The X-Files was the right show at the right time; a "bubble" of the '90s, if you will. The internet and mobile technology was nascent. The world was getting bigger, but was still quite "small". I definitely feel quite privileged to have lived through this time, and enjoy all things '90s quite a bit. Any, and I mean any, attempt to remake this show is doomed to failure, and I wish they would just stop. Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to hang out with the Lone Gunmen for a bit.
The one thing about that era that has always seemed unique is that for people who lived it, a few years was a very big deal. Even now that I'm much older, talking to people in my age range it still blows my mind how different people's life experiences were just due to be 2-3 years different in age.
Especially for anything tech oriented.
Talk to people who were computer science majors in the 90s, you'll find that their curriculum varied wildly depending on exactly what years they were there. a 2-3 year difference could be huge.
Same is true for how they experienced the internet, interacted with media, whether or not they were mobile native or landline native, and so much more.
Less tech oriented but the 90s had an enormous shift in terms of corporate culture. The people who were a few years older than me reported wearing suits to work. By the time I went off to be a corpo, it was usually casual wear, not even business casual. For the same types of roles & companies!
There were ones before that, my mom had one. Apple added polish and used a capacitive touchscreen instead of a resistive one, then amped up the hype in their commercials, so everyone forgot these existed.
Possibly a Palm Treo, introduced in 2002, or a Windows-based PocketPC, introduced in 2000.
I always felt that Apple basically reimplemented PalmOS with the benefit of ~10 years newer technology and a wildly efficient Chinese supply chain.
I definitely wouldn't say that these devices were mainstream. They were very much targeted toward business people and hardcore nerds. The iPhone definitely revolutionized the market, with its vastly more desirable aesthetic and approachable interface.
It may have been a 2005 phone or something. I think it was a Nokia, Motorola, or Samsung phone (our whole family was on those at the time), but whatever it was it had just about the complete form factor and an app store - mostly a screen with a grid of apps on home, with a couple of buttons at the bottom (more Android than iPhone). Maybe it had a slide-out keyboard? Can't remember that part for sure.
Fringe definitely handled the continuing storyline much better. The way they blend in, then transition from, the monster-of-the-week format is excellent writing. It did put a deadline on the story, something which the X-Files writers seemed allergic to as the series began aging.
Worth remembering that both the X-Files and Babylon 5 premiered in the same year (1993).
TV science fiction was just beginning the transition from "monster of the week" to season+ long pre-written plot arcs.
Twin Peaks was only a few years earlier (1990), which pioneered(?) bringing the hitherto only soap opera and family drama continuous storyline to other genres.
TNG is indicative of this too, with the adaptation of season-long plotting between 1-2 (little), 3 (some), and 4+ (more).
Which is to say when the X-Files premiered, having a series-long plan of any sort was still a novel idea in TV scifi.
Well, I for one would not be disappointed at a sequel or continuation of Firefly, as long as they figure out a way to bring Wash back from the dead and Joss Whedon has absolutely nothing at all to do with it.
I feel like I'm the only person who didn't really vibe with Firefly. I usually like the "space Western" motif but Firefly was so broad and over the top with it that it just seemed silly to me.
I'll grant that Firefly's sci-fi western motif was novel, but it could have done fine without it. The show's magic for me was its characters and clever dialogue. It it was funny, and it had heart. There was an enormous amount of satisfying character development for such a short run.
The Expanse is fairly good on its own and I did enjoy it but it could have totally filled the void left by Firefly if they would have just had a few comedy writers on the team. Instead, we got a ship full of gloomy self-loathing heroes with poor mental health who were too caught up in second-guessing everything they did to fully appreciate the absurdity of everything happening around them. (I know, I know, the show came from a book series, just humor me...)
Devil's advocate: deft use of zeitgeist-known settings in time-limited media can make for more efficient storytelling.
A captain of a ship.
An outlaw.
In a western-seeming system of planets.
If nothing else was said, that already paints a pretty vivid background from the audience's preconceptions. All of that exposition can be skipped. Or at most, quickly nodded to in order to confirm.
Sure, a show could rebuild the same thing neater from primitives, but how much show time would that take? Western was "close enough" to the point, so they went with it.
They're going to, because there is no property that will not be milked for nostalgia.
Although honestly, it could work if they played into the cynicism and uncertainty of the modern UFO phenomenon. If the "conspiracy" is a hall of mirrors comprised of psyops, lies, grift and folklore and the truth is something very weird exists but the government doesn't know what it is. Establish a "post-truth" narrative where the only thing we know is that everything we thought we knew (Roswell, Area 51, Dulce, Majestic 12) was a lie.
Maybe at some point have the in-universe version of Northrop-Grumman (or pick whatever defense contractor you like) actually make a breathrough in reverse engineering alien technology (or say it's China, to play on American xenophobia) and now the enemy isn't some vast government conspiracy but dark capitalism. Have an Elon Musk analogue, AI death cults around weird alien artifacts, SV startup culture, UFO grifters within the government, creeping fascism, all of it.
Someone could make an intelligent and interesting show that studies the nature of hyperreality, the evolution of UFO folklore as a mirror of generational fears, and the embrace of metaphysics as a trauma response to the dehumanization of modern technological society. The problem is, that wouldn't be the X-Files. Something closer to Lone Gunmen, maybe, as written by Grant Morrison, without cops being protagonists, but the vibe of the 90's and the Smoking Man and all of that is just too quaint to be plausible nowadays.
They'll do it anyway, and they'll do it badly, and they'll probably do it with AI.
That wouldn't work. The X-Files revolves around a government conspiracy because governments are genuinely scary. They have near infinite resources, can break any law they want at will, are frequently motivated by convoluted social engineering schemes, don't investigate themselves (so it requires a plucky outsider hero character) and so on.
If you try and make capitalism the enemy you just end up with Erin Brockovich.
