I'm a bit sidelined physically this week, so I wanted to have something to chew on a bit. That said, it's also more of a trip down memory lane. It's still summer, after all! This is the time for that. It's also the 20th anniversary of YouTube, which ended up changing the entertainment landscape more than anyone thought possible.
When the internet first started taking off among the general public in the 1990s, the monoculture was not only still intact but was also the default assumption for the populace on how the world, universe, and everything, worked and would progress going forward. Message boards and chat rooms were full of what you might call "trolling" and silly behavior, but it was all on the assumption that it was for relaxing between life itself and that it was just a fun side thing. It wasn't yet life itself, and would not become a new home for millions.
That changed slowly through the 2000s as not only were kids born in the '90s growing up (usually completely unsupervised) on the internet, so too did Gen Y end up turning towards cyberspace more and more as an outlet for dealing with the post-9/11 world to find some stability where it once existed. Then of course there was the rise of social media from Myspace to Facebook to Twitter/X, but that was more of a gamechanger for the older generations. Before that happened, Gen Y was carving out its own ecosystem on message boards and comment sections based on cynicism, sneering contempt of once happy nostalgia while also depending on it at the same time. Pop culture also mutated for this crowd as a way to sustain identity in an era where corporate Geek Culture was concocted by corporations to siphon what little money they would have left by 2008.
I bring this up to show the epitome of what this era was like with a site that was called Channel Awesome. Back before websites became little more than content farms and the internet became flooded with bots, YouTube was just one site that was primarily used for a few things, all of which changed radically over time. The key development in its growth from illy home videos and pranks was the attempt to create a new ecosystem to forge an identity by people who largely didn't have any in a world that didn't want them to discover one.
Channel Awesome was (technically still is) a pop culture review site that focuses on nostalgia. They were not the first or second, but the one that first tried making it into an industry. Whether it succeeded or not is for you to judge.
In the '00s, the popular thing to do was to review the childhood's of Gen Y (and younger Gen X and older Millennials: remember, it's all a spectrum) kids to mock and skewer it and show how ridiculous a lot of what the audience grew up with was. Isn't it all just silly and meaningless? But somehow it's important to us, even though it's quite obviously terrible!
There were a few hallmarks of this upcoming genre of video review: snark, sarcasm, irony, and the obsession with "logic" and accepted opinions from Respected Professionals above all. Honestly, looking back at the era now, it's incredible how lock-step a lot of this was. You would not really find much in the way of dissenting opinions, because everyone was expected to think the same thing about everything. Contrarianism existed, because of course it did, but adherence to the monoculture (in this case, the accepted corporate "Geek" monoculture out of a paid Kevin Butler speech) mattered more than anything else. This was your "community" and you needed to belong there, which meant that you needed to be a Real Geek.
The above video does a very good job at highlighting the majority of the members that existed on the site two decades ago, even talking about where they ended up in the time since they started. It's a fascinating look at a time and place long since gone, and how and also why it would all eventually go away. Of course, the video is long, so be aware of that, but that doesn't make it any less interesting as a historical document on internet history that has faded away.
As for why it all went away, the answer is simple: it wasn't enough. The people involved, the audience, and the wider culture, was fracturing as the monoculture was dying in the 2000s, and as it was doing so, new priorities emerged and new identities formed. Those priorities and identities were manyfold, but they all sum up with the fact that those involved realized, at least, subconsciously, that none of this stuff was an identity. That's when it all shifted.
For myself, I bailed on the scene fairly early on when I realized the majority involved where content stewing in bitterness for the old days while also profiting (socially, at least) on those same old days, which made me question exactly what this was all for. No one wanted to create anything, they wanted to live in this weird bubble of pop cult aesthetics and slang divorced from not only the real world but any meaning that childhood might have actually had. The '00s were the hangover for Culture Ground Zero, where it was told products were all you needed to have an identity, the greatest lie Geek Culture told, and by the end of it, especially with the crash of 2008, that wannabe Gen X aloofness cracked and turned into a desperate bitterness over reality.
That's why you had so much anger in those days few remember to mention when waxing nostalgic over the "Old" Internet. The Nu Atheist/Skeptic movement was the first dividing line, deciding an entire segment of their former cohorts were now intellectually inferior and needed to be scrubbed off the internet with sneers that would make a middle-aged Karen politician in Current Year blush. You might think this unearned arrogance and hatred was a defining trait of that particular crowd, but no, it soon became the default way to operate online.
Through the 2010s, as that lack of identity failed, it also split up itself. Atheism +, progressivism, counterculture discourse, but one of the few things that refused to completely sever was that obsession with Pop Cult media. That obsession would even become a battleground in Culture War issues, because neither side could admit that the culture they grew up on not only no longer existed, but they were so focused on mindlessly clinging to their phony identity centered around it that they never considered passing it down to the generation just under them. A whole generation cut itself off from the wider world, because they had long since abandoned it.
Years later and they're still be arguing over the Hollywood system that hates them even as mainstream audiences have lost all investment in the entire affair long before they have. In other words, that pop cult identity is already gone and irrelevant, but they can't let it go. This is because it's all they have, and they need to still have that connection, because there isn't anything else for them left. Everything else is dead or problematic (which is just a euphemism for dead).
The above video that highlights all these many "content creators" (itself a demeaning term) and shows how just about all of them scattered away through all of the above madness that was the 2010s, is a good example as to lack of identity driving everything. Not to say they are fundamentally broken people or anything, but that what united them all together fractured as reality set in. There really wasn't any glue in the first place aside from those old corporate products.
Some of them did right the ship in their own lives, which is commendable, but the loss of shared monoculture is even more obvious when seeing the change in a whole cohort right before you. At the end of the day, all of the above people on whatever side of the conflicts they were on desired one thing: a community to be a part of, and a place where they could belong, and an identity that defined them. That is the real story here.
We've discussed both the book "Bowling Alone" and the madness that the 2010s set forth on an entire generation that had just dealt with the miasma of despair that was the '00s in earlier pieces, but they both stem from the greater issue, which is the lack of any real shared culture beyond products, transactional relationships, and a recitation of a youth that was the last time that connection existed. We are a culture of isolated islands connected by a bridge that fell into the sea long ago, and all we can do is rage about it. However, that does not change that said bridge is gone and not coming back. That world is over.
I don't want to be too hard on the people that do or like any of this stuff. It clearly has value. The wider point is not that it is bad that "geek" stuff exists, but that it's not an identity or a personality. It doesn't make you who you are. What you like to consume does not define who you are, and most of arguments around the subject of gatekeeping in regards to this always just amount to focusing on the phony identity aspect over the much more pertinent quality one, which shows exactly where the priorities truly lie in such discussions. It's still primarily thought of as a desire for a club away from the plebs, not a thriving art or entertainment landscape to grow in.
Art is an ecosystem meant to present a window into what the culture not only finds important, but how they live and what they believe. Without any of that, it's just product in a sea of other product, with no rhyme or reason or direction except to fill shelves. It's just consuming slop to consume slop and possibly harm the outgroup in the process of doing it so one can still feel they belong to an ingroup that doesn't care about you.
But what are they trying to belong to?
In fact, what are we belonging to right now? Are we any better than the young Geek Culture acolytes of the '00s, angling for an identity, or are we still the same lost sailors at sea? Are we still struggling to draw lines in the sand based on cliches, ingroup insults, and more Us vs Them rhetoric? How much more pared down do we need to get from the current state of things? Will it ever be enough? Will we ever be satisfied?
Right now, it's hard to say, but it won't always be that way. Enjoy the trip to the past and remember both the good and bad so we know what to take with us going forward. Because we're going to need it for what's coming up ahead.
Have a good weekend and I'll see you again soon enough.
I don't know where you are, but here the weather is beating me down and taking no prisoners. It's not unbearable so much as it is annoying, much like today's subject. As bad as the weather might get, you always know it's going to go the other way eventually. The world isn't ending, no matter how much some of us wish it was, but it has also always had its antis: people who just hate everything and want it to die. Sometimes they disguise it very well.
Today lets take a look at one particular movie that disguises itself as one of peace and love but is actually one of death and misery. It also took a long time for this movie to be exposed for what it was, even though it seems so obvious to us today.
