Why the 1990s Were Horrible

The 1990s. Y2K. It wasn’t all that great. You might remember it a certain way, but much about today’s landscape, your own age, and more shape your perspective on the past, as it does for all of us. It’s particularly hard for me to see through this nostalgia shield when looking at the late 1990s, but they were quite horrible at times. Don’t get me wrong - I do love this decade, but I’d like to acknowledge more of the horrible aspects and wipe away some of the nostalgia. I wrote a similar article about the 2000s.

I was born in the mid-1980s. I have fragmented memories of the early 1990s that likely do not fully capture it. So, a lot of this focuses on the middle or end of the decade. I also talk about internet-adjacent topics here more than wider social issues, which existed in spades. This is because these are within my own realm of experience. It’s also because of my audience - people on the small web (neocities, nekoweb, and similar sites) do sometimes romanticize Y2K's web just as much as the 2000s.

Technology is scary...

Many people will try to paint the 1990s, and particular the late 1990s, as a far more optimistic, naïve time in American history. We joke that people back then were unduly excited about the internet and all it promised, and stuck like glue to the idea that technology would somehow make the world better. I won’t deny the accuracy of the naïve part, but only as much as every decade is more naïve than the one that follows it (usually). Optimism, though? Particularly about science and technology? No, can’t agree there.

That aura of technological optimism surrounding your 1990s memories is your own nostalgia. In reality, it was a time filled with paranoia about the future and apocalyptic thinking.

To see this lack of trust in the future that filled the late 1990s, we need only look at the kind of media the era produced. Societies display their greatest hopes and dreams in their fiction, after all. So, what about 1990s media depicting the future? As far as science fiction back then was concerned, there were a few things that could be certain. Amongst them? Aliens exist, but more importantly, never trust science or technology. This seemed to really crystalize with Jurassic Park, both the movie, and the book. It’s a classic, and spawned numerous sequels for a reason, but also leans awfully hard into anti-tech tropes.

Really, a lot of Michael Crichton’s genre work focus on similar themes of “science gone wrong,” and in the 1990s, people were eating it up. I do not blame Crichton; he was merely writing what people already wanted to read, after all. There was a general distrust of science, considering the boom (often of just rumors) surrounding new technologies. Around the same time, the story of Dolly the sheep was making rounds in the media, of course. The prospect of cloning seemed even scarier than the dinosaurs (who might get cloned). No religious person could ignore the spiritual implications of this, too - you even ended up with science fiction-inspired cults like the Raëlians and the tragic Heaven’s Gate incident gaining media attention.

This neatly collided with the panic over Y2K potentially destroying the economy and infrastructure. People giggle about that today, but of course, it was quite real at the time, and whole books were written about how one might “survive” it. If you think the spiritual aspect stopped with some New Age cults, think again - the Christians were also quite paranoid. That was mostly about things like a potential Rapture coinciding with the Millennium, or Bill Clinton declaring martial law first.

This all created an environment where we did love the new technologies like America Online and search engines, but many were frightened by the deeper implications of technological progress. The fear of missing out on new technology (FOMO, as we call it today) influenced most people towards purchasing and using computers, America Online, and similar internet technologies. And we all soon realized we adored them and what they could do.

That didn’t change the fact that, overall, science was scary. Computers themselves were kinda scary too. The decade closed out with The Matrix. This was an intense, meaningful, many-layered film. It struck a chord with some people specifically because it portrayed machines as the bad guys, though. Some folks didn’t see past that aspect, I suppose, having dozed off back when their teachers were explaining what “metaphor” is. Of course, other, earlier movies had robots as antagonists, too, but something about The Matrix made things too close for comfort, it seems. This was intentional - see, again, the metaphor aspect, but it went over many people’s heads.

By the close of the decade, while not willing to admit it, we just weren’t sure how to handle new technology, let alone if it was safe. This manifested with a lot of fear and mistrust that influenced online interactions too…

Who are you talking to (online)?