I don't know. Obviously a certain personality type considers government to be an all-encompassing evil (which is the Cold-War era fear the conspiracy theories of the X-Files drew from) but in the modern day corporations (particularly tech companies) seem to be far more competent and dangerous.
And I think it makes sense that if there were defense contractors and companies secretly reverse engineering alien technology, that capitalism would be their primary motivation. I'm just saying the zeitgeist of conspiracy theory tends to reflect current generational fears and a remake of the X-Files should reflect that.
Defense contractors only have one customer - the government. They are "capitalism" in the weakest sense of the world. Tech companies aren't scary. Everyone interacts with them, they're run by well known personalities, they're subject to the courts and follow laws etc. The story tension you'd need just isn't there.
I think the government conspiracy fear works best for the audience who still has some belief in government. So it is a disturbing moral corruption of something they consider powerful and benign. Lots of people older than myself reported this feeling from the 60s and 70s as things like the Pentagon Papers came to light.
The corporate fear works if you assume either fascism (top-down collusion between the two), government incompetence/irrelevance (so corporate power is unchecked), or widespread government corruption (more bottom-up collusion).
So feelings on these themes may help indicate your worldview or the worldview of the audience and writers in different eras?
24 is another one that was at the right time, although the big one was not under their control. It started showing 2 months after the 9/11 attacks. More to the general point, it was also at the time that computers and internet usage was fast growing, but gaps in the digital side meant it was still plausible that field agents were important. They also had plot lines such as the bad guys using online video game chat (a smaller but growing thing in the early 2000s) as a hidden communication channel which I believe is pulled from real events.
I'm at least happy to hear that you think America is better now. Typically agitators say things like America is more racist now than ever (including before Civil Rights).
> I'm at least happy to hear that you think America is better now
Pretty certain I said nothing of the sort.
Given that both major parties in the US are now fully complicit in arming and enabling live-streamed genocide, there's a pretty strong case to be made that anti Arab and Islamophobic racism is reaching new heights.
And while most actual Americans are very much against the arming and enabling of said genocide, that hasn't motivated them to move on from the two party system.
There's a widespread notion that "agitating" against two genocidal parties is idealism, or perfectionism. It's really just doing your duty as a person, and the fact that so many Americans don't care/understand that points to... Massive widespread racism, ding ding ding.
Uh, no. Totally different times. To me the mid to late 90's where almost the same, among 2000 and pre S11 2001, chill, futuristic times, with computers, consoles, comic books, everything, the final death blow to the 80's which began at 1992/1993. Maybe from 2001/2002, but from 2002-2003 the one was grim, dark, pro-torture on series and tons of war propaganda in movies from the US.
Not only bigger, but more mysterious at that. Information wasn't instant and wasn't readily available. There were tales, there were rumors, there were news, and you had to rely on those for your own worldview. Anything further you had to make an expedition to your encyclopedia or library or other means to dive deeper into it. If you made an appointment with someone, you had to rely on the fact both sides will be there; No portable means of communication (easily / cheap). Now we have portable comm devices where we even use them between rooms.
As sibling comment said, I feel privileged to have experienced that, but especially the whole transition from analogue world into digital and then online. It was quite a ride. Around dotcom boom, the second wave of internet users coming online, internet was relatively widespread,. It was also heterogeneous. Quite amazing actually. Now we're down to few big walled gardens and it's definitely different and, in my opinion, worse.
In the world of "strange stuff that occasionally happened on the internet back then", my favorite example is from September 11, 2001.
Nearly all US news websites were at a crawl. But somebody at CNN - knowing that their website was basically nonfunctional - piped the closed caption feed from their regular news channel into an IRC channel. (It was hosted at CNN, so clearly it was internal.) And I found that out because someone posted about it on Slashdot.
It's funny, being someone who was terminally online then and now, back then I had immediate access to orders of magnitude more information than I did a few years prior as well as a normal person. These days the amount of information I can pull at the drop of a hat is so much more than back then it is mind boggling. Also a normal person isn't that much different in capability vs a terminally online person such as myself.
Yes, and that imo kind of cheapens the whole effect of it. We're witnessing something similar now with genAI and slop people produce with it. First few moments it was wow, look at all of this and now it's noise.
Conspiracy theories were a lot more recondite back then, less accessible to what people today would call "normies." Before X Files you would rarely encounter them unless you subscribed to the Loompanics catalog, or ran into a LaRouche activist on a college campus, or shopped at the kind of used bookstore where an old guy woud talk your ear off about the FEMA secret government or something.
I don't really agree. I remember getting books from the library in the early 90s that talked about UFO conspiracy theories. There was a lot of weird stuff on TV, before the X-files, like In Search Of (which I think was from the 70s).
Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World was a thing among such things. It was present in popular culture, it wasn't obscure, but it did culminate with X-files for sure.
Unless you had access to unusual books they didn't really talk about conspiracy theories per se. I remember reading 90s books about aliens and they tended to be collections of UFO encounter reports, sometimes alongside or in the same books as reports of fairies, werewolves and other monsters. They were very much treated as a modern version of the local villager swearing he saw a goat that looked like Satan... just random tattle, repeated for amusement more than as part of a coherent thesis.
> Unless you had access to unusual books they didn't really talk about conspiracy theories per se.
Definitely remember at least one mentioning "the men in black" (with a picture) and government coverups.
> They were very much treated as a modern version of the local villager swearing he saw a goat that looked like Satan... just random tattle, repeated for amusement more than as part of a coherent thesis.
IIRC, the tone was more "some people think." They weren't especially skeptical or judgemental.
Yeah, the internet felt more like an unexplored place then. Now it feels like a service to access some other services, but back then, it felt like a real world that could contain anything.
It was happier, with plenty of opportunity for everyone and society felt like it was held up on common ground. It defnately felt bigger, because it was.