We could talk about some of the most obvious subversive movies made. Pleasantville and American Beauty the most obvious ones people still talk about quite a lot. There are some less obviously subversive flicks like Forrest Gump or Wag the Dog, but are no less corrosive than the former two. Even though these films say one thing, they tend to mean something else, which is a nasty trick Hollywood used to be very good at pulling offer.
However, back in the day it was also a lot less subtle and a lot more blatant about what the message, not that unlike how it is today after decades of trying the poison pill technique instead. The difference is how they focused more on selling a specific worldview back then that is currently fading in the world of Current Year, mostly because it failed and everyone knows it failed, even if they won't admit it. This makes the movie extremely hard to go back to.
The above video speaks about the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still which, for a long time, was looked on as a siffy classic film on par with Forbidden Planet, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Invaders from Mars. It was seen as one of the Big Ones--and important, to boot. They even had a popular band for a while named after the main character! To this day the film is also studied and looked on as an important building block in modern cinema. It goes without saying that the movie was popular and influential back then. Few movies surpass its cultural importance.
It's also not a good movie.
While the earlier mentioned three movies in this set still hold up, this particular movie does not. The reason is, even from people who agree with its general thesis, because the film is a clunky and ham-fisted lecture with plenteous logic gaps meant to make the audience take one lesson away from the movie in question with no wiggle room or alternate solution. It's a religious tract for the progressive world order of its day. You can see its entire playbook from the above video itself. Suffice to say, the movie does not hold up.
The message being sold in The Day the Earth Stood Still is the same as HG Wells book The World Brain that I discussed in The Last Fanatics. It is the beating heart of 20th century materialism that runs the engine of the siffy mutation formed through convention consensus in 1939. This thesis is the idea that humanity all subconsciously and collectively will come to the same beliefs and conclusions that are, shockingly, the exact same as the siffy author's worldview of the time period. In essence, it says humanity is destined to have an epiphany that siffy authors are actually their superiors and had it all figured out before the rest of you plebs. Do what they say and reach paradise or you are an evil monster who must be put down. As you can tell, things have not changed that much since The Day the Earth Stood Still released.
Therefore, keeping this philosophy in mind, the trick for these writers is to create a specific sort of protagonist, a creature above man that is not supernatural (because the supernatural is infantile and evil) which will guide humanity down the right path. He is clearly above the common piece of filth that is man, and must be portrayed as without progressive sin (progressive sin of its era) with all the solutions that lesser humans are too inferior to figure out on their own.
Once you see this is the one trick, much of what is called "classic" siffy absolutely falls apart, because this is what it is all hinged on. You can even see it done today, complete with new progressive sins and designated acceptable classes of acceptable targets filling in the villain role. It does not work anymore because the trick is obvious to everyone, but said writers have no other one to use, so they just keep using it over and over to diminishing returns and ever-shrinking cliques that do little more than decay into even more bitter beings. Truly the class of betters that should be ruling the world. At least, so they are still told by the people in charge.
This corrosive view of existence is also why adventure stories have always been demonized by these same types. In The Last Fanatics I covered the prevailing view of this set that aliens could never be portrayed as evil or malevolent. Humanity always had to be inferior, the lesser, or the most evil, because the other, the alien, was the Higher Being above them. This is because said anti-social writer considered themselves the outcast and the other, and always saw themselves as above the common man. Portraying an alien as evil is tantamount to calling them bad people. And that's just not possible! They're smarter and more special. The Important People tell them so!
Therefore, aliens could not be cast as anything else than Higher or else the writer and story would be labeled as x-ist or y-phobic and therefore discarded without further thought. Aliens are your betters, just like the other, and you need to process this immediately or get sent to a camp. (Or in the case of a particular siffy con, beat your chest about open minded tolerance while having your convention a few hours away from literal concentration camps).
You see, Humanity is bad because Humanity isn't like the writerOther. Therefore, it's a personal affront to these types to express any creativity outside this narrow ruleset. Truly the "genre" of imagination and wonder.
Human beings being cast as an irredeemable evil is key to the playbook, since this framework is created by anti-social types who dislike reality and believe it would be changed for the better if they were in charge, but all they have done is made everything worse. You have to ignore reality, you can't argue, you can't discuss, and you can't offer alternatives. You are to shut up and be led by your betters, the ones who decided they know better but have yet to prove it even with having decades upon decades of institutional support from those who hate humanity even more than they do. What we are left with is a World Braindead, not a World Brain.
This attitude is what set the stage for the climate we are currently living in right now. That is also why it's falling apart and in constant need of propping up. It's a little like a circus tent falling down while those under it frantically run around to prop it back up. The end result is obvious, and those panicking are simply wasting their time.
All of this could have been avoided with the one thing such stories don't allow: self-reflection. This means self-reflection of the writer, not an attempt to project a faulty view of the world onto the audience so they can worship at your feet.
The Day the Earth Stood Still does not understand that change always starts with the self. The movie is obsessed with tearing everything down simply because it has its own superman to bully the world into compliance. It centers on demonizing locality and shared culture to prop up a bizarre individuality that is also part of a worldwide collective of acceptable beliefs and rules decided by the strongman. The one world future of Klaatu requires the right creature being put in charge to rule it all, somehow also embodying the everchanging goals of Progress at the same time. This is the world these anti-socials want. It isn't possible, but that's also why it's dying.
The movies, and these people, don't understand that if you want a solution to a wider problem, you have to start local. You have to connect with people you might not understand or might not understand you and come to a new consensus on how to build something better through both of your contributions. You can't wait for some top down revolution to do it for you. As has been shown, that isn't how we got here to begin with. We got here through laziness and flippancy, allowing rot to take hold and telling ourselves its Natural or some nebulous thing like History leading the charge. Decay is easy; growth is hard. We haven't really tried to grow anything in decades, just complain and hope for others to do it for us or punching holes in the boats of those trying. Well, that isn't going to happen by doing this. The proof for that is Current Year.
The only solution to the current state of the World Braindead is to not follow its example. To start small and focus on that. Give attention to what we can. It's the only option we have to counteract the destruction of Klaatu-types who want us to fall in line with their rotting materialistic view of existence. We need to build, not destroy.
The good ending to The Day the Earth Stood Still would have been to throw Klaatu into a furnace and call his bluff. But the narrative was specially made to not give the characters the choice: it's willful and blissful enslavement Vs deserved genocide of the human race. Bow to Satan or die. He'll give you the world and all you have to do is give him power to tell you white is black and black is white for the rest of your life. Isn't that a small price to pay for tolerance? For a world where everyone can be equal some of the time?
It starts with a rejection of the premise these 19th century materialists set up. Not just Doing The Opposite as many online stylize themselves and their image, but understanding what they got wrong in their initial thesis of what humanity is and correcting with a better and healthier vision. Live a better way free of paranoia, bitterness, and tired memes. Instead find one of belonging and growth. Start local, always. It won't start anywhere else.
We can only start from ourselves, not to change but to understand. What we've lost, what we need, and what we have, is more important than what could be. There is no Eden on Earth and there never will be. We have to start living for something better than failed utopias built by people who have proven time and time again to be full of nothing.
Klaatu's false premise and promises need to be rejected. The World Brain must be allowed to finally die. Only then can we finally move on from this pit we've lodged ourselves into, and only then can we finally have a new vision of the future.
It starts with ourselves and those around us, and that's where the focus should be. Until then, at least we can laugh at the absurdity of the Klaatu class and the World Braindead they have left in the wake of their failed ideas.
Not like the movie has much else of value of offer these days, just like the mentality that thought it up in the first place. It's all dead and rotted, so let's finally put it all to rest.
Summer is on so let's go back in time for this week's post. Let's travel back to rediscover that nebulous time between the week and the weekend that has been muddied over the decades: Friday Night. More than anything, I want to touch on what it was and why it mattered more than the nostalgia that remains around it.
First, watch the video above to get a handle on what exactly we're talking about. It's not an easily definable thing we're going to be talking about from here on in.
You might think that Friday night is still a big deal these days, but it isn't to the same extent it once was. This is for multiple reasons. "Friday Night" was a cultural institution when everyone had more or less the same work and school week, with the same promise that weekends would be for you and those around you and no one else. It was your time. This is what made Friday Night such a powerful force. Everyone was off at the same time, with the same options, and in the same communities, and that knowing shift is what drove a lot of what made it all so enchanting.
