots of figures like Trump who speak to the 2020s and they don’t point to a culture lacking in ambition.

Donald Trump, or at least his persona, is a remnant of the 80s though.

He's like the Undertaker bringing so much longevity to the gimmick that you forget he's from a different era altogether.

Might be caused by population ageing coupled with fallout from decades of the Triffin dilemma, i.e., economic growth slowing down in the 1960s, trade deficits becoming chronic and growing starting in the mid-1970s, Reaganomics needed to deregulate financial markets and take on more debt to cover rising costs starting in the early 1980s, and so on, driven by the use of the dollar for global trade.

Apologies for making this a total digression but including Raymond Reddington in that list is just absolutely laughable as "international man of mystery" goes because The Blacklist decided to Shyalamatwist by making Raymond Reddington, James Spader Moustache Twirling Hopkins Hannibal Channeler, a fucking woman.

It probably wasn't meant to be a girlboss attempt as much as it was meant to be a Smart Twist, but the reveal coinciding with the heights of cultural wokeness just made the entire series retroactively worse (I think, after the second season of Spader Smugly Wins I got tired of the premise). In any case the idea that Great (wo)Man Raymond Reddington is an aspirational touchstone for younger men to set themselves by is dodgy enough to begin with and became ridiculous later on.

The one US TV series that DID approach the AI apocalypse anything resembling competently was Person Of Interest, where it ended up being humans effecting their AI Godslaves. Otherwise most Great Man stories have to be small, since nukes and interwebz are unnavigable. Unless you're a leet hacker like Hugh Jackman who can keyboardhack while getting slopknobbed.

EDIT https://popculturereferences.com/we-dont-need-authorial-intent-to-know-who-red-reddington-was/#:~:text=Knauf%20confirmed%20that%20the%20intent,to%20leave%20after%20Season%208.

Knauf confirmed that the intent of the writing staff on The Blacklist (specifically show creator and co-showrunner Jon Bokenkamp and John Eisendrath, co-showrunner for the first eight seasons, and then solo showrunner in the final two seasons) was that the Red Reddington (James Spader) that we followed on The Blacklist for ten seasons was born Katarina Rostova, the mother of Elizabeth Keen, the FBI agent who was the co-lead on the series with Reddington until her actor, Megan Boone, chose to leave after Season 8.

@MaximumCuddles, this may or may not serve as proof. I personally noticed this theory when there was fucking ENDLESS spaderfacing about "well maybe I AM really your father or not hmm hmm hmm" that irritated the fuck out of me when watching Blacklist, combined with the lead actress just being very bad at doing anything other than white woman whining about this brainteasing, so I just caught up the summary when it finished and, yea, retroactively made my decision to dip early on worth it.

That's fucking hilarious. I haven't actually watched much of the show, just enough to grasp the conceit. In my mind, Reddington was something like the final money-grubbing exploitation of the character concept, dragging it down to Law & Order spinoff levels for the people who still watch network TV.

As someone whom is aware of but has never seen any of the things you’ve referenced this comment is a goddamn roller coaster of emotion.

Are you takin the piss or are you deadass?

James spader’s character turns out to be a woman? This reads like a /pol/ parody of Yellowstone. I’m legitimately frightened to know the answer to this.

Are you takin the piss or are you deadass?

On god bruh, unc is deadass. Shit is not bussin, that shit is low-key sus AF. Gyatt.

In the year of our lord 2025, you’re either a spiritual boomer or a spiritual zoomer. No in between. Call it.

I still see all the other phrases a lot, especially "unc," but we seem to have passed peak "gyatt." I feel this is a positive development.

Also bussin is passé at this point as well

If I had to take a guess it’s been about 67 weeks since it passed from typical zoomerspeak

James spader’s character turns out to be a woman?

It isn't in the Wikipedia article.

It's been awhile since I saw the show, but it really jumped the shark. The Spader character wasn't actually Raymond Reddington, I forget who, but was somehow related. The real Reddington was someone else, and then someone else from that. It was a series of fake faces. I don't remember the woman part, but the show got bad, so I buy it.

The 90's/early 2000's were might be better compared to now, at least when restricting ourselves to social factors like "social cohesion" or "expectation of the typical person that they'll get married and start a family," but that doesn't make it peak. You're still dealing with sky-high divorce rates (that only "recover" due to declining marriage rates - the early 2000s are debatably the beginning of "inceldom" as an actual trend, and not just a one-off thing you might experience only once or twice in your life). You have to go way back, arguably pre-Industrial Revolution, for that

I see no indication that nostalgia for the time - either by younger Gen X or older Millenials reminiscing on their youth, or by younger Gen Z/early Alpha exposed to 90's/00's pop culture by their parents - is driven by regret that being an International Man of Mystery is harder now. Everything I see points to (a misguided) belief that things were more optimistic then.

Also, wasn't the 90s the time when cocaine use swapped for heroin use?

My nostalgia comes from the fact that childhood set the bar at things like family, cartoons, playgrounds, and succeeding at educational challenges. Then those things all changed rapidly and I had no framework on what to do and tried filling the void with memberberries and creative writing failures. I want to go on unfocusedly for several paragraphs, but that'd probably just reenforce it.