I wrote an essay for a private journal last year about how the X-Files mainstreamed anti-scientific and anti-government conspiracy thinking and thereby led to the downfall of American democracy in the 21st century. It valorized the fringe, presaged "do your own research" and consistently told us that the skeptic is always wrong, the believer is always vindicated.
It wasn't a bubble of the 90's, it was a prescient blueprint for the 2020s.
I've heard this idea before but I think it's primarily hindsight. At the time The X Files was on, there were even more popular shows about strong institutions, like Law & Order or The West Wing. So if popular TV was influential, why didn't society evolve toward those portrayals? I think we can look back today and say "that looked like this," but it doesn't mean that caused this.
It took something far more powerful than a TV show that was mildly popular for a few years to create what we live today. It took the great flatness of the Internet. As Terry Pratchett predicted to Bill Gates back then.
The X-Files didn't presage it, the X-Files were inspired by it. Conspiratorial "do your own research" style thinking long predated the X-Files (both in existence and in popularity).
If anything, the 90s were the one era where that thinking had receded more than at any other time. Then 9/11 brought it roaring back.
I think it’s simpler than that, the internet makes it easier for conspiracy people to reinforce each others beliefs in a space where no one is going to challenge their fallacious reasoning.
Any attempts to remake this show including the new X-file seasons were a failure. I believe it was this insane time in history where two young federal agents in the early 90's without smartphones and mobile internet would make this conspiracy stories even more believable. This time felt due to the emerging underground tech scene more mysterious than probably any other span in history. So if someone would want to make a new conspiracy mystery drama it would have to play again in the early 90's.
There are still lots of us alive who have experienced this. And to us, X-files felt high tech for the time. This was a time period when I think people were just waking up to powers of computers and technology, in particular alien tech, due to the incalculable complexities of ideating and creating magical electrical boxes - microprocessors. How could humans be capable of doing this, after all?
One poster already mentioned Matrix, but games like Alpha Centauri and others had also explored socioeconomic themes of power laws and what massive sweeping changes entail.
You can still get the 90s and 2000s experience to some extent. It hasn’t truly left, but society has moved on so it is a rather isolated journey and somewhat limited. But you won’t get MTV or any of that nowadays sadly.
For me, my car is a mid 2000s model so the way I listen to music is to buy CDs. I haven’t stopped. That part of 80s/90s hasn’t gone away, but it doesn’t really feel nostalgic either because it’s normal. To others of course, especially newer generation, they don’t even know we had to rewind tapes manually sometimes because the device would fail to do it properly.
The larger thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this.
What I remember most about the 90s was the overwhelming optimism. Technology was going to make our lives better and unlock opportunity, not take all our jobs and render us irrelevant.
To me, the weirdest thing about the AI hype cycle is the inherent nihilism of it all. If there's one thing I miss, it's the optimism. I used to be enthusiastic about what the tech industry was doing and where it was going.
> The larger thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this.
How about this: Back in the late 90s, after Google appeared, search actually worked, worked well, and was not yet deeply tied into creepy tracking and ad tech.
I would wade through thousands of geocities memed sites to have that experience again.
I miss the optimism too. What drew me to tech was how it felt like we were trying to make people's lives better.
These days, it feels like tech is primarily interested in extracting value from us. I guess this is nothing new. Profits at any cost, and all that.
I don't know, I'm just kind of sad about all of it. Even though my smartphone is like 100x more powerful than my first computer, it still feels like something was lost
There was the sense that tech and the internet would change human systems. Information wants to be free and all that. The individual power granted by tech would lead to individual liberty. Traditional power structures would crumble when faced with this.
We didn't realize that it only felt that way because the people with power didn't care yet. Tech was like an ant crawling across a picnic blanket and thinking it's powerful because the people aren't doing anything about it. Once traditional power structures woke up to tech and the internet, they coopted it all.
It's all feels though. If you stare into the void, the apocalypse is coming. OTOH, bringing an AI assistant to every person in the world to make their lives better, is one perspective to take. It's all a matter of framing.
> These days, it feels like tech is primarily interested in extracting value from us. I guess this is nothing new. Profits at any cost, and all that.
Not just that but the whole "shaping the future whether you like it or not" push.
In the 90s, building the computing future meant figuring out a user need and building a product that fit that need. Now, there is this idea that technology companies are just building their idea of what the future should be, minus any product imperative, minus input from customers or the public, and then it's up to us to "get on board" and adopt it. The cart is driving the horse.
The optimism died a long time ago. I’m a Millennial, the 90s flew by as I was growing up, but one of my formative experiences was playing Deus Ex in 2001, after 9/11. It gave me healthy distrust of technology, governments, big corp, and what the world is going through today only reinforces this vision of the world. Of course I am nihilistic about AI: when I read about Altman and Karp, I see Bob Page. These are NOT the type of people I want to create a new world order. Yet these are exactly the people positioned to create a new world order.
I feel the older generations still believe that technology will set us free.
Ironically libre games gave me that faith back when I saw roguelikes coming (in 2002 with Slashem, Nethack being back and Angband), libre engines, Linux distros working with AvermediaTV pirating media streams and whatnot. Corporate computing was hell, full of virii, shitty interfaces (and now even more with even more control), adware, and tons of shovelware.
But the common folk was doing amazing stuff. A 3D suite/raytracer for free? Free as in freedom math books with easy algebra teachings? Free compilers, operating systems and whatnot? You don't need to pay about $600 (or $3000 on industrial basis) for everything in Debian Sarge? Just an $20 DVD? It was like getting a damn interdimensional UFO for free when everyone was paying for expensive cars, gas and highway tolls.
> I feel the older generations still believe that technology will set us free.
I still have my original copy of High Noon on the Electronic Frontier[1] and still hold out hope that computer technology will ultimately end up on the positive side of the scale rather than the negative side, despite how our current tech leaders are racing as fast as they can toward the negative side.