Work exists for leisure, not the other way around, which means that leisure has to be more meaningful than work. Therefore, once the weekend actually comes, it is anyone's guess as to what happens next. It's a whole other world divorced from the long week being left behind. The actual activities on the weekend itself don't matter as much is the reality that it's time for you and yours, and the world comes in distant second. But that's the weekend: not what lays between it and what was left behind.
Friday Night, however? That's where the magic is.
Friday is a lot of people's favorite day of the week because of more what it symbolizes than what might actually occur during it. A Friday symbolizes a coming break from work and a retreat into leisure. Nights are already seen as the leisure time (it is when most people sleep, after all), but when you add in the weekend ahead and (usually) the lack of no big plans ahead, it makes Friday Night a time of endless possibilities. You can do anything, and anything can happen.
It isn't so much what you do, but the knowledge that you can do it. This is your true reward for getting through the week, and it is what made the work truly worth getting through. Friday Night represents real freedom, the kind we tend to get less of these days regardless of your age or station in life. Everyone had the same shared experience, which is what made it all the better. you could also meet anyone, and you were all on the same equal ground and in the same mindset.
No one really says this anymore.
I try to be careful with these subjects on here, mostly because it is easy to fall into the nostalgia trap of thinking old things were better simply because they were old. It's what I and many others my age did when we were young, but I think at this point the conversation has moved beyond nostalgia arguments when industries are collapsing and the online space is rotting away at faster and faster speeds. We're trying to find that place we lost before we lose the chance to rediscover it for good. What people are looking for is that intangible space between the past and the present, the spot that we can't seem to find, and put something down there to begin building on.
A sort of new monoculture? Who can say, but it's something we know we lost and something we know we need to regain.
Nostalgia isn't really an argument anymore as much as it is now a Brand like everything else, and you already realize that, as does everyone else. You don't actually want the 1980s or the 1990s or even the 2000s back. You want that cohesiveness and sense of belonging and wider societal purpose they had in spades compared to now. You want to be able to go out and find things with other people as curious as you are: someone to connect with and something to find. The loneliness epidemic is not just for single males, after all. It effects everyone living in a world where fragmentation through consumption is the end goal. This world is the end state of striving for perfect individuality, after all. The perfect individual is alone.
But perfection isn't possible. Convenience doesn't necessarily make things better, either. Those were things taken for granted back then, and now we can't even entertain going back to it again. However, the Friday Night experience we all want and desire, is not possible in a world of easy convenience. It requires being able to go out and find people who think, act, and believe, at least a little like you do: a cohesive communal experience where anything can happen. That is a big part of the magic.
That requires risk, but it requires risk of a different sort: where putting yourself out there doesn't result in an internet video from someone who thinks so little about their neighbors that they will toss them to the sharks and be rewarded by those around them for doing so. It requires a world where you can talk about the same things with people you barely know and find yourself at least a little better off for it. You can't do that if your neighbor has nothing in common with you and has no desire to even try to connect. It's a two way street, and that isn't where we currently are now.
Perhaps this is why the past is currently looked at with more curious eyes beyond the nostalgia, and why Zoomers and younger are hungry for it despite having no memories of that era. We all know the way things are isn't sustainable and is not ideal, but we don't know how to retain what we lost without pretending the clock is a different time than it is.
The point is that making everything more convenient hasn't really made anything better. Yes, we still get good books, video games, and music, but we were already getting those before. What it hasn't done is made our quality of living better as a whole. Life itself hasn't benefited from these changes, which is how a nebulous feeling like Friday Night became a pale shadow of what it once was. Yes, you can go out somewhere, but Everyone won't be there which means Anything can't happen. The magic is no longer there, just as the majority no longer is.
It's gone, but the hunger for it remains.
And that's what we need to get back.
So the next time Friday Night rolls around, think twice about what it really means, and what makes it truly so special. Perhaps if we try to reclaim that feeling, we can come that little be closer to reclaiming that certain undefinable quality we can't seem to nail down. It can't hurt. In fact, it'll only bring us closer, in the end. What else can be better?
Here I am back with another topic, this one a light subject. We're getting into summer, so let's keep the streak going. I want to talk about nostalgia, but not as a negative or a positive, but in the contrast of something wider. Let's discuss the culture of Staying Vs Leaving.
As you are certainly well aware, the culture of nostalgia has more or less turned into a joke by this point. Hollywood remaking '80s and '90s properties into Modern products has failed and continues to fail to greater degrees. No one can seem to understand what the audience wants anymore, not even the audience. The reason for that confusion is because the audience doesn't actually want old things: they want the ecosystem those old things were allowed to be created in. I'm not just referring to demographics or time periods, but a very specific approach.
Now, of course nostalgia is real and many would argue is a big problem with today, but it's really a symptom of a culture that doesn't really have anything to offer outside of piecemeal experiences thrown out like chum in the water to satiate anyone who will chomp it up. This is a difference between the cultures of Staying Vs Leaving. This battle is best shown in the recent example of Pizza Hut Classic being created and trumpeted all over social media.
The above video talks about what exactly people miss about things of the past, and it is not just the IP or franchises or big bold neon and colorful text and logos, like every cynical executive (who lived through those times, mind you) would say it is. What they are missing is, as mentioned above, the climate that allowed those things of the past to be created and flourish in the first place. Yes, they do miss the franchises and the chains and the big glossy movies and production: but what they miss above all of it is the shared experience everyone had at the same time reacting to or enjoying those things. They want the framework of the culture.
So what is the difference between the Culture of Staying Vs Leaving and what does that mean? Let's get into it.
The key takeaway is the difference in approach in how these things operate today. I'm not talking about ideology or cynical profiteering, but about what they say about the culture. The old way, the way of Big Fancy Cinemas, Pizza Hut Classic, inviting video stores, bright arcades, and shiny malls, was a culture of Staying. They wanted you there, to stay. They wanted you to stick around, and in the process this environment would invite others to do the same. In other words, exactly what third places are meant to do. You can quibble about their effectiveness or the like all you want, but that's what they did. This is a feature of real life communities completely lost today.
This means that all of that old era was linked together under the shared idea that we were all in this together and there were places to go where we can fit in together. As we well know by now, the purpose of art is the same as community: it's to connect. A culture of Staying means a culture of connection, of sociability. It's the purpose of all of this, really.
The opposite is what we have now: a culture of Leaving. As the above video states, this is a climate centered on individuality and alienation, of getting out as fast as possible to be left on your own. Swipe, scroll, pick something up, get in and out, consume, and on to the next thing. It is the antithesis of how it used to be, and it's why no matter how many Ghostbusters, He-Man, Star War, or Marvel, movies or remakes that Hollywood pumps out, they will never hit the same, because they are being fed into a culture of Leaving. No one has the time or means to sit and Stay. We do not reward it, in fact we proudly thump our chests about how special and different we are from each other instead. The idea of Staying is not the cultural era we are in anymore, and we can't pretend otherwise or think things can change as long as we continue to reject the reality that we deliberately chose.
The memories older generations have of that long gone era isn't just of nostalgia, it is about the shared cultural experience of Staying that has been abandoned and subverted. When someone is celebrating a Pizza Hut Classic or the experience of a vinyl record, it is not just because those are old things they remembered and mindlessly prefer over "better" options. That might be the starting point, but the real underlying desire is that forgotten ecosystem, that community feeling of going anywhere and feeling like you belong there and so does everyone else around you.
Baby Boomers used to thump their chests about driving everywhere being freedom: but that isn't what they had. It was in fact a safer society filled with others that had the same shared experiences. No matter where they went, there they were, because where they were was more or less the same everywhere which made talking and getting to know others simpler. They took this long gone era for granted and aren't even aware it's completely gone for younger generations. They were marinated in the Culture of Staying while they pined for a Culture of Leaving. They didn't realize they were in a veritable sandbox of fellow children: not a wide open road of strangers and possible danger around every corner. They had community, and it was so prominent they didn't even realize it.
In fact, I would argue this is what Zoomers who engage in old mediums are really after. This shared cultural experience is the only piece they can try to understand for themselves. These old products and forgotten mediums are the only windows left into the Culture of Staying they can find. They want what they never were able to have because what they have today is so much weaker. And every single person knows it.
