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.

I would legitimately love this.

Hear me out... what if we do democracy 2.0 and we actually remove capitalism/religion from the picture entirely? Who's with me?

It's called "The Matrix". Based on the 1990's peak of human civilization "to accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of 'our' nature."

We can has buttons on our phones again, removable battery, and 7 day battery life?

Lan parties with Red alert?

Can we get 90s cars there too? I can't stand super high vehicles and dangerously bright headlights.

You guys joke but I would do this in a heart beat

Amish 2 with a focus on 90s early internet culture?

AIMish

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.

AIM is social media.

See, what's going on here is that "social media" is a word from normie culture. And if people only use the word in the context of normie culture, then it's only used for normie websites. So people don't see it used for geek media.

But if geek social media can exist, then AIM is social media. And geek social media can exist.

Discord, email, youtube, and piefed are social media too!

The menenites I know use email and phones but keep it pretty work focused/practical.

I think the "beachy" Amish do the same too now days.

So you might just wana be Amish without the god part.

Going back to the 90s not eating animal products would be rough.

I'm not going to volunteer myself, but I like the idea of periodic checkpoints in case we hit a dead end of some kind.

Nah. IRC and icq, screw aol.

"The Conkies", named after Ian Conkie - their founder. They have eschewed any invention that came after the 6th of December 1983. Their pastimes involve playing old Atari video games, and the staples of their diet include toasted sandwiches and Soda Stream drinks

Tangential to this, some cities are starting to have Luddie clubs. NYC, LA, probably SF too. Look into it and start your local. “Summer of Ludd” is a good search term to learn more.

They closed radio shack cuz they didnt want us building our own open tech. You can't change my mind

Amish 2: Analog Boogaloo

Regulate the fuck out of of social medias. Turn them back to what it was in 2009, a way for you to connect with friends and family.

It will make our life much better

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 would do this. Or like first Gen smart phone era, internet was still wild, cell phones were useful and not just sadness machines.

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

can we use bitchat instead of AOL

I'd me fine with more intentional planning for what technology we are forced to engage with to be a community member.

But, there's programming languages from the 2000s and 2010s and type systems from the 2020s that I wouldn't want to go without.