The internet is against my religion.
Is that Portlandia?
This is what those dementia towns are going to be based on when we old old
when we old old
I’m already there. can I stop working and move to whatever utopia they described?
That’s Glamish.
Even the 90s was already 2 decades into Neoliberalism and median incomes and quality of life were already degraded from the peak.
Yesterday I was watching the film “The End Of Oak Street” and it started as this whole dream suburbia life, about a couple with two children and they lived in a nice good-sized suburban house, and I was thinking “bullshit!”.
Then it turns out the guy had lost his job and was earning money one the side to keep going by doing pizza delivery. “Complete total bullshit!”
Now from the clothes, the cars and so on it didn’t look like present day but some point in the past. At the end of the film we find out the story took place in 1981.
Even then, not so sure pizza delivery was enough to just barelly keep paying for that back then - maybe if the house was already fully paid.
(Mind you, it was pretty realistic in that there wasn’t a single black person living in that suburban “dream”).
Look at the Historical Economic data from the US, most notably Equality, Median (NOT the mean) Incomes, Social Mobility and in the US it all starts falling in the 1970s, a bit later in most of the rest of the West except Eastern Europe (which was under the control of the Soviet Union back then and thus had it’s own problematic trajectory), first slow but accelerating after 2-3 decades with the last 1-2 decades being quite a fast fall.
Quite literally the peak prosperity for the common American was back in the late 60s/early 70s and by the 90s things were already worse than that, though since the fall was accelerating most of the collapse in purchasing power and quality of life for average person happened afterwards.
Pretty much. The explosion of video and computer technology did a lot to mask the shrinking economic benefits for many.
Also the growth in indebtness: the levels of debt in the economy exploded and in fact nowadays even most money creation is done as debt (here is a paper from the Bank Of England on it). Basically as incomes fell, people started replacing it with debt some overall debt in the Economy went up, especially Consumer Debt (i.e. loans taken to buy consumer goods) which is now at historical record levels.
This is the reason behind the 2008 Crash and for why the ultra-low interest rates set by Central Banks in the aftermath of it managed to delay the consequences of all those economic inbalances for another decade even though there was no meaningful restructuring of the Financial and Economic systems.
Economic policy in the last couple of decades has been little more than kick the ball forwards to try and delay the day or reckoning for the chasm between what Neoliberalism promised for the many and what it actually delivered and, well, here we are with all over the World massive bubbles in essentials such as Housing, Fascists getting elected into power and people demonstrating on the streets - welcome to the Find Out stage.
Hear me out… what if we do democracy 2.0 and we actually remove capitalism/religion from the picture entirely? Who’s with me?
I’m down for a little revolution. Just a little snack of uprising and rebuilding as a treat
They closed radio shack cuz they didnt want us building our own open tech. You can’t change my mind
As a kid I remember wishing radio shack was a more general consumers electronics store. As an adult I really wish I had easy access to the stuff they sold, like I’ve had a lot of projects that need a random transistor or whatever.
I was too young to appreciate them for what they were and they went out of business before I could.
If you dig around, you can find value kits with a few of of each major transistor, cap, resistor, diode, LED, and logic IC’s.
Radio Shack didn’t really have the breadth of stock you’d want, you were just hoping you could get by.
Buying a kit every time you need a compoenent, you end up with your own stock super easy.
Yeah, Radio Shack really screwed the pooch by not branching out into the online system earlier.
If they had set it up so that you could order whatever parts you needed online and then have it shipped to your local store and ready for pickup for you, they’d probably be tech Amazon right now.
Same here, rip to the RadioShack.
Also a store for some reason linked to pre-child-predator era Jared Fogle and Subway, they just kind of had the same vibe
We have one open still near me and it’s incredible for hobby electronics, they have basically any small part you could ever want. Dunno how it still exists, but I’m glad it does.
I have one still in my town as well. Sure they charge $3 for a single 555 chip and I can get a pack of 100 of them for $8 online, but if I’m in a bind and need it today, as long as it’s before they close at 6pm I can hit up the RadioShack (they’re phasing out the RadioShack branding but still) and probably get what I need
Speaking as ex rat shacker, components and kits were already trending down as consumer electronics became more difficult or impossible to repair. Then they ultimately folded after incompetent leadership bet the farm on cell phones sales exactly while iPhones were still AT&T/Apple store exclusive.
I was working there during that time and it was awful. No one with any interest in electronics ever came in. Just the thirteenth person of the day asking for an HDMI cable for their phone which like 3 phones supported at the time. Why did everyone want that feature? I’ve never met a person who actually used that setup.
That was me. I remember asking about phone HDMI cables in a RadioShack as a teen.