I’m a Millennial, the 90s flew by as I was growing up
I'm a young GenXer and I've told some Millennial friends that I feel bad for them because they had probably the best childhoods in human history[1] and then were plunged into worldwide terrorism, the Great Recession, and now the affordability crisis and incoming AI Apocalypse.
As a GenXer, at least I lived with the anxiety of nuclear annihilation at any moment as a child to set my expectations for the future.
[1] assuming you're at least vaguely middle-class and American or, presumably, living in Western culture. I can't speak to the experience outside this realm, but I watched my Millennial cousins grow up in a flourishing economy with endless products and media designed to delight them.
Still somewhat optimistic here. It's easy to fixate on the negatives, and tech has brought many negatives for sure. It sometimes feels like governments and big business read all the dystopian sci-fi novels and turned those ideas into operational playbooks. But tech has brought many good things as well.
If you're a basic bitch consumer and complainer, that's on you. The world is hard, life is hard, humans are beautiful and terrible. These things don't change. But there are more options now, and it's never been easier to learn, explore, and DIY.
Besides all the nice luxuries like power tools and google maps and online shopping, my true optimism lies in digital data, transparency, and accountability. The powers that be of course are allergic to latter two, but tools are there now and we're slowly making inroads. There are real problems being solved across all industries that wouldn't be possible without technology.
Nostalgia is fine and all, and the 90s were certainly a more naive time of course, but it's not like everything was great and now it's terrible.
> What I remember most about the 90s was the overwhelming optimism.
To me it felt we were slowly making the world better for all. Progress was happening and would continue to happen.
Now it feels like we are rapidly on the path to a dystopian Elysium like future. A dystopia for everyone but the sociopathic ultra wealthy that want to rule over us. And they’re not even hiding their intent from us anymore.
I think it's pretty funny to call out the clothing as stylish.
As far as I remember, Mulder's suit was meant to look like the cheap and ill-fitting suit that a low-level, young government employee would buy for a dress code and because he didn't want to think about clothing.
And so much of the environment was slightly strange to US viewers, I think, because it was mostly filmed in the Pacific Northwest and Vancouver, and felt just ever so slightly in the uncanny valley of being like much of the US but also not.
I also think the technology was somewhat reduced for plot purposes. Consider the "road warrior" template that already existed for business travelers, with more use of laptops, cell phones, email, etc. I think the writers just found it convenient to make communication and information research more cumbersome than it really had to be in that era...
I agree with most of that, but disagree about the "road warrior" bit. Laptops and cell phones and email existed, but not pervasively when the show started in 1993. It was around 1998 or '99 when work issued me my first cell phone that didn't require me be careful how I used the minutes. A powerful laptop of the time had a 250MB hard drive, a 486, and 2 hours claimed battery life (but in reality the battery was more like a UPS so you could carry it between power outlets). Pagers were common but coverage sucked outside metro areas. Email was uncommon. Email that worked between organizations was science fiction for most people.
On a personal level, when X-Files first aired, I navigated around with a Thomas Guide, and you were out of luck if you got to a friend's house and they weren't home. My dad had a car-mounted cell phone and warned me not to touch it at risk of my life and bank account. No one I knew could afford a laptop. I dialed into a lot of local BBSes with my Amiga but only knew of the Internet from magazine articles and hadn't actually seen it in person. FidoNet was the closest I got to wide-area email.
No, I'd contend that X-Files was reasonably accurate for the time.
It would be interesting to hear anecdotes about whether FBI agents were being issued or were finding it worth purchasing their own notebooks, cell phones, for use in the field back then!
Anecdotes about what we thought was affordable or common place in our neighborhoods isn't very relevant to whether the tech was available for enterprises and workers who needed it.
With no insider knowledge, I can only guess whether a federal agency like the FBI was aggressive with such options or lethargic and stuck in their legacy methods. Likewise, the writers and show producers may have made choices based on what they thought the audience would relate to rather than what was actually possible or in use. Or maybe they didn't have any insider knowledge either..?
However, the term "road warrior" was jargon for a category of business travelers in PC advertising by the late 1980s. There were various portable computers back then, and "notebooks" became idiomatic in the early 90s. PowerBooks and ThinkPads were already around when this show launched, and being used by companies and individuals who saw the value. It's hard for me to imagine that a Hollywood writer wouldn't know about these things if they did any background research at all.
People had modems and various forms of dial-up interface with larger enterprises. You likely dialed a modem bank specific to your employer to access some kind of mainframe app or terminal server within the enterprise. But the transition to things like SLIP and PPP was also happening at this time in some enterprises. And CompuServe and Prodigy were more retail focused. You could imagine agents using something like this in the field much like people today use unofficial social media and personal phones. It's hard to prevent it...
The first 2G digital cellular networks were rolling out in the US around the same time this show launched. But, yeah, coverage was not as universal as it is now.
I can't speak to the FBI, but I was in the military at the time and almost no one had a personal laptop. Our department got one in 1994 that we could share around the office. I would be gobsmacked to hear that the FBI were given the budget for laptops and cell phones back then.
Remember also that 2G didn't meaningfully have data until the very late 90s. Its first "data" offering was SMS, which was pay-per-message. Not that it mattered, because a phone couldn't do anything with data at the time, and if laptops and cell phones were rare, cell modems were unicorns. In any case, cell coverage outside cities sucked until 2010 or so. My wife had to commute to a nearby city once a month to run a medical clinic, and she lost signal about 5 miles outside our town and picked it up again when she could physically see the other. Those tiny towns in the middle of Washington state forests were probably busy upgrading to IP over Avian Carrier during X-Files times.
This is quite the tangent, but you could use regular analog modems with AMPS analog cell phones. They actually did circuit-switched analog like a wire replacement.