It's not just about physical media or expensive and shiny advertising or old IP, a lot of that sort of nostalgia is missing the forest for the trees. Every one of those things is part of a bigger cultural tapestry that was taken off the wall to be replaced with the digital one-push button world of consuming and moving on: the Culture of Leaving. No one wants to Stay, and that is why they can never feel at home or satiated with how things are and are always on edge and alone. They not only don't understand the purpose of leisure, they have long forgotten how to live.
The Culture of Staying had more weight and felt more Real, which is why people are seeking it out without even knowing what it is. The culture of Leaving has been the standard for a long time now, but it was also the desired endpoint of those who lived decades earlier who lived in the old world. The streamlining and dumbing down of old things was to make them More Accessible and Easier to do, but all that did was degrade those same things and make us take them for granted. Streaming hasn't made music any better. Netflix hasn't made movies or TV any better. Digital eBooks haven't made books any better. Always online consoles to download everything haven't made video games any better. Apps and readers haven't made comic books or manga any better. It just made them more convenient to consume: so we can Leave for the next thing on the list to consume.
You could quibble or fight about who is to blame for today's ecosystem or what the best way to fix the problem is, but I suspect that will already change as more and more people begin to realize what they have lost. The increase in vinyl and Blu-ray/DVD sales, the creation of things like the above Pizza Hut Classic, the desire for more analog experiences, all signal an obvious change in thinking. You have to look at it in the greater scheme of things beyond product purchasing: it's the desire for what those things represent (though yes, them being superior products and experiences is part of it, one can't deny that). You'd have to be blind to not see the climate has changed quite a lot over just the last few years, and is still in the middle of shifting.
We have more Content than ever before, and yet we're more bored and unsatisfied than we've ever been. That is solid proof that what we want isn't something purely tangible or easy to express. It's a specific cultural frame that we want: one that has more to offer than the next dopamine hit. We want what we once had, but better than it ever was before.
It's important to realize the Culture of Leaving did not spring up because of the internet and phones. Technology itself didn't lead us here. What lead us here was our desire to Progress past the Culture of Staying to make things more convenient, and the end result was something that is the complete opposite of what we once had. In essence, it was forgetting what mattered that allowed us to throw it away and replace that ecosystem with something inferior that we can't admit to being so because we've talked ourselves into thinking Convenience is a Good Thing. However, "convenience" is not a synonym for "good": it is just as capable of being bad for you as inconvenience, as we can see from how things are today.
We need something more than the bare minimum of consuming and moving on to the next thing. We've always wanted it, but we lost sight of how to get it back.
So let's try Staying for a little bit. It can't possibly be any worse, right? We won't know until we try.
This week's post didn't take a lot of time in the oven because I wanted to get it out as quickly as possible. The reason for that is because it's not only a timely topic, but one I have a lot to say on. Today's subject also contains several elements I've wanted to go over for some time now, and this is the perfect opportunity to discuss it all. I also recorded an hour long episode of the podcast on my Patreon on the subject, so you can also hear more about it here. Suffice to say, I had a lot to say about this topic.
I grew up in the 1990s. I think that's very clear for anyone who has read anything from me. I am a member Generation Y (born in the '80s and grew up mainly in the '90s), also called the baffling moniker Older Millennial sometimes. My childhood memories are all encased in this decade, and impossible to remove from it. One of my own books, Y Signal, was set in 1995-1996 and I did my best to make it as accurate as possible for the story being told. Suffice to say, the decade means a lot to me, even if I am well aware of its flaws and criticize it all the time.
All this is to say that I loathe what the decade has been turned into in the modern age. Whether by my own cohort or not, it has been transformed into a theme park for bitter burnouts who also hate the era they are trying to profit off of.
I once covered the failed Netflix series Everything Sucks, which took place in 1996 and got absolutely everything wrong about it, from the fashions to the attitudes to just plain misunderstanding what normal people thought and believed back then. This turkey turned the decade into an amusement park ride of media kitsch and sarcastic eyerolls in order to sell a stock "finding yourself" story that has been told a million times before. In other words, the '90s shell was a cynical gimmick to sell garbage to both nostalgic adults and curious kids. The moral, as always, is that the past is terrible and you've always been miserable and will always be miserable in every era to come. That isn't true, of course, but it's the only reason these uncreatives use any 20th century time period to tell a story. They have no other story to tell.
Unfortunately, that failed series is not alone, as the video above highlights. In the years since, cynical nostalgia revisionism has only gotten worse. With the rise in physical media, vinyls making a comeback, and older TV and movies being enjoyed by younger generations than ever before, it is clear there is an interest in What It Was Like. Unfortunately this means propagandists and opportunists are using this thirst as a way to poison the well.
You might wonder why this subject annoys me so much, and I'll tell you: I don't like the decade I grew up in treated as a playhouse for cynical hipsters stuck in 2000s irony poisoning posturing to fool around in and lecture me over. This isn't just about historical accuracy, but about general respect for both the people who lived in that era and those who want to know about it. Basically, I hate lying, and that's all this amounts to.
I should also clarify that I'm not criticizing works that aren't 100% accurate. That is not the argument being made. When doing a period piece, things will go wrong. It happens. The difference is in the authorial intent: why those inaccuracies exist.
The opposite of the above example is a piece of hackwork that cynically exploits the time period as an aesthetic to cash in on blanket "nostalgia" to sell the audience phony memories and attempts to rewrite the past to suit their own selfish ends. Material like the above Everything Sucks is like this. It's meant to sell a lie wrapped in a candy coating of an era it doesn't understand. Another product like that failed series is the recent Mixtape movie-disguised-as-a-video-game.
For those unaware, Mixtape is a "video game" that was made to invoke '90s nostalgia, though from what I heard the writer director of it did not even grow up in America, where the thing takes place. Regardless, there's no defined year, but you can parse it down to being around 1997 (again with that year) simply due to the music selections and the level of technology mentioned. There is no file sharing mentioned, which means it has to be before 1999. Though even that gets dicey (more on the subject later). The selling point of the game is to fool burnout adults into misremembering what the '90s were like and tricking Gen Z kids into thinking this is what it was really like back then. There is no other selling point here. Why else would you tell the story?
It certainly isn't the gameplay, as there is basically none. I can't even say the soundtrack is a selling point, because it is oddly chosen and extremely inaccurate to the time period. More on both of those later. For now it's enough to say that "recapturing" the era is its selling point, so let us talk about how it fails at that before anything else.
Mixtape lives or dies on whether it successfully inspires nostalgia in '90s kids or not, so let me start this criticism out first as a '90s kid.
The story concerns soon to be high school graduates named Stacey, Slater, and Cassandra. They were supposed to go on a road trip, but Stacey (the game calls her by her last name "Rockford" for some reason instead of her first name) decided she needs to go to New York to catch some kind of soundtrack programmer (this plot point is very vague, I'm doing the best I can) by running into this woman she has never met randomly in the street so she can get a job making mixtapes as a Music Supervisor professionally. Therefore she has to leave tomorrow morning for this one extremely vague chance to define her future. Yes, this is the inciting event of the story.
I will talk about the absurdity around the music later, but for now I want you to remember that this is 1997. While she has a computer that certainly has Windows 95 on it, there is nothing saying she has the internet. It's not even mentioned. Even if she had the dialup internet required, how would she know any of these things about this random music industry woman's daily schedule she wants to run into? It's never explained. Given that, again, this is before the internet was ubiquitous and there was no social media, coming across even vague information would not have been easy, never mind a random employee's personal schedule in a place like New York. Anyone who lived in the 1990s in North America would know how hard it was to get any deeper information on anything you liked. Again, it isn't even like the character is a computer whiz. It never comes up.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg, by the way. No one talked the way any of these kids talked in the '90s. No one used the expression "Big if True" in the '90s. No one liked things ironically for "cheese" in the '90s. No one talked in stilted smirking above-it-all aphorisms that would make Joss Whedon blush in the '90s. All of this is hyper irony hipsterism that emerged out of the 2000s. The writing is no different than flops like Dustborn or Forspoken, or even older punching bags like Life Is Strange. Unless you believe teenagers have been talking exactly the same with no differences for the last 30 years, it's obvious this is fake and put on.