In the late 1990s, America Online’s chatrooms had grown in popularity. Suddenly, people (in America, mostly) could chat with people they’d never seen before in their lives, quite easily, without leaving their homes. This really was a social innovation from which our society is still reeling, but in a good way. I firmly believe it’s changed society for the better by allowing us to connect in a faceless way. This not only frees us from many existing biases, but, more importantly, has democratized (for lack of a better word) speech worldwide.

Still, initially, it was quite a shock, and frightening to many…

Early on, America Online itself pushed the idea of these online, faceless interactions as wholesome. They even spawned a whole ridiculous rom-com about a couple that meets online - how quirky and romantic! Believe me, I’ve seen said rom-com several times. When I was a child, it was my mom’s favorite movie because Tom Hanks. The movie jokes about the dangers, but portrays it as a safe experience for the adults involved who go through a cute series of misunderstandings, of course. America Online continuously made commercials that hyped up the connectedness aspect of their walled-garden platform with statements about how one needn’t be afraid “because everyone’s just like you.”

People weren’t buying that idea, though they were signing up for America Online in droves for other reasons They quickly began to regard most online interactions (chatrooms, messages, etc) with a degree of suspicion, regardless. If you were talking with someone you knew IRL, it was one thing, but a stranger? Good heavens. The average person didn’t even seem to chat online that much - it seemed too risky. I know I was the only one in my family to (sneak and) do so in the mid-1990s. Even so, it was cautiously. Once more, everyone warned that anyone could be typing back. Anyone. Possibly even the Unabomber at that point. Well, probably not, but you never knew for sure.

Naturally, a general degree of caution is healthy in online interactions, but in the 1990s it wasn’t about caution; it was more a matter of just not noticing that other users were people like you, too. Ironically, America Online was on the right track making those “everyone’s just like you!” commercials, even if nobody took them very seriously. People just weren’t willing to believe that whoever they were talking to online could possibly be a normal, honest person just like them.

This could be summed up in stereotypical statements like “Oh, that friend of yours? She’s probably a creepy old man somewhere.” We got the constant suggestion that any online interaction ought be treated as somehow fake. By default.

Many people around my age knew enough about the internet and how it worked to see through this. Because of that, we did develop online friendships with (some) other people our own age, albeit cautiously. This worked out for many people (like me) but definitely not everyone. If we’d had less-dismissive adults involved, things would’ve gone better for those who did run into the proverbial “creepy man” online. It would’ve been, after all, easier to talk to our parents about the internet if they’d admit it was, in essence, a real space.

We also wouldn’t have hidden so many of our online interactions from them, I think. My family, after a few years of allowing it, began to operate under the assumption that chatrooms were incredibly dangerous places, and forbid me from “talking to people” online. I did it anyways, and it was easy because the adults didn’t understand the technology. Many of my friends reported doing similar things.

In a way, our own technological skill didn’t matter, because it was a mindset. “It’s just the internet. It’s not real life.” That got hammered into us, either way. True, plenty of us saw through it, even at a young age. We did form genuine friendships online, and learned to conduct ourselves safely there. And what can be more important to safety online than realizing online interactions have real consequences?

Even so, the idea of the web as somehow an unreality remained influential throughout the next quarter-century. People ended up repeating it, in online arguments when they’d gone too far and wanted an excuse, or when they wanted to dismiss anything or anyone else online. It primed everyone for the general lack of empathy in online interactions we see even now.

I wanna see the guy with two…

Every kid who logged on in the 1990s deeply wanted to see something strange. Strange, of course, is relative. What’s strange to one of us won’t be strange to all of us. The internet, though, provided it all, and we had plenty of options for seeking out the forbidden, the outré, the odd. And most of us did. Was that a good thing? Did it influence the way our lives developed?

Some people went directly for shocking content of the disturbing sort. Rotten.com, Goatse, and other “shock sites” weren’t exactly age-limited, nor were plenty of other sites, even if they tried to be. It was easy to find something weird, age-inappropriate, or just terrible online if we searched. This is, of course, also true today. It’s simply how the internet works, and will never change. Society never expected or adjusted to this (entirely, yet), and it was even worse in the late 1990s.