And I used my first 2G phone as a modem to dial up my work modem bank. I believe this was on Pac Bell Wireless, before Cingular. In this GSM scenario, the phone itself had a serial port accepted modem control commands. My computer still saw it like a normal modem call, but as far as I know the digital stream was sent over the air and something on the telco side terminated it with an analog modem that called my work number over POTS lines.
These were slow, somewhere in the 2400-9600 bps range.
It was a capability designed into the networks, since dial-up was so important back then. You generally just had to have the right adapter cable that split out the serial (or USB) from your phone's proprietary multi-pin port.
This strikes me as weird. In 92/93/94 I was on packet radio, a ham equivalent of digital lora which used hopping to get you to neighbouring countries. Most had 1200 baud, some 9600. I downloaded executables from bbs’es over the air and chatted with likeminded folks. Around that time we also had the first guest lectures about software defined radio with proof of concepts. I find it impossible to believe that a bunch of amateurs in EU were more digitally connected than the folks this thread talks about. Without a monthly payment, mind you.
Right, the capabilities were there. One question is what was realistic for an FBI agent relegated to the basement. I agree with the other poster that Mulder probably wouldn't receive government issued packet radios or even a laptop. He probably got an old IBM electric typewriter to go with his limbo office.
But, what was his pay? Could he have decided to equip himself, much like US servicemen were known to upgrade their own body armor, GPS, etc. in recent decades? The Lone Gunmen side characters surely must have known about all this stuff, and his character could have been informed of the options.
And, in the timeframe of the show, I know that US college professors and various "creatives" were buying the Apple PowerBook and using the online services I mentioned. They were not the executive class in terms of pay or prestige. But they saw the value, and prioritized the spend from their own modestly middle-class means.
I absolutely believe it! I’ve seen exactly one packet radio in my life, a giant rack mounted thing on a US Navy ship. It was neat tech but you’ve gotta admit it was far from ubiquitous. I think the modern analogy would be surprise that they don’t issue Meshtastic radios.
First and foremost, Mulder and Scully worked for an enormous federal agency. They have some pockets of incredibly high tech stuff. They don’t procure cutting edge gadgets for the average employee. Think of it like going to work at IBM or similar, where you get issued exactly the set of tools that your job description and organization say are required for your job. If that still says you need a Pentium 4 desktop and a BlackBerry, guess what’ll be in your cubicle on your first day at the office.
Remember that AOL hook into the internet in late 1993 just as the X-File was showing season one. Dial up internet was a big thing by the mid-90s, especially for CS students who used it when at college.
>As far as I remember, Mulder's suit was meant to look like the cheap and ill-fitting suit that a low-level, young government employee would buy for a dress code and because he didn't want to think about clothing.
1000% times better than what people are wearing today.
Today is so hoodified you have office workers in sneakers.
The white shirt, suit and trench looks so good. ALSO people where not as obese. This has of course an effect on the fit.
His uniform was pretty much the federal worker equivalent of the off-the-rack oxford shirt and chinos for a corporate cubical drone like in Office Space.
Yes, the tech world brought "casual everyday" to the office. But, ironically, the SF tech scene is full of designer t-shirts and jeans, so the obscenely rich and/or sartorial types can still signal their elite status among casual wear...
The Mulder equivalent today would be wearing a clearance rack hoodie from the megamart, rather than the hand-woven, artificially distressed version from this year's runway show.
An off the rack OCBD and suit with a herring or trench over is so so so so so SO much more stylish than "designer t-shirts and jeans" or "clearance rack hoodie from the megamart"!!!
Or do you honestly set a = between them? Are they equal?
We are truly lost, my god.
Explains why I have to fight to get a decent OCBD and Slacks. I have found it and never leaving.
Hoodies are for kids and african americans when in public and I am neither.
I do not mean runway style if you think that. I mean business and/or business casual. YES give me the 90s slacks, OCBD and blazer anyday I am trying trying so so so hard.
Personally, I don't care about fashion. I'm not in any way interested in passing judgement on fashion norms of this era or that era.
My real message here is, perhaps, old fashioned. I believe art's meaning is in the intention of the artist or author, in this case the show producers and costumers who did their work in the 90s. You can understand it by considering the context of their intended 90s audience. If there are records of their production decision process, that would be even better.
It is through this lens that my original post found mild amusement in this young person's misunderstanding of the show's costumes. In the originating context, nobody should consider the federal drone as fashionable. Rather, it signals the least effort the character could get away with. It expressed a "phoning it in" vibe. This person has other priorities and just wants to bypass the cultural gatekeeping of the time.
By comparison, I'd say Scully's clothing started off expressing the straight-laced, eager college graduate of the time who is trying to manage her appearance, on a budget. Something like "adulting" for later generations? I'm not passing judgment on that either. It's just the contrast that was there to establish characters.
You're wrong. Style is subjective and it's abhorrent to suggest that fashion associated with certain races is inherently less tasteful than others. You should be ashamed of yourself.
On the second question, you make the mistake of framing it as a completely personal choice. But we are formed by our environment. I had no chance growing up in the 00s. Everyone had jeans and hoodies, maybe a sweater. I did not pay attention. I carried that into my 20s and only in my 30s have I started to care about my clothes and weight, which I regret so, so much I want to die almost.
I blame everyone. My parents are and where preppy but they made the mistake of thinking I would pick it up through osmosis somehow. But getting things handed to you or seeing, you dont learn tools, what things are called. I really have had to study and try on things, I remember I saw well dressed people in our capitol and HM models for inspo. 4chan fa board has helped a lot too but now overrun with zoomers but there are good threads.
I am too paranoid to post myself openly online, I have no instagram nor an active facebook so I will not post some imgur of myself here. But for work I tend to go with business casual chinos, OCBD and boots or loafers. You must understand, everyone is casual here and wears jeans at most.
Same with books and quality movies. It really is a struggle to find quality, but the internet does help. Like finding xfiles. Our state does upload good old movies to sort though the modern slop.