Everything about this game is dated, not because of the era it's supposed to take place in, but because it feels like a product of the empty-souled 2000s that produced a million Ramona Flowers wannabes. It would be like if the anti-80s slander of the '90s were still the default of today, or if tastemakers still stereotyped the '70s as disco world with giant mustaches. It's an outdated frame that should have been discarded years ago, but still it persists.
The tired revisionist '00s hipsterism is what makes this fall so flat. The core trick is to present nostalgia full of winking nods to tell you that the person writing this is just as uninvested as you should be because nothing means anything. Don't ever be invested, don't ever stick your neck out and try, just do as little as possible and convince others that you should be rewarded for doing it, or, like, you know, realize it's not for you. If '90s nostalgia is not for me, someone who grew up in the decade, then who is it for? I am the exact audience for this, which is why I'm going to tell you why it doesn't work. The '90s might not have been a pristine decade, but it was not this dead-souled as outdated '00s irony hipsters portray it as. Accuracy should not be this hard.
Not to mention that there are countless hours of home movies from the 1990s, in contrast to previous decades, one could watch for research. It should be the easiest decade to get right, and yet is the one portrayed incorrectly the most. There are also actual films from the decade starring kids and teenagers one could watch, too. They might not be 100% accurate to the times, but they are far more accurate than nostalgia pieces being made today. When the kids from the Mighty Ducks sound more mature and realistic than these supposed teenagers do, in a zany kids comedy of all things, something is very wrong with what you're doing. Fulton Reed might have had a ridiculous slapshot, but he still talked like a normal person. No one in Mixtape does.
All this to say is that I hate that '90s kids are not allowed to have our own Stand By Me or Wonder Years. By that I mean a TV show or movie that legitimately tries to adapt the time period as accurate as possible. We can't even get a Dazed & Confused or That '70s Show (both made in the '90s, ironically), a more comedic take that at least treats the decade with respect. We can't get anything at all that actually even tries. It's all dated ironic hipster-brained slop from burnouts who can't leave their warped 2000s philosophy behind. Instead of something made to try to understand the past of an era of real people, we get smirking backwash slop slathered in lies. It's hard not to get even a little miffed at this repetitive pattern of disrespect.
The 90s kid factor is only part of it: what of the music? After all, the game prides itself on nostalgia for the '90s and music as well. Music is part of the title, even. Surely this means the soundtrack is a mix of songs teenagers from the '90s actually listened to. You have an unlimited budget for your "indie game" to get songs in perpetuity that not even Rockstar could get for the million selling blockbuster Grand Theft Auto games, after all. Accuracy here should be even easier with that crutch. How could it possibly fail on that level?
Well, it does. Spectacularly, even.
To be fair, Mixtape doesn't fail because the songs are necessarily bad. It fails because it undercuts its own nostalgic selling point (the entire reason this is being made) by completely disconnecting with the music selection of what '90s kids listened to. Let me explain what I mean by this, because it's hard to get across in only a few sentences.
The point of Mixtape is to sell nostalgia to a mass of people who actually lived in the time period in question. This means the soundtrack should have things teenagers listened to at the time, specifically delinquent loser kids since this is what the main character ostensibly is supposed to be. and yet the soundtrack comes across as, yet again, a 2000s hipster's music selection. '90s kids did not listen to almost any of these songs. The game fails monumentally on getting this aspect right. It fails so badly it ruins any hint at nostalgia its trying for.
To get to the point: No teenager in 1997 was listening to music from 1969-1989. You might have been, as in you as an individual or a few of your friends, but this was not how teenagers listened to music in the '90s. It was a constant battle to be seen as fresh and cool. The '90s were defined by an endless series of fads and no one wanted to be the one caught listening to old stuff, because it meant you were not cool. That's just how it was.
As an example, I had to convince a friend to listen to Led Zeppelin, of all things. He didn't listen to "old music" back then. Beaming over discovering Boston's self-titled in a used CD store was considered weird for a teenager. Isn't that music for old people? None of the people I'm talking about were hipsters, either. Hipsterism wasn't really a thing for teenagers. All of my examples were ordinary kids. They did not listen to old people music.
If you want to get the era right, the soundtrack should be songs from the era it was in that kids listened to. Even if its something as varied as Megadeth's "Sweating Bullets" or Teenage Fanclub's "The Concept" or at least something that was playing on the radio in 1997. Rap, ska, swing, jangle pop . . . there was a lot, and Mixtape contains absolutely none of it.
The point is that this is what the majority of these kids listened to back then. If you want to connect through nostalgia then you need to connect to what the majority of the people at the time were doing, even if you weren't. No teenager was putting Rainbow, Stan Bush, Rush, or Devo, on mixtapes in 1997. Kids at the time would have thought they were old people music. I know because I saw it for myself. You would have been seen as a massive weirdo for listening to "your parents'" music. It's only in the 2000s with the combination of irony music hipsterism, file sharing, and the rise of video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, which helped introduce younger generations to this stuff that changed this perspective around. In the 90s, it was very different.
On top of this, there is the practicality of how a teenager in a small town would acquire this music in the first place. Vinyl was a relic and forgotten by teenagers in 1997 and cassettes were already fading. They bought CDs. If anything, the '90s were the decade of the CD. Therefore, the local music shop is probably the only way the main character is getting music, which would certainly only contain newer music since, again, vinyls were shoveled out by that time and not everything old had been re-released on CD yet. This is a lot to keep track of, but, well, of course it is. It's a lot of work to get things right, but it doesn't mean I shouldn't expect people to try.
If the answer to inaccuracies is "Don't think about it" then why am I tasked to think about any of this? Does any of it matter at all? If it doesn't then why was this made in the first place? If you aren't taking the music seriously, then why should I?
Lastly, in regards to music, why does the main character have burned CDs in 1997? They barely existed then due to insane cot and availability, and were in no way common until the 2000s around the time file sharing was. I know because I was burning mix CDs myself at the time. Yes, they existed in extremely rare places, but again, this is not a common or shared experience. Most people only started burning CD once Napster blew up. Why are burned CDs in a nostalgia product that is trying to sell common and shared experiences? No mass group of people were making mix CDs in 1997. On top of it, why is the movie game then called "Mixtape" at all then? The soundtrack used in the story is on a burned CD. It's all so baffling.
This is also supposed to be a "video game" that takes place right in the center of the Golden Age of the medium, and yet video games play absolutely no role in the character's lives. None of them, not even side character. Everyone in my class growing up in the '90s from kid to teenager played video games, owned a console, or knew someone who did. They were massively popular among the under 25 set. When Tony Hawk Pro Skater came out my entire class was buzzing about it, and that close to the time this movie game takes place in.
You have the premise of a nostalgic video game supposedly centered on the '90s and you don't include your own supposed medium in it. I don't even think the rental store included in the game carries video games. They're just not there at all. Strange choice. Then again, Mixtape features none of what games at the time did. There is no challenge, no lives, no score system, and no fail states. So what makes it a game when it doesn't contain what even Sierra adventure games from that same era had? It is possible to pass entire sections of this "game" without touching the controller. So why is it considered a "game" or "interactive" at all. It even gets the part where you rewind the cassette tape with a pencil wrong. It not only ignores video games as a medium, it isn't one itself. No wonder game journos love it. They've wanted movies with minimal button presses instead of video games for decades now, and here is something that gives them the bare minimum.
We went through how Mixtape failed at reflecting the '90s, how it failed at using nostalgia, how it didn't get the music right, and how it failed at being a video game or even paying tribute to them, so let's move on to the last one: the writing.
The best way to describe the writing of Mixtape is that it's written by someone who doesn't remember the '90s, loves '80s "cheese" ironically, and still thinks '00s hipsterism is cool instead of annoying like it's been for the last quarter century. No one acts like a person here. The main character is a vapid selfish idiot who talks like a listicle from Cracked circa 2004. Her guy friend is trying to channel Bill & Ted with quirk chungus random one-liners that make no sense while adding nothing to what little story is here. The two of them only seem to be friends because it's convenient and have nothing in common aside from their generic hatred of normal people, because these stories always have to star losers and never actually contain normal people except to sneer at them. The other girl is possibly the worst one, a psychotic narcissistic airhead with anger problems brought on by a cartoon strict dad stereotype that folds the instant she threatens criminal activity on him. Every other character is a non-entity that all talk in the same repetitive cadence.
