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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.
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?
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.
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