Related enough to add some commentary.

I can say what I honestly wish I saw more in movies and shows these days:

Competent teams of people coordinating their unique skillsets in interesting ways, where the success or failure of the whole venture depends on everyone fulfilling their role with precision.

That guy is the polyglot, that one there is the martial arts expert, she's got a PhD level understanding of volatile chemicals, and this last dude trains seagulls to steal jewelry from tourists. A rich benefactor is paying us to deliver a donor heart to a hidden village in China to be transplanted into a sick child for unknown reasons.

Ocean's 11 is maybe the ur-example here. "We want to complete an extremely specific set of tasks for the possibility of a singular, massive payoff if everything goes well, and possible ruin if any piece of the plan fails." Maybe Mission Impossible is a better standard example, but the later movies really lean towards "everyone is omnicompetent at whatever talent the plot requires." I still like them, though.

Despite what cynics say, I think the "team of people overcoming massive odds through sheer skill" is a winning trope, and for good reason. I think that's TRULY what makes heist movies appealing.

I also suspect, for example, Star Trek, USED To be about this to a large degree! Everyone on the ship has their specialization and their duties. And as long as they had a competent Kirk, Picard, Janeway, to get everyone to do their job correctly and align their objectives, this was enough to achieve victory against unknown opponents and strange phenomena.

I gather that Modern Trek has discarded much of that framework in favor of more emotional drama and angsty grit.

There was definitely some kind of trend of "swiss army knife" heroes in the 2000's. They spoke every language (or could learn them overnight), they had combat skills, hacking skills, engineering skills, charismatic and witty personalities. Often they were really good at chess. Basically, Mary Sues, with better writing.

Tony Stark being able to build an advanced exosuit in a cave with a bunch of scraps sort of deal. Batman in the comics, for damn sure.

And yes, it has become absurdly obvious that human beings with broad skillsets that are all at least two standard deviations above the average really do not exist. There are grifters who make money presenting themselves as this sort of person (and pay me $100/month I can teach you, too!) but is not anyone out there who can infiltrate the CIA and assassinate a high ranking official then hack the database to erase their own existence, all by their lonesome (or with a handful of supporting cast). Anyone that MIGHT be able to do that probably works for the CIA already.

Humans can specialize very well. But only in like two, maybe three things at most. Scott's review of "Raising a Genius" touched on this. If you're genetically predisposed and trained from near birth at a given talent, you can become world-class at that thing! But the time spent on that training probably precludes being exceptional at much else, for the same reason.

Elon Musk probably can't throw a decent punch. The world's best martial artists are likely piss-poor programmers. Genius-level intellect does not, in fact, guarantee massive financial success. Although it helps. And that's leaving aside the "fooled by randomness" aspect where sometimes, seeming outliers kind of just bungled into their own success.

Nothing wrong with imagining the existence of such people in fiction. I'm a huge fan of the Jason Bourne series myself. But they're probably better categorized as 'modern mythology' than anything else. And this trope is getting WAY less credible in a world that, as you say, becomes more complex to navigate on a yearly, maybe monthly basis.

Watch a kitchen sometime. While The Bear is an extended exercise in stress and heavily recommended, I believe the much-more-feel-good but overly sentimental/dramatic Japanese show Grand Maison Tokyo is also worthwhile as a team competence exercise.

Thomas Jefferson was a botanist, architect, paleontologist, president of the American Philosophical Society, politician and other things I'm surely missing. Benjamin Franklin had a similar resume. An LLM or a better historian than myself could fill in the blanks for some real Renaissance era Renaissance men.

Fast forward to the mid-late 20th century, and we're in an era where scientists can conceivably read every manuscript/major text in their field. By the 90s, the scope narrows a bit so that you could reasonably have read every paper in your subfield, by the 2000s we're talking sub-sub field. Today, if you look at one of the popular genes to study there are literally >100,000 papers published on it, with about 5,000 more coming out per year. The scope has narrowed from comprehensive knowledge about biology -> subfield (genetics, immunology, oncology, etc) -> sub-subfield (autoimmunity, leukemias, etc) -> gene or gene family -> some aspect of a gene family or cell type. Teamwork, communication and interlocking specialties are hugely important in ways that they weren't before. My main paper had over 50 authors and included dozens of different specialties and techniques I have no idea how to do.

Now it's beyond that, it's systems of shoggoths that we can tweak and manipulate, but none of us can truly grasp as a whole - and we can't even really imagine someone who can.

Biology is a shoggoth we can't ever grasp as a whole. Maybe there are limitations to intelligence, and no being is ever going to truly grasp biology in a comprehensive way. But if you want to keep making progress, you either need to build a shoggoth-oracle and have it teach us or you need to enhance our brains somehow a la neuralink. Otherwise, we're just going to keep spinning our wheels pumping out shitty papers that nobody reads or can fit into any kind of coherent picture.

Teamwork, communication and interlocking specialties are hugely important in ways that they weren't before.