Some of this content was merely gross sex pictures (as you no doubt know if you’re aware of Lemon Party); others were things like the proverbial guy with two whatevers. Said guys didn’t deserve to be online, mocked for having two whatevers, and we hopefully all know and realize that now. Back then, when you’re a kid, you usually don’t. Even if you do, your curiosity overrides, and you still want to see something.

I also know a lot of us saw things like beheading photos, too, which are a whole different level of “shock site,” so to speak. I myself didn’t, but others did. I don’t know what affects that had, so I can’t speak to them. Plenty would try to laugh it off now with meta-post-ironic jokes about how sensitive people have gotten, but I’ve no idea. And all this got passed around in a physical setting, too. These URLs were swapped in school, amongst friends, etc. We discussed them in much depth, and with a disturbing degree of casualness given (some of) the material.

Back then? There typically weren’t many adults equipped to stop us on our quest for such content, either. I guess that, once again, this goes back to the massive generation gap which developed as we outpaced our parents with new technology. Many didn’t even know this stuff was out there themselves. In the late 1990s, plenty of parents still bought into the idea that if we were on the computer, we were learning something, too!

We did learn some things about biology, sociology, and psychology, I guess, however unfortunately…

I’m not here to whine about how we saw graphic content unsupervised (exactly); it’s not quite about that. The issue probably rests more with the fact that what we saw was often real, or at very least presented to us as such. And, because we were encountering it on the internet, it fell in that twilight realm of real, but still just online, which made things even weirder. And often, as I alluded to, the content wasn’t mere violence or sex, but just a person or two who happened to be peculiar in some way.

I guess it mingled with the matter of people online simply not being read as actual people, too. If the guy with two whatevers is just a concept, there’s no harm in laughing, right? I cannot help but think this primed us for some of the social media voyeurism that would take center stage over the next two decades. To be fair, many guys with two whatevers have gone online, monetized and capitalized on their whatevers, and had beautiful, fulfilling lives. Good for them.

Dare to be different… but not like that!

School and the media constantly hammered us with messages about how beautiful and desirable to be different, and that uniqueness was to be treasured. You shouldn’t bully people for being different because being unique was a good thing; all those cartoons said so, after all. Teachers read us books in class about little animals that learned lessons about tolerating difference and sharing, things like that.

This was all theory, though - in practice, things were much, well, dare I say it? Different.

Inherent in every message about tolerating differences was the implication that those differences were always superficial. In the real world, many ways of being different decidedly aren’t surface-level, and that disturbed people, ultimately. It actually made things worse.

It turned intolerance into an othered caricature of sorts, too, something nobody could possibly imagine in themselves. There was an idea of bullying that didn’t fit reality. It allowed people to say that actual, real-life bullies just didn’t qualify as bullies. Real bullies were the troubled kids, the ones wearing black who might “go Columbine,” right? Your average successful teen with good grades, a healthy, wealthy family and lots of friends would never be a bully. Bullies were outcasts themselves. That was the image, anyways, and this meant excuses when kids who didn’t fit the archetype were the bullies (as they usually were).

In reality, bullying was rarely just one problem kid going around wreaking havoc. It was typically a group activity, and involved people who definitely didn’t fit this bully archetype society had created. So, there had to be excuses. For those who already fit in, bullying the odd kids wasn’t intolerant. If anything, you were helpful because you were letting that person know that their odd behavior was inappropriate, right? I heard a kid literally say as much in fifth grade about his treatment of a guy who apparently had poor hygiene. He argued that calling him a “smelly r*t*rd” was just “letting him know he needed a bath.” The guy in question was probably just struggling at home and didn’t have a lot of options for clean clothes. I don’t know for sure.

The teachers themselves seemed to adopt this perspective too. In most cases, when a child (even in grade school) was being bullied, sure, the adults would try to stop it somewhat. They’d also take the victim aside and give them a talking to about how if they’d just “put themselves out there differently” or “stop doing XYZ” or “don’t be so sensitive,” it wouldn’t happen. This all fed back into the notion that bullying is good for society. That was really the ultimate message. Bullying helps people, because while we’re all supposed to be unique and special, the bullies are there to make sure we’re only special in proper, decent ways, and to prepare us for the real world by teaching us to be less sensitive.