For 90s kids who remember their parents having people over, parties were really like that! Obviously without the drama and comedy. But people would come over and socialize and not be glued to screens. And we have data that things have changed dramatically. In 1990, 55% of men reported having six or more close friends. In 2021 it was down to 27%. The percentage of men who have no close friends is up by a factor of five, to 15%.
> But people would come over and socialize and not be glued to screens. And we have data that things have changed dramatically.
My wife and I are moderately social with diverse groups of friends. I haven't been to a party where guests were glued to screens in years.
I can think of a few, but they were so uninteresting that we didn't prioritize future events with those people. Why would I spend my limited free time hanging out with people who don't want to socialize?
Thinking back, those people probably think that staring at phones at social events is just what people do, so it was okay. When you don't see your friend group self-selecting into a bubble of people with shared beliefs and behaviors, you think everything around you is how everyone in the world operates.
I remember back in the early 80s my father knew the drummer or bassist of some "A-minus-list" up and coming 80s band (the actual band escapes me, maybe Poison way before "Every Rose Has Its Thorn") and he convinced the band to hang out at his house and jam. Well I remember the whole small town Pennsylvania community showed up and it was a total ripper. I never properly capitalized on the cool-kid-cred I should have gotten from that night.
If you enjoy The X-Files, you really should check out Millennium, by the same creator (Chris Carter) and broadcast at roughly the same time.
It's very intense, with an Emmy-deserving performance by star Lance Henriksen (whom you may remember from the movie Aliens). It mixes Christian theology and eschatology, mythology, horror, and serial killers, leavened with delightful humour.
The first season is mostly "serial killer of the week", but is important to establish the characters and long-running story arcs.
The second season is a delight, with some of the best writing of any TV show I know, and a lot of complex situations with no easy answers.
The third season changed (and cheapened) everything, and is only worth watching for completists.
To anyone with this kind of nostalgia I'd recommend watch 'Perfect Days'. You can live however you want.
While it is impossible to not have a smart phone at this point you get to decide how you use it. Want to feel like you are in the 90's? Stop using your phone. Consume only old or physical media if you want, get rid of streaming services. Go buy an old car if you feel like it. Go read a book. Anything you could do in the 80's and 90's you can do now just as easy. You just have to curate such a life.
I think the only place you have to compromise is work. You can't roleplay like it's the 90's if you work in tech. But hey when you clock out of work turn your laptop off and go do whatever you want. Again, there is nothing stopping you from doing anything you could have done back then now (except maybe buy a house).
That was a great time to be a kid and so much of what I did in that era is gone now. Going with friends to Blockbuster? Hanging out at the arcade? Stopping in at the mall because you will probably run into friends there? From age 15 to 25 I was at a house or field party a couple times a month.
And things like streaming services are no replacement for video stores. Scrolling though a list doesn't compare to going to a video store, wandering the aisles, bumping into people you know, talking and flirting and finding out about parties, and totally changing your plans based on who you happened to run into. The random social interactions were important.
You can do 90's larping, but unless you are doing it with all the people of the same generation from your community it's only a shallow facsimile of the real thing.
> That was a great time to be a kid and so much of what I did in that era is gone now. Going with friends to Blockbuster? Hanging out at the arcade? Stopping in at the mall because you will probably run into friends there? From age 15 to 25 I was at a house or field party a couple times a month.
This is true. I didn't really think about it from a kid/youth perspective. As an adult I think you can live a similar life style but kids definitely have been robbed of all of this. I'm past 25 and I average a house party a month still I would say. House party's are permission free though, if you want one then host one.
> And things like streaming services are no replacement for video stores. Scrolling though a list doesn't compare to going to a video store, wandering the aisles, bumping into people you know, talking and flirting and finding out about parties, and totally changing your plans based on who you happened to run into. The random social interactions were important.
Video stores still exist. Depending how big of a town/city you will still bump into people you know if you are out and about.
>You can do 90's larping, but unless you are doing it with all the people of the same generation from your community it's only a shallow facsimile of the real thing.
Live how you want. If it's good others will follow your lead. I deleted all social media over five years ago and I have some friends who have at least tried to follow my lead. I read a ton, my friends do as well. I have a group of guys to play magic with every week where we take turns hosting.
If you have a vision of what you want the world to be the first step is to live that way yourself. Either others will follow or they won't, but you can't force people to do anything.
That is larping. No amount of wacky pomo carpeting and Outhere Brothers cassette tapes can actually transport you to a post-cold-war-pre-9/11 world.
The nineties literally ended in a party where at least one person in the room thought they were going to die the next day. You cannot recreate that with a Doug t-shirt.
Books have been replaced by DVDs at my library. I spent almost all my time at a book store for a year in Austin and can count the number of active readers I saw in there on one hand. It's depressing.
Reading is an independent activity by nature. I don't really see how other people not reading should affect you. There is nothing depressing about nature. It's natural that the majority of people would shift away from reading and gravitate towards easier forms of media consumption.
This wasn’t my experience at all. I read similar novels as friends, we talked about them, tried to replicate some of the stuff the characters did, have suggestion about books to each other, lent them out, went to the bookstore together, etc.
People read books on public transport before the iPhone and that was often the path to strike a conversation with a complete stranger who nonetheless shared interests (depending on the book they were reading).
Books certainly could be completely individualized experiences, but they offered a whole world of socializing opportunities.
Ah, the 90's. Bill Clinton raised taxes, which eliminated the deficit, which made interest rates go down.....My biggest problem in life was wondering which company which was trying to recruit me had the best stock option package.
There are a few things which have gotten better. Gay marriage. Marijuana legalization. But Entshitification is real and for the last 25 years has been relentless.
And let's be honest, that is also partially Clinton's legacy. Him and Tony Blair, with their "Third Way" triangulation bullshit, effectively moved the Overton window to the right for good. And here we are.