Yeah, with this approach we can still make progress in terms of scientific knowledge, but I think we've largely slipped past a point where a single person can keep it all in mind. Maybe that's fine, or maybe it's causing problems or maybe we're missing critical insights. But the discomforting thing is that we're losing the ability to tell. We can see trees, but not the forest. In an ironic way, it's almost a reversion to a more primitive state, albeit at a massively larger scale.

In a hunter gatherer tribe 10,000 years ago, you could rely on knowing what everyone else knew. Nowadays it’s impossible for someone to say science doesn’t know x. There’s too much science. Things are coming to the edge where human understanding is finding it increasingly difficult to penetrate to higher levels of understanding the natural world. Maybe future AI will represent a new information/industrial revolution of sorts and take us to places we can’t go and in a way, it’s already doing that.

Sorry, but I have to smile at the idea of the world of the 90s being smaller. In one way, yes. Modern technology like smartphones and the Internet was not entirely ubiquitous, you could be out of reach of people trying to contact you from work or social reasons, and everyone had not put up every single detail of their real life on various platforms - Facebook was still in its prime, and many of the hot hip sites of those days have long vanished.

But Bond etc. were creations of the 60s, it was just as implausible in 1990 as in 2020.

Nostalgia has locked on to the 90s because a new generation is looking back at the simpler times when they were in their teens and life seemed easier to navigate, they weren't trying to handle adult responsibilities, and pop culture was what they consumed, not today when it is product for Gen Z or Alpha. People are talking about My Chemical Romance and the likes because those are the bands of their youth. I don't think I've ever listened to one of their songs, or if I have, I can't tell you which one, because that was not my era (I was just old enough when punk was kicking off and the New Romantics came along, followed by the rise of the indies, these are the bands of my nostalgia days).

In ten or fifteen years time, someone else will be writing nostalgically about how much simpler the world of 2020-25 was.

One of the inciting observations for this post was the fact that my own teenaged kids seem to lock into 90's nostalgia harder than their own youth. My daughter loves the same emo punk bands that were big when I was her age. My son watches 80's and 90's sports movies on loop.

Although, now that I think of it, that might parallel my brother (born in the 90s) being obsessed with A Christmas Story, a movie from 1983 based on a book from '66 about the Christmas of 1940.

There's a reason I repeatedly called the idea a hypothesis.

Are there even any truly iconic western ips of the 2020s that people will have nostalgia for in a decade? The 2010s had some hits like Frozen, Game of Thrones, maybe pickle rick etc, but honestly I can't name anything memorable recently.

Saltburn, Oppenheimer, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. I don’t know if any of these will become iconic, but then iconic has come to mean milkable corporate crap in recent decades, so we might be through with the age of iconic media. We might be through with the very concept in the era of IPs.

If you look at top 50 (by box office receipts) 2020s movies, and restrict to American movies, Oppenheimer (at #13) is the top entry that isn't a sequel to or a remake of or a movie version of some already-highly-successful narrative IP from an earlier decade ... and then the second-highest entry is Elemental, at #48??? Did I miss a bunch?

We might be through with the very concept in the era of IPs.

I know this isn't a new trend, but I hadn't realized just how bad it's gotten. In the 2010s we've got Zootopia at #38, Bohemian Rhapsody (not counting a song as narrative IP) at #46, The Secret Life of Pets at #50, and that's it, so essentially no better.

But back in the 2000s we see Avatar at #1, the first Pirates of the Caribbean (not counting a theme park ride as narrative IP) at #32 (then up to #3 and #6 in sequels), The Da Vinci Code (based on a successful book, but a 2003 book) at #24, a couple Ice Age movies (sequels to a 2002 movie), 2012 at #27, Up at #29, one of the Twilight sequels (based on a 2005 book), Kung Fu Panda at #34, The Incredibles at #35, Hancock at #36, Ratatouille at #37, The Passion of the Christ at #38, Madagascar at #50 and its sequel at #40, Night at the Museum (based on a 1993 book, but not an already-highly-successful one like Harry Potter) at #46, and The Day After Tomorrow at #50.

Now, note that I didn't say I was looking for good, just successful and original. I can't say I'm proud of the culture that gave us Twilight, Dan Brown, 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, or even Dances With Smurfs. But at least it was a noticeable fraction (looks like around 1/4) of a culture! The idea of original culture was clearly on its way out, even then, though - the originality fraction for the 1990s is around 2/3, way more than I want to list out in a comment, and that's despite not including a swath of embarrassing entries like the 2000s did.

Clearly the peak of popular original culture was the late 90s (I'm going to say 1999 - The Matrix was right about that being "the peak of your civilization"), and although it's a priori suspicious that @Iconochasm and I identify this peak as being when we were in high school, it's a fact supported by data, not just nostalgia. Suck it, kids these days.

Avatar: Way of the Billies

What about K-Pop Demon Hunters earlier this year? Seemed to have a lot more staying power or cultural penetration than most things recently.

Did it? I'm only immersed in the Western infosphere while online, but I'm online a lot of the time, and I've barely even seen any memes of it.

It is certainly the hottest movie among elementary schoolers. Not sure about a wider cultural impact.

Only technically western. If you're allowing that you might as well allow Squid Game.

