1999 - ROSS BENES

Second book I’ve read on the 90’s in the last 6 months. I think there are a few reasons for this renewed popular and scholarly interest in the time period in the last few years. First, it’s roughly 30 years in the past, which makes it a prime target for a nostalgic revival. Folks who are at the center of their professional lives remember the 90's as their childhood or early teen/young adult years, which is always a period of time that will hold interest. One need look no further than the amount of 60’s revival stuff that was going on the 90’s. Also, the 90’s were something of the last “real” decade. You could make a case that Y2K/early 00’s culture exists but beyond that the difference between decades is less about the style and more about the technology. So, while it is true that there are major technological differences between the 70’s and the 80’s, what we actually remember when we think about the 70’s vs. the 80’s has to do with how people dressed and what movies were popular and major trends in music, etc. If one were doing this same exercise using 2005, 2015 and 2025, I think you’d find that trends remained fairly stagnant, there isn’t really a 2015 “look” that would seem dated in 2025, you would just note how the technological trends visible in 2005 have gotten worse. Post 1990’s, at least in the US, we’re not looking at “change” so much as decline. That all being said, this book does a good job identifying some of these trends in their nascent stage. The book ID’s a number of events and trends from 1999 and shows how they represent an earlier form of something we’re dealing with now. Beanie Babies become bitcoin, the storytelling techniques of WWF become politics, porn spearheads all sorts of trends in internet culture. I particularly liked the way he discussed ICP and how the group is able to cultivate such an extreme fan-base and how these strategies were adopted by others. He doesn’t use the phrase but he is describing something I’ve called elsewhere on this site, vice-signalling. The opposite of virtue-signalling, vice-signalling is when you purposefully and in-full-view do something that you know the majority will find objectionable in order to broadcast both your disdain for mainstream values and to show your membership in some subgroup that has different values. ICP fans are famous for this, they revel in being seen as “outcasts,” “freaks” and “evil clowns” (it probably deserves its own essay but man, does Amerika have an insatiable lust for evil clowns). I liked this book much more than the Klosterman one, since that one is more focused on how the 90’s felt different than how it's being remembered. This book is finding trends that started in 1999 and showing where they are now. I appreciated how much the author talked about larger, structural, economic issues like deregulation on telecoms and writers’ strikes and how these played into the trends of the decades. Too often culture writers make it seem like culture and trends emerge fully formed. The classic base/superstructure misunderstanding. However, I feel that this books, and basically all media that remembers the 1990's, downplays the “end of the cold war” aspect. Amerika was oriented towards destroying communism from the end of WWII until 1991. It fought what we call the cold war but to people across the world (in, say, Vietnam or Indonesia or Angola or Cuba or Peru or Korea or really anywhere outside of the “first world”) this was really WWIII. But, we win, the war is over and there is a brief lull before 9/11 reauthorizes us to get the war machine rolling again. The 90’s, and especially the late 90’s were this bizarre aberration. I saw The Matrix in theaters in 1999 (I was 11) and when agent Smith tells Neo that the Matrix is based on the late 90’s since that was the peak of human civilization, people in the movie theater literally laughed out loud, but maybe he was on to something, at least for America. The empire was at its peak. We’d won the war, there was no alternative to liberal democracy, we hadn’t yet entered into the late empire death-spiral wars were still in now, over 20 years later. 1999 was the end as much as the beginning.