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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   24307 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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 PC games at home. 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. I don’t blame him one bit. If my adoptive country did that to my family I’d hide my true intentions as well and turn on and fight 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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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