There was that audience participation remake of The Andromeda Strain...

No, I know exactly what he’s talking about with the world of the 90’s feeling smaller. I grew up with that too, although changes were happening rapidly at the time as well. I can remember when we’d advanced beyond the ARPANET, which the Internet was still a handful of sites on a 56k dial up modem that disconnects every 6 hours and nobody could call your home rotary telephone while you were on it. I can remember a peer telling me when my friends and I started first becoming interested in girls, “… women and malls go together like warez and a T3 connection, my nigga…” AskJeeves, Geocities, an endlessly buffering embedded RealPlayer video that takes 1 hour to play a 2 minute clip. Number Munchers in school and Descent/Myst DOS/PC games at home. If you wanted the answer to a question and you couldn’t find it, you had to consult your home encyclopedia (which a lot of us had) or go to the library. There was no looking it up on Wikipedia. Life was still mostly lived outside though. I remember building a clubhouse with my sibling and father, endless adventures and being outside hanging with friends all over the place.

Goldeneye was the first Bond movie I ever saw and I still regard it as the best one. It’s the only Bond movie where I regard the villain to have won. Alec Trevelyan was the real hero if you paid attention to his story in the movie.

Not everyone that looks back to the past has nostalgia on the mind. There are things that are objectively better about 2025 than 1995, but childhood is not one of them.

The Internet has undergone a massive shift since then that I'd compare to a rapidly growing town: back then we didn't have quite as much variety, but you could mostly trust someone's personal page on a .edu domain and expose ports on your machine like leaving your front door unlocked. These days it feels very urban and while that has some advantages (variety of content), some really miss the small town vibe and we now all have to lock our doors, encrypt everything, and our kids keep getting distracted by the blinding lights of the casinos and seedy joints that have moved in.

I can understand wanting to have the Internet equivalent of a white picket fence in the 'burbs.

Alec could have been a hero, but in the end as Bond said, his plan was to cause a global financial crisis to steal some cash. "Nothing more than a common thief" if I recall the line correctly.

Trevelyan had a vendetta against the British because they betrayed his parents and left them to die. They later recruited him to be an agent for MI6 and figured he wouldn’t have remembered what they did because he was a young kid. He hid is true motivations until he became a fully trained spy and turned on the British just as they did to him.

That was the whole point of the story. It was a story about vengeance. I don’t blame him one bit. If my adoptive country did that to my family and friends I’d conceal my true intentions as well, and turn on and fight to dismantle and destroy them with everything I’d learned and mastered. The “bank robber” element was an insignificant sidebar to the main plot point.

At the end of the day, Alec was a traitor. He smiled at his colleagues every day while secretly he plotted to undermine everything they were working to protect. I find it hard to think of such a man as a hero.

Furthermore, the story is at the very least more complex than he tells it. What responsibility did the British owe to the Cossacks? They had fought for the enemy (Nazi Germany) against an ally. Giving them to Stalin was inglorious in a perfect world, sure, but it’s silly to treat it as a betrayal.

If I were ever in such a position I’d hope I would betray my country before I would my family and friends. Man’s a hero in my book.

If your family and friends were allied with Nazi Germany, you really should betray them and work for your country instead.

If my family and friends were allied with Nazis I’m pretty sure I had other problems somewhere along the road.

If you ever felt like contributing an example to the nostalgia genre (80s Ireland?) I’d love to read it.

80s Ireland was a land of rain and misery - high unemployment rate, crashed economy, expectation that pretty much as soon as you hit 18 you will emigrate because there's damn-all at home for you.

In 1987 a government minister defended the emigration expectation (and lack of action by the government) by telling us "We can't all expect to live on a small island". Population back then was around 3.5 million. Population today is around 5.5 million.

The 90s were the Celtic Tiger and the good times would never stop, except it was a bubble and the 2008 global crisis hit us hard once again. Austerity budgets and back to the emigration trail.

Today we're being told that the economy is going great (sounds familiar?) but yet people feel that they have less money in their pockets, prices are going up, and there isn't enough damn housing (sounds familiar?)

Hmm, yes, I see. Although arguably the emigration was responsible for the Celtic Tiger and Ireland’s prosperity generally. When America etc. were looking to see how to invest in Europe, having a lot of Irish-Americans and the general diaspora in high places saying it should be Ireland was probably very important.

The world has gotten in one part more complex but in another smaller. The Internet has homogenized the world turning foreign places into America lite.

Diversity may not be our strength but it added a richness (ie you could see how different people live). That is now lacking.

I think this changing idea of the "size of the world" may, at least in certain aspects, purely be a matter of the self-understanding of the same Western culture you hail from and are speaking to. For a specific example, in 1990, Japanese was more important than it is today: the bubble had not popped yet, the population was peaking, a big fraction of the dominant tech companies were Japanese, people's English was worse and they had no Google Translate to pull out in an emergency, and American pundits were actively and credibly nursing fears of a future of complete Japanese dominance. Now Japan is where the Chinese fly to do their low-cost duty-free shopping and Westerners make off-grid LARP videos where they buy some abandoned house in the mountains and farm cucumbers. Yet, a modern James Bond would be considered more cringe for not knowing Japanese than a 1990 James Bond was.

