alt Hacker NewsI feel like the last 30 years are significantly less distinctive than the prior 30 (actually 70+) years. The 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s all had iconic and partitioned cultures that are instantly recognizable. I feel like that started to fade a bit in the 90s (what I call the Pottery Barn decade). The 2000s have felt more "alive" to me than the 90s but they're also significantly more post-modern and less distinctive. I consider the 1980s "peak humanity", prior to mega capitalism and data driven marketing enabled by the rise of computing power. I don't think we could ever go back to an iconic and focused cultural decade like say, the 1960s.
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With time I am starting to think that "decades" are defined with around 10 year delay. When you are inside them or a little later, you see too much of nuance and are too much in your everyday concerns away from the culture. For example, to the common young consumer today the 1980s may be about synth and maybe hair metal in music, where it was infinitely more happening. They also probably have an exaggerated view of importance of tech for an average person back then. The 1960s are often seen through the culture of teens to maybe 30 year olds, while also there was much separate adult culture and concerns.
By now, I think people have well formed esthetic of 1990s and truth be told even 2000s (roughly around it being an electro, futuristic, MP3 players, Windows XP era). One can also more or less predict how 2010s will be about stereotypical hipster culture and the bronze age[1] of social media, maybe with some mixture of increasing culture wars. Though because we're still fighting them, they may be harder to estheticize.
I have my own views and am far from the cheap trick of accusing others of nostalgia, or the fallacy that culture never declines. But to discuss value, we have to have criteria. To me, being pluralistic, rich and free is probably more important than distinctiveness. Living in a cool decade is far lower in my list of priorities than having a good life and accomplishing things. Not saying which times I'd favor. Anyway, always by living later at least we can be wiser, however sad prize it may be.
[1] Evoking more dirt and less shine than the golden age, but still some mercenary glamor.
How distinct was 1940s US culture from the 1930s? To me, a European born much later, the 1940s are the decade of 20th-century American aesthetics that blends the most into the previous. The changes I see are all related to WWII. Civilian everyday life captured in film and press photos seems the same as in the 1930s.
BTW Chuck Klosterman discussed this at length in this 2022 book on the 90's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nineties_(book)
I think it's a pretty deep point -- your memory and consciousness are shaped by the media environment (media being the thing that Klosterman thinks about obsessively)
And the media environment drastically changed after the 90's -- because of the Internet
I think his main point was about access to media in different eras, but it's worth reading directly if you feel like that