I wanted to Bluetooth a controller to my phone and plug my phone into my tv and play some emulators.
I never did manage to do either with my phone back then. I can do it now, but I never play games on my phone lol.
Lol I just remember trying to sling the Samsung Instinct, was laggy and pretty awful to use, but the best we had comparable to the “buttery smooth” iphone. Those were tough days.
When frys went too I cried
Blockbuster
Radio Shack
Pizza Hut
AOL
When did we outsource our shared culture to corporate identities as shorthand for those shared experiences? Is this meme secretly causing me to rethink how much of my nostalgia is for consumer behavior driven by corporate marketing, so ubiquitous that everything we’d later remember as common interests and backgrounds was just how we spent our money?
I have to rethink everything for a little bit. Maybe I should sit down.
Dude we got dropped off at the mall to hang out with our friends. The place where 100 different stores were all owned by 7 different companies. The fucking mall.
Same for me. My childhood access to small electrical components was sadly thanks to big corpo. I’m sure the small town I grew up in had a mom ‘n’ pop electronics shop somewhere, but it would’ve been in some strip mall or old building downtown where I wouldn’t hang out as a kid.
When did we outsource our shared culture to corporate identities as shorthand for those shared experiences
Some time during the 80s. I think it was one of Reagan’s first bills
I remember in my childhood in the 90s, like, if you went to a different town, you would get completely different stores.
Now every town has the same stores.
More like 50’s.
@Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world makes a good point—Reagan admin legalized advertising to children. And now children of the 80s and later have nostalgia for corporate products and experiences
What if instead of modern brands, which is bad, we have slightly older brands (same owners though). Isn’t it the best when the brands have different names?
On one hand, my town didn’t have a Blockbuster, but an independent video rental store. I still call it Blockbuster when i talk about it because it being the point across. So sometimes it’s just a short hand.
On the other, you really have a point. Personally, I am trying to be more mindful of decoupling “good times” from consumerism. The last two dates I had with my partner were mostly walking around chatting. I like having people over for board games, or going to the park. All zero or low cost activities that have been collectively pushed put of the “cool zone” by, I would guess, consumerism.
Yeah like idgaf about blockbuster, but i do miss family run local video stores and small chains. I mostly miss landlines tbh
I think we’ve done that since essentially forever. Many businesses are for gathering or socializing. If this were the Middle Ages, we’d hang out at the inn after the work day was done, or maybe talk and drink down by the town well. Its just that in the modern day, businesses are stand-ins for “3rd spaces”, because we’ve societally forgotten that we need those and should take care of that.
Many businesses are for gathering or socializing. If this were the Middle Ages, we’d hang out at the inn after the work day was done, or maybe talk and drink down by the town well.
In many rural communities especially in the Midwest this is the role that the town bar(s) fill. You need something like 50 people living in a given community for one bar to be sustainable, and because of that you get towns with ~250 people that have 3-4 bars but only 2 churches. These small town bars generally know their role and price their food and morning coffee accordingly-making it as affordable as possible so the few customers they have can afford to come back more than once a week
Christmas, Halloween and Valentine’s Day are all entirely commodified, to the point where pretty much everything you think of as being part of Christmas is actually a hundred-year-old corporate psy-op to get you to buy coke and go to Macy’s
It started convincingly in the 60s (tracking on Bowling Alone, a book written in 1999 about the decline of the American community), but isn’t clear-cut on likely reasoning at the about halfway point I’m at, other than older more socially-involved generations dying out.
My take expanding what I’ve learned so far is that appears to be a combination of:
- there are things that are ‘entertaining enough’ at home to discourage former events like going over a friend’s or coworker’s, so general schmoozing is relegated at best to video games online with rare exceptions. The 60s is when television really “took over” the family room, but there was radio and books before it.
- the generation that grouped together to fight the oil barons died out, and did not transmit their union dinners and other community behaviors to their children.
- churches saw significant decline during the social movements of the 60s that has continued since.
So we may be too comfortable at home with new technology to go out, even if we’re not fulfilling all of our social needs (that is, the “epidemic of loneliness” so often brought up). And when nearly all the interactions you have left is “vote with your dollars,” whom you choose to pay becomes the political and social choice that defines who you are.*
* though the fact that a few people own most of the dollars means your vote basically means squat anyway, but that’s getting on to class war, for which social isolation is a fantastic benefit for the ownership class against labor negotiation
Amish 2 with a focus on 90s early internet culture?
AIMish
Spat my beer out. Thank you.
Alcohol abuse!