It doesn't affect the substance of the argument you are making, but James Bond did speak Japanese.

James Bond read Oriental Studies at Cambridge, which requires you to study two Middle Eastern or Asian languages to fluency, and given his known interest in Asian culture and lack of interest in Middle Eastern culture, I suspect Japanese was one of them. On-screen translation convention means we can't be sure, but there are scenes in You Only Live Twice which only make sense if Bond is speaking Japanese. This isn't in Fleming, but it's been in the films consistently since long before Japan was a threat to take over the world in the 1980's.

Bond actually adventured and lived in Japan in the novels.

Interesting - I wondered where EON got the idea that he was an Oriental Studies major from.

I think this changing idea of the "size of the world" may, at least in certain aspects, purely be a matter of the self-understanding of the same Western culture you hail from and are speaking to.

Absolutely. Up until the 90's "the world" meant Europe and maybe Japan. Everything else was a bit player. Now, China is a pole, and I don't think the West has any kind of traditional method of grappling with how different their culture is, much less offering the opportunity for deep understanding or even passing.

Europe has become more samey, but there's no Chinese/Indian equivalent of The Grand Tour to develop a cadre of people who grok those cultures.

Does anyone remember the flurry of books in the 90’s about the Japanese economic miracle? I remember all the hoopla in books like The Emerging Japanese Superstate that they were going to overtake the US economy. Then the bubble popped. I remember my father explaining to me as a kid how the gardens of the imperial palace were valued more than the entire state of California. Yeah. That’s a bubble.

Well, if it was written before the effects of the plaza accords kneecapped japan's economy, it's understandable.

It was certainly a common cultural trope at the time. TV Tropes has a better list than I could come up with offhand, but it's IMO most interesting as an uncommented-on undercurrent like in movies Back to the Future II, Die Hard, or Alien, but there are some works of literature that comment on it on more directly: Crichton's Rising Sun, Stephenson's Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.

I think it's an interesting example of how the zeitgeist can be wrong: Japan remains a world power, but it's projected continued ascent was oversold.

I had a hilarious conversation once of my relatives once where we were brought up movies as an example of American arrogance to the rest of the world. Two of the movies we came up with were Die Hard and Independence Day. If you try to look at them with our inborn cultural blinders off but as someone who’s a complete new initiate to our way of life, they’re actually incredibly chauvinistic movies when you think about it.

Not just chauvinistic, solipsistic.

The old joke is that the British overconfidence is thinking everyone secretly wants to be British, whereas American overconfidence is thinking everyone secretly already is American.

Yet, a modern James Bond would be considered more cringe for not knowing Japanese than a 1990 James Bond was.

Are we all forgetting You Only Live Twice? Probably would be excoriated for yellowface amongst many other crimes as well as being generally cringe, but the 60s also were interested in Japan as a modern, post-war nation taking a role on the global stage. (The novel seems to be a little more complex in its exploration of Bond's character than the movie, which naturally was more oriented towards being in sync with the suave spy theme of the Bond movies).

I enjoyed your comment and generally agree. However, just regarding African languages - it feels to me like the wider world has never been less interested in African cultures than it is now. At least for a while Kwanzaa had some cultural significance. But consider: when was the last time a cultural trend happening in Africa was discussed on this forum? Has it ever happened? Especially apart from white South Africa.

For having such a bulk of population, Africa has nearly literally zero cultural force. I do often wonder what kind of stuff they're getting up to down there.

But consider: when was the last time a cultural trend happening in Africa was discussed on this forum?

Tangential to Black Panther and the genre of Afro-futurism? But I agree, not much about cultural trends. Though now and again musical trends seem to come and go - see world music, Paul Simon collaborating with Ladysmith Black Mombazo, Mory Kanté having a late 80s hit, Youssou N'Dour, Ali Farka Touré, Amadou and Mariam, various others.

Tangential to Black Panther and the genre of Afro-futurism?

No more African than Kwanzaa - Marvel is a US company targetting an audience of Black Americans and their simps. The picture of "Africa" in Black Panther is of a culturally homogenous blob whose spiritual capital is South Central Los Angeles.

The picture of "Africa" in Black Panther is of a culturally homogenous blob whose spiritual capital is South Central Los Angeles.

Africa in Black Panther is incredibly heterogeneous, with one super-advanced country so isolationist that its more numerous and much more impoverished neighbors are barely aware it exists.

The homogeneity isn't between Wakanda and the rest of Africa, it's between Wakanda and the woke USA. When Wakanda decides to break its isolation and try to uplift the suffering black people of the world, where does "the first Wakandan International Outreach Center" get built? South Sudan? ($700/year PPP-per-capita GDP, lowest in the world, then mid-civil-war with hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees) The DRC? ($1,700/y, infamously one of history's most brutally victimized colonies, a decade or so out from an even larger war, and their fictional neighbor) Rwanda? ($4,000/y, another neighbor, a couple decades out from one of history's most shocking genocides) I could keep going, but naah: it's Oakland. African-American median household income $60,000 (really hard to compare to mean per-capita GDP, but divide by ~4 and you're still way ahead), under 100 African-American homicide victims per year.

