“Oh in the ‘10s the culture’s courtship practices totally collapse, but decent autistic queer ones actually develop, and then in the '20s you turn queer and out to have been autistic all along” actually a pretty good synecdoche of my cultural whiplash lately
people like anita sarkesan, 4chan and other members of the gamer gate movement refuse, to even consider the reality. there is biblical evidence for video games. these people don’t want to believe that basic facts, adam and eve played the xbox which has been proven scientifically and is the word of god, plain and simple. denying video games = denying christ.
3rd century ecclesiastical schism over whether the Xbox came with Uno
God, I just realized that Anita Sarkeesian has totally fallen out of relevance
“gen z is so loud and rude and disrespectful!” good. they might actually accomplish something.
– Gen Z
Seriously, from over-drawing lessons from the 60s – and specifically, the 90s’ reinterpretation of the 60s to flatter and intellectualize the Boomers fully coming into their own as heirs to the country, and the lessons learned under later periods built on that 90s understanding – there’s this widespread youth sense that “if I’m not getting my way, it’s because I haven’t been enough of a brat about it!”
But that understanding could only bear so much weight, the 2010s was a festival of putting too much on it, and now it’s fallen through. And the rest of society has realized it doesn’t need to placate those brats, or win an argument against them, just stop taking them seriously and let it wither on the vine. You already saw it with “defund the police”!
And reimplement the pre-60s – pre-90s, really – understanding of things, which is, “you act in a way acceptable to the rest of society, and in particular your seniors running the established order, or the hammer comes down”
I suspect you could probably draw a line between those posts complaining that what’s being marketed as 1990s nostalgia is really just mislabelled 1980s nostalgia, and those posts remarking that it’s become okay to make fun of the 1950s now because the principal object of reactionary nostalgia is no longer an alternate 1950s with no civil rights movement, but an alternate 1980s with no AIDS crisis.
I think it’s more that the “lost golden age” has been updated from The 50s to The 90s.
Man all the rosebushes – which must have been messes under the previous methhead couple owners’ tenure and then on divorce trimmed back for sale by her dad to these thick stumps that gave off like 3 man-high nightmare canes a year – have finally been developed to the point where they split their spring growth into a candelabra of color that keeps going a while if you deadhead them. Good stuff!
Must be weird to be the guy going hard through my archives and like two days ago was the harrowing cultural crisis of the mid-2010s and now I’m just going on about my yard and how everything is awesome
I recall @kontextmaschine getting into it a while back with Anon over “you keep saying that Woke is gonna roll back but you don’t give examples”, and it occurs to me that the recent Target Pride thing is exactly an example of how it’s gonna go. Company brings out a Liggibettequeue-theme thing, Yay We Love Queers, and then Oh No There’s Complaints And Protests (which there’s precious little public evidence of, but, y'know, protests) and where in previous times the company would’ve kept going now they have Safety Concerns and the whole thing gets shoved to the back of the store and deleted from the website and never spoken of again.
And I just read a story about some kids putting on a play where Robin Hood is actually Maid Marian, and they had to do it in a garage because the school nixed the idea, and the interesting thing to me was that the school shut it down not after lengthy and vitriolic demonstration from angry adults threatening violence but after a couple parents phoned the school and complained. And sure, you can interpret that as “oh, the Right Wing is Ascendant and people don’t want to buck them”, but as late as 2020 I would have expected at least a little pushback from the school authorities, and from the language in the story it was less “someone has made credible threats” and more “we don’t want a bunch of people showing up and making a scene because we consider avoiding scenes more important than supporting queer stuff.”
“Somehow rebounding into a cockeyed reaffirmation of gender roles via rejecting 90s Strong Female Characters” is the kinda bullshit way these things do tend to resolve.
The media is still grappling with what Jezebel’s creators helped unleash, for good and ill. The era opened opportunities for journalists and creative people who, by instinct or practice, could blend their identities with the stories they told. The new generation of millennial writers at the Gawker sites, BuzzFeed, Vice and other digital projects challenged stuffy, insular and occasionally deceitful institutions that deserved challenging, but it also lacked, in retrospect, a sense of the value of having trusted institutions at all.
And those of us who came up in the internet media may have missed the biggest story of all. We took it for granted that this was a progressive medium, populated by young people who loved Barack Obama and culminating in some way in his election in 2008. We didn’t expect the true apogee of the new media to come with the election of Donald Trump eight years later.