Make it make sense?

I think that’s why the backlash against the reiteration of “we’re all unique and special” started soon into the 2000s. This was both because the people who were different on a deeper level found this superficial tolerance insulting, and because some people just hated the idea of tolerating differences to begin with. The movie Fight Club came out in 1999. Its lines about how “…you are not a unique and special snowflake...” seemed to resonate hard with some people.

Many younger folks completely missed the message of the film, though, which seems like a critique of capitalism’s brutal effect on masculinity. I’m a millennial myself (obviously), but I will say that many (more) of our elders tended to understand Fight Club better than we did. A lot of younger people at the time couldn’t see through the edginess, but (for example) my grandma did, and loved the movie. I’m still not sure why she grasped it better than we did (at the time).

Monica the… Vacuum?

This was perhaps the utter nadir of American popular culture in the 1990s. It combined obsessions with public figures, the tendency to treat politics like a game, and the tradition of shaming women all into an awful package.

Most people remember the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, and with it, some of our parents carrying around giant paperbacks called The Starr Report. The former involved Clinton’s supposed sexual relations with a woman named Monica Lewinsky and subsequent lies about it, and the latter was the government’s inquiry into the matter.

Our parents (probably) poured over the report for references to the infamous blue dress that Bill had stained during his liaison with Monica, amongst other salacious topics. Allegedly, it had all happened in the Oval Office, of all places. The dress itself would be tastelessly preserved for years to come in the Newseum. The entire country was possessed with the scandal from day one. Did Bill lie? Was that an impeachable offense? Oh, good heavens! How utterly dramatic! It was just like a television show, except it involved real people (who happened to be in charge of the world)!

Nobody seemed to be discussing what seems the obvious issue now. Monica Lewinsky was an intern in her early twenties; Bill Clinton was nearly fifty and the most powerful man in the world. Sorry, but that’s more than a little gross, disturbing, weird. It’s a power dynamic that makes the whole relationship rather odd, and also makes the massive campaign of shame leveled at Lewinsky herself even worse. The Democrats didn’t like Monica Lewinsky because she was “ruining” Clinton’s presidency. The Republicans, conservatives, while willing to use Lewinsky, didn’t like her much because she was a woman who’d had sex, of course.

As a youngster at the time, I didn’t see what was really happening because there weren’t any adults willing to explain it. Instead, they were busy giggling about Lewinsky’s blue dress and Paula Jones’s testimony. We youngsters quickly learned that we, too, should be giggling about it. People quipped about vacuums that “sucked as good as Monica” and it quickly became a 1990s meme of sorts. This was all quite public, too - the jokes were on-air, and we all heard them.

We didn’t even know properly what “oral sex” was, but it was still funny, right? That lady on TV did something bad with the president! My family (Democrats, of course) assured me that it was “sexual relationship between two consenting adults,” and had thus been completely okay. Nobody seemed to care or mention the way Lewinsky was getting treated, or Clinton’s potential abuse of power. There’s also the not-so-small issue of, uh, Hillary Clinton, which makes the whole thing, yes, morally bankrupt regardless.

You really have to wonder if the situation would’ve been viewed differently had Clinton been a Republican, too. The Democrats really, really wanted Clinton to remain in office, and an impeached Democrat looked so, so awful, right? And yes, there were reasons (in terms of policy) for concern. That doesn’t change the horrible way the media, politicians, and our entire culture handled this situation. It’s odd. Weren’t the neoliberals uh I mean Democrats usually the ones in America claiming they support women? The ones vying for our votes?

It may hurt to admit it as someone who has voted for many, many Democrats over the years. I won’t deny it, though. I can imagine stepping out of a science fiction transporter into an alternate universe version of the 1990s where President Bill Clinton (R) was vivisected by the ”liberal” media for his abuses of power and treatment of women, while Lewinsky received empathy and space to recover from the experience and manipulations.

And I’ll admit that would’ve been a better timeline, possibly? Maybe not. It would really depend on what had happened to Reagan.