There's a strained diegetic reason for this, but the straightforward extradiegetic reason is pretty much as you say: Africans in Africa aren't salient to scriptwriters the way African-Americans in California are.

We don't disagree on substance here - my spin would be that

  • There is no meaningful heterogeneity between film-Wakanda and film-rest of Africa because we don't see Africa outside Wakanda onscreen - it is represented memetically by scenes of Black America.
  • Wakanda is a collection of bad tropes of "darkest Africa" with a veneer of technological civilisation that the locals explicitly didn't build the hard way - the way the story is told implies that niggas who act like niggas could and did build technological civilisation if they had access to vibranium (memetically, if YT hadn't stolen Africa's natural resources). So culturally it is intended to be part of blob-Africa.

Wakanda's decision to start their outreach in the US was so egregiously bad it broke my suspension of disbelief. Even if you accept the assumptions of the universe, it isn't plausible.

For having such a bulk of population, Africa has nearly literally zero cultural force.

Afrobeats did have a moment with artists like Burna Boy being successful and working with members of the diaspora in Britain. From South Africa Tyla is probably the most prominent artist that's making waves in the US?

Their momentum seems to be stymied in the US though which might explain why it doesn't feel like it has any impact. In both cases their promotional runs seem to have poisoned the well a bit either because they were perceived as lecturing American blacks or not responding correctly to awkward questions - the whole colored category in SA apparently sounds awkward to AA ears and Tyla really failed to give a soothing answer, or any answer at all. Now every time she comes up in the hip hop media so does this issue and they're not kind. Probably doesn't help build up a head of steam.

In her defense, it's kind of a no-win. The answer that I see is that "colored" is a different thing from black and saying that might be even worse than appearing uppity.

As if to further drive home your point, Kwanzaa—the one traditional African cultural celebration Americans used to know about—isn’t even African. It was invented by a black American radical activist in 1966 as a replacement for Christmas.

If anything i feel like its the opposite. The world is smaller and much more comprehensible. Everything is homogenising and genuine cultural differences are being sanded down to the extent that people don't really understand that they exist at all. People speak about diversity more than ever but understand it and accept it less than ever. A single small country used to contain more diversity than a continent does today.

The romance of the unknown and the unexplored is disappearing and to the extent that things don't work it pisses people off more because they assume maliciousness when they feel like they understand the causes of the dysfunction.

Why were things better in the 90s/00s? Because things felt like, globally, that they were going in the right direction and all boats were rising. Communism had largely collapsed, there was rapid economic growth (including in the remaining "communist" countries), there was "peace" (at the very least no threat of global war) and a form of genuine global cultural idealism. All this then collapsed in various stages. People's impression of how things are is at least as influenced by where they perceive things to be heading as by where they currently are. People are perceiving a downward trajectory(or it's first and second order derivatives), even in America.

Because things felt like, globally, that they were going in the right direction and all boats were rising.

That is it. Collapse of the Berlin Wall, now the Cold War was over and there was no threat of nuclear war. Capitalism had won and every country would pursue money-making, and to do that trade needs open markets and political stability and no wars. People were doing better as we came out of the 80s recession. There was a sense of optimism. Colour blindness was in, idpol wasn't yet a thing. Gay rights were winning. We had environmental problems, but they were solvable (see the ozone layer and doing away with CFCs), e.g. adopt recycling and do away with pollution, not the intractable problem of climate change. Things were getting better and would always get better because now we were smart, educated, peaceful, and Science and Progress would bring us into the ever more bountiful future hand-in-hand.

It was the End of History and the liberal project had won.

Ehhhhhh. I am a digital nomad, from the US and have spent more than half of the past 3 years in either (non-anglophone) Europe or Asia, and really all you need to know today is English.

I speak pretty good German and Spanish, my French and Japanese are ok enough for tourist purposes. Every educated person in Germany and Austria speaks perfect English, the only use I get out of my German is speaking to Turks in Germany and Hungarians/Eastern Europeans, Romanians and Turks in Austria. Spanish is more useful in Spain and probably requisite in central/South America (barring Brazil and a few outliers) but admittedly I haven’t been there so I don’t know. In France you are expected to speak French and English ability is associated with upper classes- so people will be embarrassed if you expect them to speak English, but in response to your point being that French is necessary for important badassery, in my experience anyone important enough in France and broader Europe already speaks English.

In Asia it’s even less required to speak a local language. In most of Asia they will be surprised if you do. Japanese don’t go to Korea and speak Korean, or Japanese, they speak English. Koreans don’t go to Japan and speak Japanese or Korean they speak English. And so on and so forth.

As an aside, a little while ago I was thinking, oh it would be so useful to have a watch that displayed live translations of whatever audio was in my environment or people I was speaking to in English. Then I saw a piece in I think the WSJ saying the new AirPods can translate/interpret people speaking to you in foreign languages. I thought that was cool and useful though I worry most people you speak with will still think you’re being rude for speaking to them with headphones in, plus it won’t talk to them in their language so I think the watch visual interface solution would be better. I also worry about the barrier to integration of cultures being too low. Now every immigrant with $120 (or whatever AirPods cost) can get translation of whatever language they want, giving them an asymmetric advantage over people who aren’t using the technology.

