I think there's a very real sense in which our culture sort of froze in amber around 9/11. yes some things have changed, but nothing is unrecognizable.
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It's a worthy thesis but I think a lot of it dates to Reagan. That was the introduction of conservatism; the appetite for big transformative change went down a lot. The 60s were a time of assassinations. Those eventually kinda stopped. Crime was very high, that went down too. So let's say the 90s.
jul 5, 2025, 7:10 pm • 1 0 • view
yes, I don't think 9/11 was actually the cause, but the point where hindsight makes the stasis since that point very clear. the 90s marked a deceleration but the recency of the end of the cold war meant that wasn't clear at the time
jul 5, 2025, 7:42 pm • 1 0 • view
Yeah, I think we broadly agree.
jul 5, 2025, 7:48 pm • 1 0 • view
If you guys think that culture became stagnant around 2001 that almost guarantees you turned 30 around that time. It’s not true, you just got old and stopped caring about youth culture. That means you were born around 1970. How many years am I off?
jul 5, 2025, 8:40 pm • 0 0 • view
Also, I resisted the 2001 thesis. So I don't know.
jul 5, 2025, 9:04 pm • 0 0 • view
It's a perspective. I don't agree, but you did get my birth year right. The American Graffiti point is a little harder to answer.
jul 5, 2025, 8:47 pm • 0 0 • view
In all honesty I think the last 10 years have been a little bit better than what came before that.
jul 5, 2025, 8:48 pm • 0 0 • view
no, I was smack in the middle of youth culture from the late 90s through mid 2010s. there have been plenty of changes, but what made back to the future work was a broad-based revolutionary cultural shift from modernity to postmodernity that dwarfs anything that has happened since then
jul 5, 2025, 9:40 pm • 1 0 • view
This is my point, really. That gap is 30 years. So 1985 to 2015, what would there be to say about 1985 from the perspective of 2015? Nobody would understand it. The boomer innocence narrative is irritating, but it's extremely legible. Maybe that's all we're talking about here, I don't know.
jul 5, 2025, 10:21 pm • 0 0 • view