You guys joke but I would do this in a heart beat
I think a commune based on a less jokey version of this where instead of rejecting all post 90s tech you reject like very specific things, or specific use cases of tech, would be pretty awesome. Like you could have electronics but no internet. Just your own intranet with self maintained message boards, and a library of PDFs/MP3s/Movies and TV. Stuff like that.
I want internet, but only at home on a desktop pc. Get this pocket internet out of here
I agree. I think a pocket device that only has GPS Navigation, MP3 player capabilities, and calling/texting would be perfect. Maybe some basic stuff like a notes, app, alarms, etc too. Stuff that’s actually useful.
Edit: This is actually basically exactly what my own phone is. It’s graphene OS with no google services and that’s what I use it for.
Yes.
I want a Commodore Callback (for the reasons you pointed out.)
But my GrapheneOS phone without Google is most of the way there.
The notes, alarms etc part sounds like PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) to me. My dad used them extensively in the 90s and I would argue that they are the true predecessor to the modern smartphone.
I also remember my dad having a GPS device without a map. You could input waypoints and record a route and that’s it. I searches a bit and it looks like it was Garmin GPS 45 XL (but I might need to confirm that with him - I’m sure he has it somewhere)
There were also early examples of portable mp3 players in the late 90s. I think they were mostly held back by the storage density - the best option was the ultra small HDD (like the first iPod had in 2001). I think a portable CD player was the default back then.
So all the ingredients were there in the late 90s, just not in one device.
The most fun bit of tech history I found on the internet is this mp3 car stereo from 1999, which was running Linux. It had max capacity of 28GB for the music (2 HDDs). I don’t see myself needing much more than that even now. It was quite expensive, so it didn’t sell very well.
I’ve also read that people would drive with a PC in their trunk with some head unit, so they could listen to mp3s it in the car. It would totally be me if I were the same age as now 30 years ago.
yeah i was around back then myself. I remember using a walkman. That’s what portable cd players were called. The issue was that portable power was nowhere near what it is now. Battery tech has truly been revolutionizing and the efficiency gains we’ve made too. If you made a smart phone that was JUST those functions and used modern tech to do it while stripping out all the bloat its battery would last a whole week.
I remember my Sony Ericsson K800i lasting a week or so on a single charge. With modern tech the equivalent would last at least 2 or 3 times that
Yeah we stopped optimizing things. Mostly because now every device uses half its battery power to spy on you.
Remember when you could have internet, but only if you let your computer scream at you for a little bit?
I’ve never made a joke in my life
It’s called “The Matrix”. Based on the 1990’s peak of human civilization “to accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of ‘our’ nature.”
And anything better we rejected according to the machines (well guess they don’t say they tried incremental improvements in the matrix)…looks at the world huh seems accurate, I so thought we were on turning things for better back then, having more inclusive shows (though they were stereotyped it felt more inclusive).
Also yes I know other issues but things were mostly progressing in a positive manner for acceptance. Used to party with such cool people of all types and it was awesome we had fun, people of all types enjoying their time. Maybe the drugs helped but regardless it was Fun!
In the end the aggro of the white wing (sorry right wing) of politics is polluting any acceptance for creating division. Mean they were starting back then but not as much traction it feels like. I just hope we as humans can figure out we’re all humans and more similar than different to get along before we nuke our civilization.
Lan parties with Red alert?
Kirov reporting
What if I told you no one’s stopping you from canceling the internet at your house and living like it’s still the 90’s. Go to the library, get your DVD’s, get a TV antenna, use signal instead of social media. RSS is still supreme.
At this point I’m just listing what I’ve been doing, but God it feels nice
Except that ostricizes you from your community peers. The point of these “communes” is to be able to live with others who share your lifestyle and be able to talk and share.
I do most of these things and am still connected to my community. My “online social” is here, limited as it may be (on purpose), and my real community is in real life, where the internet is kind of irrelevant (or when it does come up, is mostly meme sharing)
It’s hard to get other people off the bad parts of the Internet.
It’s very hard to get businesses to stop exclusively posting stuff on Instagram.
People are brainwashed to use only the 3 corpo sites on the internet now. They’ve completely forgotten how awesome the human internet is.
Oh well. I’ll keep enjoying it while i can and not talking to people who refuse to leave fb and snap.
It’s hard to get other people off the bad parts of the Internet.
Why does it have to be a purity test? Don’t force your own values on other people
Because I want to interact with them, but don’t want to be on Instagram.
It’s not a purity test, I just don’t want 500 different accounts on platforms I have no interest in and don’t trust because they’ve demonstrated their adversarialism.