A couple of things happened. One, the Supreme Court handed the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, and not Al Gore.
Bush did not continue the policies of Clinton. He cut taxes, which increased the deficit, which made interest rates rise, which made the subprime market collapse, which resulted in the worst recession since the great depression.
What gave him political cover to do this was 9/11. He took the opportunity to spend Trillions on oil wars, which we fought for the next 20 years, and which accomplished absolutely nothing.
The result was that for the first time in American history, the next generation had it worse than the previous generation. When I graduated from college, my biggest problem was choosing which stock option package to accept. When my son graduated from college, his biggest problem was deciding which meals to skip to afford his insulin.
Thank goodness Obamacare fixed my son's insulin problem. And Obama wasn't able to get rid of the deficit, but he at least put it on a path where it was shrinking relative to the size of the economy.
I can't bear to rehearse what the Trump administration has done. Absolutely incalculable damage to the budget, the deficit, civil discourse, our international goodwill, and to the rule of law.
It's hard to even convince people how bad it is, because nobody under the age 40 even really understands what a functional government and economy looks like.
It accepted unfettered capitalism in a very fundamental way. Once you make it axiomatic that taxes should always be low, that the private sector is always better, and that massive inequality is just fine, you basically renounce all meaningful tools to fight for the little guy.
Plus, you can only triangulate effectively if there are two radical sides to play off of. Once your policies effectively disqualify one of those positions, you're left alone to face the other radical group - and they now have no incentive to compromise. Which is exactly what happened over the following decades.
Anybody who remembers the last century knows that any Democrat left of Clinton would have resulted in a President Bob Dole. And at least the Clinton administration tried to give Americans Hillarycare.
Growing up in the 90s in Moscow wasn't all cakewalk (immigrated to US soon after), but I fondly remember watching the show and reading Russian-translated X-Files books. I don't know why the books were so fascinating to me. Imagined my life in America as something akin to Fox Mulder: suit, nice hair, car, hotel, official business. The lifestyle was all foreign to me, and also the coolest ever.
For me, it's The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle. Those are the shows I watched as a kid and I'll love them forever.
I learned to love Sisko a lot more than Picard tbh. I find him much more relatable than some pretentious english-frenchman who gets weird around kids. I never understood why he’s such a jerk to Wesley in the beginning.
Yup, X-Files were great and I did experience it. "The Lone Gunmen," was good idea as well but they, i.e. tv gods should have waited five years after the X-Files ended, to allow some time for nostalgia to creep into fandom, to do the show. I remember discussing with someone, who knew a guy who knew a guy, online regarding how their personalities should be crafted for the show. They ended up with, funny. Too, funny was not a good fit for them since they had genius level intellect. This show was one of the few places I saw Linux being mentioned by an ape in the episode where The Lone Gunmen receive a message from an ingenious chimp attempting to escape a government laboratory. The way they were killed off was really crappy. They should bring then back on the new series, perhaps as cloned versions.
Yes, it was short and fun, to those who appreciated it, but the world was saturated with X-Files. I would have waited 5-10 years, then brought the Lone Gunmen back for a revival. The viewers would've had time to miss X-Files and thus Funny & Quirky would have appealed more to a nostalgic audience. I think it can work again, given the right conditions, the writers, same actors + new faces, even different shows/genre crossovers. There I go, again, giving advice for which I am never credited :|
Harsh Realm was interesting, noticed Gillian Anderson's voice narrating the Harsh Realm training video. Rewatching it now, nice piece of Nostalgia :)
The 90s were my 20s - I still remember walking back with my girlfriend from the sea in the evening, across a residential area and we could here the jingle of X-Files on tv through open windows.
This is one of the images in ly life I keep going back to and cherish.
It is interesting hiw sounds and smells are strongly embedded in these memories.
I have been kicking around this idea for a bumper sticker. "The '90s were lame, but they were still better than this."
I remember not loving the '90s when I was living through them, but my sense now (and I am hearing it more and more from others) is that we didn't realize how good we had it.
The X-Files reminds me that there was a time when conspiracy theories were funny and cool and not something that members of our government earnestly believed and used as the basis for their legislative agenda.
In the pre-internet era, when you heard a fantastic story, you couldn't just google it to see if it was true. People either believed everything they heard, or they took it with a grain of salt. Either way, it was incredibly easy to let your imagination run wild with a crazy idea, even if you firmly believed in science and the burden of proof. That was the one-half the magic of The X-Files.
The other half was that so much of it took place almost entirely in rural or at least tight-knit suburban settings because that's where all the weird stuff happened. You couldn't grow up in the rural US (or probably anywhere) without spending many long summer evenings staring up at the clear starry sky and wondering what was out there, or hearing a sound in the woods that you couldn't readily identify. Pets occasionally disappeared without a trace. Livestock and wild animals behave strangely sometimes for no apparent reason. That guy living on his own a few miles down the road who hurls insults at anyone who walks by.
Weird rural shit still happens of course, but it's shrinking as suburbs continue to grow, and you see less of it on TV and in movies these days.
In the pre-internet era, when you heard a fantastic story, you couldn't just google it to see if it was true.
Today is different, but people are worse informed. Every online place that an average person visits is a hotbed of fantasy.
That is exactly why I deleted my reddit account years ago. For every factual post there, there were two inaccurate or false posts. I didn't like my head becoming a receptacle for other people's falsehoods.
I remember back in the early seasons of the show, logging into Delphi (the VAX hosted text forum) immediately after to chat with other fans and sometimes people involved in show production. There were huge threads about the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade (actually there were a bunch of these, but DDEB was the biggest by far) and the Gillian Anderston Testosterone Brigade, lots of fanfic, consipirary analysis and more. It made it feel like more than just a show and more like a community.
Can’t remember where I first heard it (message board? Kumail’s podcast?), but I read/heard a really strong case that the core theme of the X-Files is informational enclosure/the dawn of the modern cyber panopticon, and how for good or bad all the little weird, secret corners of the world get catalogued and dissected as technology encircles all.