The story, such as it is, contains pointless asides, one-note minigames, and dialogue straight out of a Scott Pilgrim fanfic, all on the way to . . . nothing. Whatever story just ends suddenly because it decides to. There's no real climax or satisfying denouement. It just stops. Perhaps you're supposed to take away that life is fleeing so always take a chance. That might work if the main character didn't initiate this story of leaving her hometown for a stupid reason that will never work out and would have been stopped if a single person had bothered to mention that impossibility. So no it's a series of pointless absurdities that would have been easily avoided if anyone had decided to be what hipsters like these hate more than anything in the world: normal.
You see "normal" people have problems, too. They have fears, hopes, and dreams, and they actually do matter. "Freaks" who choose to be freaks, who choose to reject normality because they think they are above it, are not more interesting people for it. Those who fall through the cracks by accident or unwillingly, then work to find their way out of the dark, are more compelling characters than those who wear their deliberate anti-social posing like a badge. You could be normal but you chose different because you're Special and Better. Good for you. You have nothing of substance to offer anyone, normal or on the fringes, because you just admitted to believing you are above them. You have no story to tell that will connect to those you dislike..
That, if anything, is the ultimate failure of Mixtape's story. It wants you to care about people who don't care, people who would actually hate you. It wants sympathy for the unsympathetic. In short, it a whole lot of nothing for those who believe in nothing.
All of this comes around to the fact that right now the past is popular even with younger kids. They want to know it better. Products like Mixtape are trying to sell them a past that never existed. They're lying to them to sell product and profit off a past they never experienced themselves. These kids are looking for honesty, for hope, and maybe a window into a world they never knew to add onto their own: and they'll find none of that here. They can tell, too. You'll find plenty of clips online of streams, reviews, and Vtubers, dogging it for its "Millennial writing and humor." They can see through it all, and that's certainly a good thing. It's saying this doesn't work anymore.
The original intent of this whole project, however, still rubs me the wrong way. It's indicative of a generation that won't move on, and I'm not talking about the 1990s. I'm talking about the revisionist brain worms that cause nonsense like this "game" to be made in the first place. That didn't exist in the '90s and no one needs it to exist now.
Much has been made of "grifting" in the current entertainment spaces. One aspect of it not elaborated on is the reason it is so prevalent is because those doing it have no respect for the people they're trying to wrestle money out of. They only want money and kudos from cliques of people like them. They have no interest in normal people, which is why they have no qualms fleecing them.
If these irony poisoned types don't want to sell honesty, then what are they trying to sell and why is it so important that you buy it from them? Every piece of art exists for a reason. Why does this lie exist to do? Who is it for?
Nostalgia might be a feeling as much as it is a time and place, but if the feeling is built on a lie, then you have been lied to by the feeling. Lies are fake which in turn makes the nostalgia phony. To what end is this lie meant to take you? What benefit do you get beyond giving money for a product pumped out for consumption? How does it benefit you, in the end?
The reason I live in a wasteland is because of lies like Mixtape, because of those who care nothing of truth or honesty beyond what they can get materially. The reason '90s nostalgia exists is because so many people want to get away from the grifters crowding in on all sides to hose them and are looking for a window to a world different from this one. For the jailer, to sell the key to another cell, then lock it up and say the prisoner is now free, is an evil act. It is wrong.
You might ask why all this matters. Why do you care so much about your past, old man? It's just a product: either consume it or shut up. I care because it's fake, it's cynical, and I am well within my right to loathe an attempt to cheaply exploit my past and lie to my face because it's easy. Art should mean something, even a silly throwaway video game, and it is silly to not expect more. At some point we need to expect more than the bare minimum.
You deserve more than to be exploited. We all do, and asking for a little bit more from people you are giving money to should be normal. What is all this for, in the end, anyway?
Welcome back to the Wasteland! I hope you're having a lovely weekend on this very unimportant holiday. Today, I would like to cover a subject not quite touched on much these days. That would be the remainder of the 2000s.
Back at the end of the '90s, things were changing, the overall culture was becoming more connected. Windows 95, especially, broke open the dam that allowed people beyond the tech literate into computer ownership and then onto the internet. This was happening the same time the Telecommunications Act of 1996 consolidated the music industry, the ACT finally managed to whittle cartoons down to edutainment garbage and specialty channels, and the comic book industry was flatlining. In other words, the digital world was broadening at the same time the wider culture was shrinking in scope and in possibilities.
While this was happening, the younger generation was being raised on the only remaining wild west left: the early internet. This mysterious place allowed them to pretty much say and do anything they wanted after the rest of the culture had been slowly gutted to the point Bowling Alone no longer looked like a prophecy but the aim of those in charge.
Physical communities and spaces vanished, and new identities were being forged away from tradition, community, and art and creation. These new identities were formed online and they were centered on consuming corporate products.
If you're of a certain age, you might remember the explosion of "Geek Culture" in the early 2000s. This was an invention of megacorps created by feeding internet scenes their products and rewarding them with baubles and warm feelings. The era of the message board and community manager. Stop by the forums, wear your badge in your avatar or sig with pride, and endlessly talk about our Product. It is part of who you are, after all. This is what Geek Culture was, and why it would later be so easy to weaponize it against their customers when they changed their approach.
That this happened right after every offline entertainment sector was gutted by events like the above was not a victory of Pop Culture as a valid identity and goal, but that all those crippled industries could be now folded into one umbrella and make its users part of the Lifestyle Brand cult. You no longer like the Smashing Pumpkins and enjoy playing Quake III: you were now an "alternative rock fan" who was also a "gamer" and that was z very important part of your identity. What you enjoyed then became who you were.
As these identities grew, so did parodies and and mocking. The ever-hated Big Bang Theory TV show epitomized this new Geek Culture identity, and how good nerds all liked "nerdy" things and behaved and thought the same way about every topic and issue. The show was laughed at when it was on, but is it that much different when you visit a random Pop Culture livestream on YouTube in 2026? How different is it? Proudly antisocial, acceptable and safe political views, endlessly snarky and sarcastic like their teenage years ever ended, and still dressed and wearing the same pop culture shirts and showing off the same shelves they did decades ago, the stereotype the show presented wasn't made up: it was based on real behavior.
And that is what hurt the most.
All this preamble is to explain why the above video exists. For the Millennial Geek, G4 was a beacon of Geekdom and an important memory that defined their childhood. For anyone outside of that group, G4 was a cynical cash grab wrapped up in a made up corporate identity. Now, there is truth to both these views, but the full picture is that it was a network that made its mark appealing to a burgeoning socially acceptable Geek identity and it did that very well.
The cracks in what that identity was and how those who helped fashion it for that young generation are both in said above history of X-Play. At the heart of it is a level of seething hatred and anger for the audience that, while not everyone involved felt, is palpable in retrospect, especially in the atmosphere of today's dead pop culture institutions being constantly skin-suited for spare change. They've never really liked their audience, because they never knew them, and their idea of who their audience was never actually existed in the first place.
This attitude spins out into modern day. Why does it seem like there's so much contempt and hatred for the audience thinking the Wrong Things and why are they not falling in line like they once used to? Why shouldn't I be allowed to selfishly slaughter the works of Tolkien or even the creation of the Hasbro corporation whenever I want to? Why should I give the audience anything they want? Don't I matter most of all?
The fact of the matter is that there was never any real connection between us and them, it was always smoke and mirrors. The old adage that someone's always selling you something extends to TV networks: what exactly were they selling their audience? Not just products, but what was the deeper worldview they were selling? What was acceptable at the time was acceptable because those in charge deemed it so.
Just like a YouTuber who was throwing gamer words around in 2013 at the age of 27 pretending they were "ignorant" at how acceptable it was: it's all a pose. Back then it was simply a way of weaving through what was culturally acceptable to profit off of at the time . . . which is no different than how it works right now. There was never any "edge" it was all just selling an image, and now the image is no longer profitable. It was never real, it was always fake, and at no point was genuine connection the point of what was being done. That is why it is so easy for such people who do this to hate their customers: they never cared to begin with. And this is the hard lesson those who grew up with the fake Geek Culture back then had to learn.
The wild west days of the internet are gone, and there is no equivalent today. Younger generations are moving away from entertainment sectors into their own worlds, whether it be to short form internet videos, old entertainment detached from the modern complex, or creating their own spaces. There is no younger generation with any ties to the way things once were. There is no uniting aspect of culture today except that there is no culture.