Ehhhhhh. I am a digital nomad, from the US and have spent more than half of the past 3 years in either (non-anglophone) Europe or Asia, and really all you need to know today is English.

How would you say you approach interactions in these cultures? Is it "I am clearly an outsider, but we both know enough English to complete this retail transaction?" Are there any of these cultures where you feel like you understand them enough to finesse? To not pull a three fingers incident?

The point of the languages example is as an expression of mastery.

Hahaha, oh no, I’m nowhere near three fingers level mastery at Japanese or French culture, I probably couldn’t even pass as a New Yorker or a Southerner, as a midwesterner myself. I mean, mastery of a culture to the degree that you avoid the three fingers incident in Inglorious Basterds is nearly impossible, which is the biggest takeaway of that scene for me anyway

Koreans don’t go to Japan and speak Japanese or Korean they speak English.

Agree on the other points but this one actually isn't true. When I was in Japan I actually saw a lot of Korean tourists speaking in Japanese. And there are a surprising number of google reviews by Koreans accusing the local workers of discriminating because they pretend not to understand because of the Korean accent.

I also knew a Korean person who told me that learning Japanese is easy due to the fact that the grammar is quite similar, as well as a large amount of chinese-derived vocabulary(Kango/Hanjaeo). So of any two Asian languages, Japanese and Korean are the most easiest to learn the other. I assume it's like learning French/German, where they are mutually unintelligible, but due to their similarities, there are a ton of people who can speak both.

When briefly in Japan I was surprised how much Japanese wife Chinese wife was able to decipher.

I believe there's a typo here unless you have two wives.

I think his Japanese Wife is the polygamist based on this. Just since she has a Chinese wife doesn't mean @aquota does.

concerning.

When your post started with 'humanity peaked in the 90s', I didn't think the reason was going to be that James Bond would need to learn too many languages these days, quite the curveball.

Well to his point, who’s the comparable culture icon of today? John Cena?

Ironman/Robert Downey Jr. with comparable real life cultural icon being that of Elon Musk. When I think about it, modifying Bruce Wayne/Batman fits more than ever with decadent society turning into Gotham City real fast.

I will not be the first to use this comparison, but the startup tech-savvy entrepreneur is the modern version of pirate/conquistador/adventurer. They are highly individualistic people who carve their own space in hostile environment already occupied by corporate and state behemoths, often winning with boldness and intelligence racking huge treasures, fame and armies of women from around the world, who want to have babies with them.

Give them buff physique from gym, interest in MMA and Brazilian jiujutsu and some gun kata skills they use when cartel goons break into their underground bunker/office next to private power plant in Panama in order to kidnap them to steal some cryptocurrency. You have a pretty compelling hero right there. Maybe even more so than some naive secret service government spook which is so uncool today. You can even spice it up by making him traditional Catholic with some templar ethos or something.

John Wick? Maybe Dom from Fast and the Furious (which existed in the 90s but genere swapped to action hero much later)?

Batman

Batman existed when I was growing up.

More likely, the ethos of John Wick and Batman is more relevant than ever. Revenge as its own form of justice, outside the law, for past grievances.

There's some interesting anecdotes I remember hearing about how Batman is more popular in first world countries where as in poorer places they prefer Superman.

Bond existed well before the 90s.

Bond was still a popular icon in the 90’s.

I favour the 'giant messy bureaucracies blocking you from doing everything' angle rather than the omni-competence angle. Today James Bond would spend half an hour of the film filling out his License to Kill, going through compulsory workplace seminars about bullying and sexism, then trying to get legal clearance so he doesn't then get prosecuted for doing his duty (probably gets prosecuted anyway).

Most of us aren't James Bond. But we do have to sit through this nonsense.

The real-life version of James Bond would be a bunch of British bureaucrats sitting in meetings for months, punting a decision down the road until a disaster strikes and they are forced to announce that the perpetrator was on their radar the whole time. Meanwhile James Bond becomes a depressed alcoholic doing a desk job and waiting for retirement. High-agency people working in a gay and retarded bureaucracy ruins suspension of disbelief. They either find a new job, or stop being high-agency.

The British once understand the art form of political and economic bureaucracy. Then the wrecking ball of stupidity came in with Thatcher and the Friedmanites and the British lost touch with that side of their historic traditions. Them and the Chinese were masters of the concept at one point. I’ll always be satisfied when the Keynesians smacked him around a bit on their turf. His neoliberal policies have done so much damage to this country.

See also: Shin Godzilla.

Shin Godzilla is one of my favorite movies of the last decade and probably the best thing Anno made that isn't the rocket launch sequence from Honnêamise. It irritates me immensely because Shin KR and Shin Ultraman were nowhere near as good and I am a fan of both those properties.

The real-life version of James Bond would be The Sandbaggers, where they do sit in meetings a lot but it's also the greatest spy show ever made and one of the best media recommendations I got from this forum.