Idk man, “I saw this Thread (or whatever they’re called) earlier that said “blah blah blah” is far too commoningly overheard. I’m not that old myself, mid 30s, but almost all community notices (wife deals with it) is through Facebook, or some other group messaging system. I don’t think that’s the era they are refering to, they want face to face communication. Like gotta go knock on the neighbors door to tell them there’s some deer coming down the hill.
Aol, all you get is a notification on your computer (when you choose to look at it). Nothing urgent is gonna get noticed in time.
Yeah I haven’t run into any issues with it. I talk to people on signal, I watch shit on Jellyfin I pirate at work and transfer to my server. I borrow video games and books and DVDs from the library. I come on here on my phone from time to time to jerk off to beans
Peers? PEERS!!? How DARE you!
My kids are stopping me
Yeah, I dont want my kid to have friends over and be the weird family that only has dvds and no streaming services. That was like being in the 90s and meeting a family that didnt have a tv.
Kids are stupid. I didnt mind places not having a TV at all as a kid…many grandparents didnt have one.
Even now, our living room has no TV. Obviously none in the bedroom either. Now, my basement gaming room is full of CRTs but yeah no streaming brainrot 😁
Same here, and I love it. Its veeeery rare to find someone who isnt brain dead with scrolling the Tok now, all my IRL friends can’t shut the fuck up about llms and will not put their phones away, so I’d rather just be alone. Hanging around them makes me upset at how corpo brainwashed everyone is. Really sucks they’ve let the technoligarch lobotomize them and refuse to listen to anyone else.
Can you drag your friends on a camping trip? Or even just a walk on a local trail? Basically organize a friend activity that’s not really compatible with scrolling on phones so they might get a break from the dopamine drip?
The thing that sucks today is phones work everywhere. Theres almost nowhere without service now. Unless we hang out in a concrete bunker
Yeah, but I still need my corner Radio Shack…
DVD’s
VHS you heathen
I’m a laserdisc head myself
That’s just bragging.
Basically how most grandparents currently live, minus social media.
Really? Þe grandparents I now are obsessively online and in social media, especially Facebook.
Anecdotes don’t prove anything. The grandparents I know aren’t on social media. Most barely use smartphones.
One was complaining to me about how their bank requires everything to be done through a phone app. They don’t like how they can go into a branch to do anything because the bank teller tells them to do it on the app.
Just because social media addicted a lot of old people doesn’t mean all old people are doom scrolling.
Studies are better, sure. So how about þis:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1319311/us-meta-audience-by-age-and-gender/
Think more of the greatest generation and elder boomers, the people who unironically thought netscape was the best the internet ever had to offer, and rightfully so.
I don’t know anybody who lives like it’s the '90s. My mother has several streaming subscriptions on her smart TV, and shops on Amazon. My friend, who just turned 80, streams music from Twitch. I told him about GrapheneOS recently, and he’s thinking about trying it on one of his Pixels.
You just can’t live like the '90s anymore, of you want to interact with the world at all. Shopping, event announcements & tickets, entertainment, social connections, bill payment, public meetings, it’s all online.
I guess skipping right over the Silent Generation tracks.
I was a teenager in the 90s, so my brain would surely love it, but I am still in the “make it like this yourself now, because that’s what I am doing” camp.
I like having a huge OLED TV and a Jellyfin server running on a PC with several processor cores, TBs of storage, GBs of RAM, and MBs of processor cache. I like that I can GPS navigate, take a video, text my family, or look up any information on earth on a whim thanks to the phone in my pocket.
But I also actively avoid a lot of my technology for much of the day. When I am home, I often don’t have my phone on me and I spend a lot of time working on things outside. It’s not unlike playing in the creek or in the woods in the 90s.
We all know that the key is often moderation with these things. Simple sayings like that often have profound truth behind them, after all. The problem is that some of the richest people and richest corporations on the planet have poured an unfathomable amount of resources into turning our technological advancements into addictive products designed to engage and retain attention.
You can have the same kind of existence, but now you have to intentionally pursue it and put effort into it. You can’t just passively exist in that world like we remember doing.
I’ve been doing similar as I’ve noticed my general happiness on a given day is inversely proportional to my amount of time spent staring at screens that day. So I’ve started filling out my office with bits and bobs for making models and soldering together electronics and I’ve been reading a lot more books and honestly it’s been super amazing for my mental health
We can has buttons on our phones again, removable battery, and 7 day battery life?
That example still comes with built-in Google surveillance software.
You can scrape off the goo with ADB easily enough though
Even if you replace Google Play with a suitable replacement many banking apps don’t work anymore.
Best to have a totally different ecosystem not controlled by a massive American company which specializes in making money from people’s private data.
There’s been reports several banking apps now work with GrapheneOS. I’ve not looked into it myself but it’s what I’ve heard