All of this comes together to show why the relaunch of G4 was such a disaster: it had no place left and no one to connect with except to cynically reach out to the audience they "wish" they had, which is the same story with every failing part of every industry these days. Having to rely on an audience they never liked to begin with makes them bitter and resentful, wanting desperately to be seen as Good by the designated Good Guys, instead of fading away into irrelevance due to the complete lack of humility and gratitude that got them there in the first place.
I've seen it myself, too. I've personally had the creator of Twisted Metal and God of War tell me directly straight out how much he dislikes Gamers, the very audience who gave him a career. So seeing a host of a G4 series do the same is not surprising. The hatred of the ones who made them and the desire to appeal to those who hate them is a spiritual sickness that defines the back half of the 20th century so very well and why it lead to where we are now.
There is no future resurrecting these old crusty time capsules, because they aren't what we got out of them. They are always going to be what they wanted to be, first and foremost. The same goes for ancient IPs and companies. They're over and done, and they're not coming back, not even if you put the "right" person in charge. This is the last hurdle those older than Zoomers have to finally understand. We can't go back to that. It's finished.
So we should treat it as just that.
Anyway, here is a bonus video from the above creator on Loss, a meme from the same era which reveals much about that era in turn.
Have yourself a great weekend and I will see you soon.
The end of August is finally here, and we're heading into the last third of the year! One last stretch to go and we'll have made it. Until then, let's have a little fun as we usually do on the weekends. Today will be a more straightforward one.
Considering recent topics, I wanted to go over one we've touched on a bit, but one that seems to be coming back with younger generations: the rental experience. What exactly do we miss about rental stores, and what can we get back?
For one, obviously the preference for a long time has been to own. When DVD first came in during the late '90s and became standard in the early '00s (almost two decades ago) it became a lot more common to buy what you wanted. Rental stores themselves (the chains, particularly, though some smaller ones did this too) cleared out old stock cheap, some even offering classic games that go for hundreds on the second hand market for peanuts. It made sense why that was popular, sometimes favorites disappeared and you would never find them again. You had to grab what you could.
That era passed quickly, however. and the '00s changed as they went. By the end, social media was standard, cheap DVDs were common, and this new thing called streaming and even YouTube had taken over by the late '00s. Blockbuster died, becoming a corporate monolith pumping Hollywood product at the expense of local scenes and lack of variety, showing that the customer could have more than the hobbled selection they were left with by the end of that behemoth.
I know there are younger people (particularly '00s kids, Millennials) that don't believe me, but Blockbuster was a corporatized monopoly that replaced local industry, no different than pretty much everything we complain about today. It choked out variety, (local stores had their own selections not mandated and supplied by Hollywood directly), local filmmakers who used to have incentive to share their wares at their local store, and turned the rental experience into a bland facsimile of what it once was. Everything you complain about today in regards to places like McDonalds, Walmart, and even the recent Cracker Barrell disaster, all started with Blockbuster. Make no mistake, if it was alive today, it would be just like them.
That said, Blockbuster was not without merit, even if a part of the decline of the industry itself. There is something missing in the entertainment space without renting around. In fact, there is something missing in the entertainment space in general, as we have finally accepted it all as throwaway and interchangeable, and as we've done so we've begun to crave that missing piece we've been missing. But what exactly was it?
As the above video shows, it's all the little things, the touches of humanity that have since been lost to interpersonal Consuming and hiding away from the world.
Just think of how much the medium of cinema has changed, for the worse since the 20th century. One can also throw television in here too, and even aspects of gaming (like multiplayer). It started as a public activity in a high trust society, and ended as a private affair in a low trust one. It doesn't matter whether you "hate people" or think your taste impeccable and beyond reproach, but an activity that once included sociality as an important factor which is now completely stripped away signals something important has indeed been entirely lost.
Some might say we cannot get that back, that "progress" is inevitable and time marches on so we must adapt. While the latter is true, the former does not understand that every single change that happens in life is not automatically "progress" and needs to be kept around. We now know that something behind "new" does not preclude its quality, a lesson we had to learn after that decade of disaster known as the 2000s and the rot to come of the 2010s.
There are things we lost, important things, and we need to bring them back. We cannot keep pretending we can go on as we currently are.
Streaming has its uses: online gatherings, meetings, and even video sites, have their place. What it cannot do is replace real life needs, like social interaction. For example, online multiplayer has never come close to replicating the feeling of playing in the same room with someone you can directly interact with. Even when the games were better, they never matched up due to missing that important feature earlier classics took for granted. The cinematic experience is the same.
It goes without saying that the solution isn't to bring Blockbuster back, or to get another company to replace what it did. The corporate era is over now, and it's clear we cannot bring it back. Much like how McDonalds hanging its awful modern design wouldn't change how choked out the fast food industry has been of fresh blood in decades, just putting up logos and chanting old sales pitches and advertising lingo won't repair the larger problem.
It has to start locally. It just does. There is no other option. If one really wants the rental experience to return, it is going to have to start there. It is going to have to start where it began, in small mom and pop shops serving the local community. People are going to have to drive out of their way, even from the next town over, to scope out your wares and spread the word. Just as it once was, this is the only way it can be.
That being said, it isn't like just offering rentals will change the social climate. Telling someone to just start a business to fix social problems is a recipe for disaster. But we have to start somewhere with an idea, and that is closer to the ballpark than wishing for the return of corporate control of an industry again. That is just plain never going to happen and not a path worth traveling down. We do not need another Netflix. We do not even need the current one, to be brutally honest.
So I'm not going to make this post anti-Blockbuster or anything of the like, because it really doesn't matter at this point. However, there is something to be gained from such a simple industry being lost purely for automated digital distribution.
The arts and entertainment in general have been losing their connection with society, with real people, and it isn't a new phenomenon. We've trumpeted anti-social "leaders" and artists for decades as the people whose example is worth following, and it's led us to where we are now. We can't go any farther in this direction as it it has done little but foster acceptable mental illness in the mainstream and confuse the abnormal with the normal. All standards have been lost.
To go forward at this point requires going back. It isn't a suggestion, it is simply reality. We've spent too far mindlessly plowing ahead and ignoring the road signs while plugging our ears and repeating "progress" like it's a religious mantra of some kind. Continuing to do that, despite its very clear failure will not just magically work now, because it never did to begin with.
This goes beyond just renting, but I think that much is apparent to anyone reading this, so I'll just stop right here. What is more important is that we're aware of past mistakes so that we don't make them again just in more ridiculous ways.
That's all for today, I hope you've had a good August and I will see you in September! Let's charge into fall in style.
Thanks again for all your support. 2025 has been a weird one, but there are still many of cool surprises ahead of us. I can't wait until I can show you what I've been working on.
We've talked about the lonely generations reaching middle age and what we can do about it, but how about going back a little and seeing where it first became visible? Today I have visual evidence of the originating point for an entire generation, the one most well known for being trapped in their memories and nostalgia. I'm, of course, talking about Gen Y. An entire generation that came of age during the eye of the hurricane that cracked during Cultural Ground Zero and bottomed out during their early adult years in the '00s.
We all know how that story went in that first quarter block of the 21st century. But what was it like being Gen Y before everything collapsed? Well, I can actually give you an example of what my generation was like right this very second!
The above video details the rise and fall of Generation Y centered on one figure who was infamous in the early popular era of the internet. This was the early '00s back when social media was just getting off the ground and Gen Y was learning how to use YouTube to express themselves. In case you haven't realized it yet, the subject is about the Spoony One himself, one of the early wave of those internet reviewers. While it might seem odd to bring up this one figure and his downfall, and you might even consider him an outlier to that generation, there is a very good reason that his rise and fall endures as a cautionary tale despite the countless internet figures that come and go everyday. No one is waiting for the Gamedude to return, for example.
It's been nearly two decades and yet still people think of Spoony. Why is that? Why of all those figures is he the one that elicits the most nostalgia for that specific time and place that is gone now, more than others from the time? Even the above video maker, being a younger figure, was a member of his audience who looked to him to learn about certain things. Even now he still thinks Spoony has something the others didn't. Let us look into why so many think so, and ponder if that is truly the case or just wishful thinking.