I just started watching this. The writing is amazing. Why can't we make shows like this any more? This reminds me of the decline in the aesthetics of architecture and makes me sad.

The end result is a man of spectacular and all-consuming agency. He is unparalleled in his ability to navigate and manipulate the world around him and the reason for that is his knowledge and experience. ... Between 1990 and 2015, the plausibility of that man failed.

It's actually objectively easier than ever to be a badass motherfucker. The problem is the liberal propaganda and brainwashing against the traditional idea of masculinity has made the entire idea a taboo. The idea of a dominant high agency masculine womanizer is no longer something that can be glorified in the current culture.

The world of 2025 is bigger. Now he needs to also speak Chinese, Japanese, 8 Indian tongues, Korean, Arabic, Farsi and a couple African languages. Where is he going to learn all of those? Boarding school?

Nah, there's no reason to learn anything except English, Chinese, and maaaaybe French. You'll have access to 99% of all of the economic growth on the planet and also be able to travel and communicate without barriers anywhere and talk to literally everyone important.

I learned Japanese but what's even the point when Japan has had 30 years of negative gdp growth and every hotel and restaurant in the entire damn country bends over backwards to have English and Chinese speaking staff.

And no, nobody is going to learn Indian or African since the people there don't even use it for business when pajeet down the street speaks a totally different dialect.

The closest we have to a man who can weave between English and Mandarin is John fucking Cena.

The next generation of Chinese-American action heroes (sponsored by the Communist party) is right around the corner.

90% great comment.

Don’t throw in slurs for emphasis.

Three day ban.

It's actually objectively easier than ever to be a badass motherfucker.

Provided you're willing and able to live a criminal lifestyle, and accept your retirement plan is an unlamented death or a prison.

What end could James Bond expect?

(Pretty funny that the one time we have a consistent canon they just kill him off)

He retires/is kicked upstairs, and the new agent takes on the code name "James Bond" and number 007. (That seems to be how they explain change of actors in the films and why he is always late 30s to mid 40s, and why he's not immediately recognised on sight by enemy organisations).

They take over the number, but not the name. In No Time to Die Bond (now retired, but called back for one last mission) and 007 are different characters.

In so far as the filmmakers bother to maintain long-term continuity, Bond from Dr No to No Time to Die is a single character played by multiple actors, who never retires before being de-canonised. Casino Royale is a reboot, with Craig's Bond being a different character in a different continuity, who has a career of a realistic length before retiring and being replaced as 007. There is no suggestion that either Bond was a pseudonym, although it wouldn't be surprising given the nature of spycraft.

and the new agent takes on the code name "James Bond"

Yeah giving a bunch of your spies the exact same name over the course of decades is a great way to maintain secrecy. They should just go one better and name him British Spy. He can just go around introducing himself as "Spy, British Spy" while performing all the patented British Spy Mannerisms they carefully instruct every one of these guys to indulge in as publicly as possible.

It's all fantasy, and trying to fill in the holes in continuity is more of a game than anything. Someone as notorious as "James Bond" is going to be found out, so the idea of him doing undercover work just doesn't fly from the start.

Yeah it's all in good fun, half of all fandom consists of making up rationalizations for stuff like this.

See, they also give the same training and the same name to every technician and accountant.

That's not really how "they explain it." In fact they don't explain it. Bond remains Bond throughout the series. His one wife (Traci) was seen married and murdered in the one Lazenby film, then in the subsequent film Connery is out for vengeance for her murder. Later, in a different film, Roger Moore lays flowers on Traci's grave. And then even later in License to Kill Dalton is said to have been "married once, but that was a long time ago" (notably this is said by Felix Leiter, played by an actor who played the same character for both Moore and Dalton, though only in Dalton's second film--in his first, Leiter was played by someone else.) There's no explanation. For stupid reasons they played around with the double oh seven moniker in the most recent (and final) Bond film, but that's another issue.

Is that actually the explanation or is that (the oldest) fanon?

Obviously 007 is a codename but "James Bond" being a codename (is "Felix Leiter" also a codename? Do all Bonds and Leiters end up as friends?) doesn't seem to have ever been canon AFAIK. The Craig Bond films certainly reject it.

It just seems like canon just doesn't matter that much to Bond. New actors allow soft reboots and that's that. Getting tangled up in the history is how you get a mess like Spectre or the need to give a definitive ending in No Time to Die. I'm not sure that form of modernization is actually better. That's how you eventually end up with MCU kudzu-canon.

Presumably he has a fatal heart attack while attempting to bring one last female Russian/SPECTRE/Chinese/whatever agent to his own side.

That's how he'd want to go out, certainly.

The idea of a dominant high agency masculine womanizer is no longer something that can be glorified in the current culture.

In what sense? You can probably rack up casual sex numbers that'd be impossible to prior generations but most of it going nowhere (and you're not even going to be whelping bastards like they used to due to the pill and abortion) and being on easy, unprotected targets. Most careers/high-achievement lifestyles are gonna actively be blocking you, as well.

I only put that because OP mentioned James Bond but that part is optional

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