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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.
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.
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.
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