The Angry Video Game Nerd is still popular. He's still working at it. It is the same with the Nostalgia Critic. James Rolfe and Doug Walker are the names everyone in these circles knows. These two are still among the biggest in their niches despite the passage of decades since their early beginnings. Most of the others have disappeared, some have imploded, some have even died (RIP Armake21), but despite it all, there is one critic that so many await a return for to this day to resume his career as if nothing has happened. That is Spoony. If you know anything about the era, you are even probably nodding your head along with that, even if you might not understand why. Why is it that nostalgia for Spoony remain over all the others?
The logo you might remember
Unfortunately, there is a realization here, and one his audience all knows deep down. He cannot really return, and we will get to why that is soon. I promise, we will discuss it soon enough! First let us discuss his initial popularity to set it up.
The early era of internet critics back in those early days of YouTube and social media were mostly just AVGN rip-offs. We all know it now, but we also all knew it at the time. There was a demand for over the top deconstructions of childhood favorites, and boy oh boy were many Gen Ys ready to fill that niche. There were almost as many angry reviewers as there were stars in the sky, and none of them really lasted beyond that initial year or two.
Most of these figures are watched for nostalgia's sake today, ironically, though they are an interesting window into an era of the internet and culture long gone today. Despite that, however, there were a few that stood out in the crowd. Aside from the above big dogs like James and Doug, the one that almost reached their level, and many would say even now was their equal, was Spoony of the Spoony Experiment. But he wasn't just an angry reviewer. Unlike the others, he wasn't a character, he wasn't overblown or cartoony, he was just himself and really excitable and personable about what he covered. Spoony loved cool things, movies, games, TV shows, wrestling, whatever, it didn't matter. His excitement was palpable, whether he liked something or not and it was always fun to hear him talk about what he enjoyed.
In those days, it was like meeting a friend and talking about things you both had in common, and it was refreshing. For Gen Y guys, we all knew someone like him, or had a bit of him inside us, or understood where he was coming from even when we didn't agree. For younger audiences he was like an older brother showing them obscure and wild entertainment from the fringes you might never have seen otherwise. Even now in the modern corporate and "professional" YouTube world there isn't really anyone else like him. The world to Gen Y was exciting, there were cool things to be found everywhere, and those things were going to be good in the end.
And then they weren't. This is where we get to those days of the later '00s where the bleakness started to take hold of the generation. Spoony was not only not an exception to this: in many ways he was the posterchild for it all. Those were rough times.
Spoony's downfall was a tough one to watch, even at the time. Though he became an internet punchline, unlike many other early internet figures that crashed and burned, Spoony's was different. Even as he faded away, to this day a not-insignificant amount of people await his return. There is a good reason for that, despite everything that happened, many still wait for him. It will probably never happen, and it should be discussed why.
As mentioned before, check out the above video for details on what exactly happened. In retrospect, his "controversies" are actually quite tame (and water under the bridge at this point), but one part sticks out more than all of those. There is a moment in Spoony's rant at the end of his Ultima series, the last large project he did before he flamed out, that tips his hand. One can feel his despair over everything he loved turning to shit, getting worse, and imploding, and that there was nothing he could do about it. This was clearly meant to cap the video off with a gag, but his clear disappointment over his precious memories being destroyed and being forgotten by the passage of time and corporate avarice, and how nothing will ever be good again, ended up reflecting the feelings of much of his audience at the time. The elephant in the room is that we all knew it was true, and we all knew we lacked the power to save anything at the time. It was the source of Gen Y's despair at the time.
That rant is a good example of that era of Gen Y existence when the warmth of youth has finally faded and left us in the empty cold of the late '00s/early '10s, a hopeless era where loneliness and alienation became common, and it did not feel like any light was coming. The realization was that everything we thought we loved was purposefully being destroyed (and it was), and that without it our generation did not think we had meaning otherwise.
Infamous, but not the low point.
This is why Spoony will not return. Not because he cannot get past that despair, he can, (we very much all can) but that the realization is that those products are not what made those times great. It wasn't the IPs, the logos, or the carboard boxes and jewel cases. Those could be cool, but they weren't the source of enjoyment. When the nostalgia fades, what remains are the ideas, the spirit, the connection, and the sense of higher purpose al the best art and entertainment points toward. At this point, Gen Y is not reveling in the past: they are moving forward using the past as a way to shine a light into newer unexplored territory of the like we never imagined back then.
The reason Spoony can't come back is because there's no more nostalgia for him to mine, and he doesn't need to do that anymore. It's been recorded and shared with the world. His part in that Experiment is over. So now what? If Spoony wanted to come back, it would have to be to move forward in the same way his cohort is starting to. He wouldn't be able to do the same thing anymore.
Were Spoony to return, not only would his demons have to be beaten, but he would have to be in a better place to show those waiting for him a better way out of the pit not only he, but his entire generation, had been trapped in. Some are still there, too. In essence, they may think they want Spoony to taken them back to the past, but what they actually want is to be brought to the future, and they still think he has the ability to that. Maybe he does.
Does the above sound strange? Are members of Gen Y, or his younger watchers in the Millennials, really still waiting for a reviewer who stopped reviewing years ago? They are waiting for something, and probably more than they think they are. Well, the audience waiting for him is waiting for him because he reminds them of themselves. Spoony has always been a reflection of who the audience thought they were, wanted to be, or knew someone like. They live in the same fallen world as he does and wish desperately for the parts of them left behind in that nostalgic haze to also be saved with the rest of them. If he can make it, they all can, essentially.
In the '00s we were told everything old sucked, was useless, and had no value. Now, in the '20s, a quarter of a century removed, we realize how wrong that was. If it had no value we wouldn't have been able to connect with any of it, we wouldn't have huddled around YouTube comments on videos and pages (until those were removed) had countless response videos, or taken to forums and social media to talk amongst ourselves over it. We ad it all in a cloak or sarcasm and irony to detach ourselves, but we all knew it mattered. That is why when it disappeared, a level of despair fell over us all. We didn't realize what we had until it was gone. It was the connection itself that mattered, and that is why we still talk about these things even so many years removed from them.
The old days were good, not perfect, but good. We salvaged what we could from them to bring what mattered forward, but those days are gone and over with now. We can't just marvel at and swim in the past. We need new ways to look forward. We don't need dead IPs, franchises, or corporations, to rule our future. We need to be able to look ahead to something better than what we grew up with. Spoony himself is a relic of that era, but he's also a person. He's a human being who can't live there any more than we can. You can visit the past anytime, but no one else is there anymore.
It is the same when a new multiplayer FPS comes out and people hope against hope for it to be a draw for multiplayer. They want desperately to return to the good times. They want the "community" to return, be it Call of Duty, Overwatch, or even Unreal. They all know it won't happen, it can't happen, but they desperately desire that lost connection again.
But what was the essence of that connection? Playing with strangers? No, it was a variation of an earlier phenomenon.
When one looks at old photos of LAN parties over two decades ago you just realize none of these new games will ever compare, and they don't. Part of the appeal has always been friends, acquaintances, and neighbors, getting together to have fun over the same thing. We all desired that connection. We don't have those anymore, though. There are no communities, no one has the time, and everyone is off in their own little spaces, which means there will never be anything that lives up to the way it once was. That's just the blunt truth.
Waiting for Spoony to return is a lot like waiting for those local communities to return. They're gone and not coming back. You can go back to the past but, again, no one else is there anymore. One can build something different, perhaps something better, but it will only come from taking in what came before and applying it to the future. That is what Gen Y's job will be: to be the preservers and the ones carrying the memories forward to apply in new situations. Our job is to not linger and drown: the hour is much, much too late for that.
At this time, I think most of us have figured this out. We are building, working, and striving for something better. The age for lingering and pining is over and done. That's a good thing: we can always improve and grow.
If Spoony does come back I would hope he's a completely different person, like the rest of us, finished with living in the past and hopeful for a better future. I would hope he could escape those demons of those darker years and build something new. They are over for the rest of us now, but it doesn't mean we have to leave everything behind. We just have to understand where we are now, and what we can offer that no one else can.
Gen Y's worst days are behind us. It won't be perfect going forward, there will be a lot of rough waters and tough times, but we're finally moving out of the pit of the past and ready to carry ourselves forward. It's about due, but we finally know what we can do now. We don't need permission, we don't need to bend the knee to people who hate us, and we don't need to fade away. We won't be defeated. In fact, we will win.