I was there and I can tell you that it was genuinely better times.
The 80s and 90s were peak western civilization.
Tech was exciting, futuristic.
Politics - whilst certainly always grubby and adversarial - had not descended into lies and manipulation and misinformation and attempts to destroy the democratic systems.
People talked socialized read books.
Dating hadn’t been turned into a high volume marketplace in which no one is ever satisfied and everyone is always upgrading.
The environment and global warming were an issue for sure but not like now.
Economic inequality was relatively low in 60s 70s, and economic growth was high in late 80s and late 90s. That seems to be a good backdrop for human flourishing, not just in science/tech but also in art, music, film etc. Recommend Piketty / Gary's Economics for more opinions on this.
A couple snippets from my own experience / wow points :
- browsing bookstores was phenomenal, hand illustrated romance, fantasy and sci-fi covers
- Turbo Pascal, Dr Dobbs journal
- Wolfenstein and Quake ushered in the era 3D interactive games
- shareware and file sharing on BBS boards, via dialup modem
- tapes, then CDs, then minidisc !
- digital watches, scientific calculators !!
- double your hard-drive storage every 18months !!!
> Only if you consider west "civilization" as the US.
Not just the US, it was pretty peak for the UK as well. Probably even moreso, considering the deleterious austerity policies that followed. The 90's were great for Germany, and formerly eastern-bloc countries.
It's fascinating to read the perspective of someone seeing X-files as a show from before their time. The clunky phones in the show, for example, were actually advanced technology that most of us had never seen in real life. The closest thing I'd seen was the IBM technician Brick that an uncle had.
> I want to twiddle the dials on a car radio
That's one thing I miss. As a kid in the early 90s, I used to collect car radios whenever someone was replacing theirs (which seemed to happen a lot more back then) - they were fun to take apart because so much of it was mechanical. Even the buttons to remember a station were mechanical and worked by using latches and levers.
One of the all-time great shows. Mythology episodes mixed in with the "monster of the week" ones for the casual viewers. The music was also pretty special. Each episode was like a mini feature film.
Scully fans may feel weird in this present alternate universe, where Gillian Anderson has gone into witness protection in the UK as... an actress with an English accent.
Watching millennials and gen Z discover her previous life on American TV is cute.
I remember watching the weekly x-files episode. My and my colleagues would discuss it the next day at work with great enthusiasm. In those days you had time to absorb tv shows like this, something that doesn't really seem to exist anymore today. The 90s where a great time.
besides already recommended Fringe, Millennium and Halt and catch fire I enjoyed at same time as X Files in 90s also new Outer Limits, opening credits were great and episodes are always thought challenging, I'm just rewatching it and still enjoy it, though technical quality is horrible since I think FHD was never released
but if you wanna straight up X Files just based on 50s check out Project Blue Book, it's like retro X Files, you won't get closer than that to X Files
X-files was great for the first couple of seasons but then it went downhill, fast. I watched it start to finish twice, including fillers, and I gotta tell ya, past the first 2-3 seasons it really ain’t that great a show. I remember playing the live action video game that was split across several cd’s. that one was real nice. sometimes i still rewatch let’s plays on youtube about it.
I feel like most people who are nostalgic about X-files, me included. Are only nostalgic about the vibe it gives you in the beginning.
I think the big mistake the X-Files made was trying to solve its own lore. The mystery was what made the show work. The more it explained, the less interesting it became.
I was a huge X-Files kid growing up. I was 10 when The X-Files (and Brisco County Jr.) debuted and I watched "Encounters" on FOX in the years before.
Are we talking about the same 90's?
There's no one like you in your area? I hope you like sitting in your house alone. You saw half of a movie late at night? Heard a song in a show? Hold onto it, it might take you a decade to finally track it down (it was Land by Patti Smith.) Have an medical issue that the doctors in your area aren't interested in diagnosing? Good luck, I hope it's not progressive.
You had to fight for access to everything in the 90's. Even if you could track down the thing you want (big IF), actually getting it was SLOW. That book you finally found, it might be 2-3 months away.
Today is the best day in human history to be alive.
We have instant access to everything and yet we choose to waste our time on short-form garbage. We are the people Homer Simpson was designed to mock. Homer and the people of the 90's wasted their time watching whatever trash TV was sloshed into their troughs. We're watching whatever an algorithm is slopped into ours.
You live in a fantastic world with instant access to everything in recorded history and yet you choose to rot in front of YouTube.
Here's the secret. It's not the 90's, the 90's were nothing special. It's the Past World, the one that you can only see when you're looking back at it. The world that we live in today was built in the 90's and the world that we will live in tomorrow is being built today.
The world is and will be what we make of it.
Our current moment will pass. I want to see what we'll achieve in another 100 years and I'm jealous of the babies just getting started now. I hope that something that I make will be seen as a stepping stone towards something better.
Name an important archive that isn’t in the process of being digitized or an unimportant one that’s likely to crumble before we get around to snapping a picture of its contents.
But if we look under the hood you can see where you’re taking an obvious exaggeration literally. See it? Right? That’s what’s making the thunking noise.
Over there on the left. No, your other left. There. The point is over there.
You live in a fantastic world with instant access to everything in recorded history and yet you choose to rot in front of YouTube.
YouTube is full of excellent content. I regularly watch several highly skilled YouTubers the same way that I would watch Norm Abrams and Roy Underhill on PBS as a child.
As a child, I could have watched grifting religious folks or Public Access conspiracy peddlers on TV, too.
Another response that (deliberately?) misses the point. I’m going to stop responding after this one.
Again, deliberate exaggeration. When I say “rotting in front of YouTube” the key to understand my point is the word “rotting”, not “YouTube”. Good work is done in every medium and on every platform.
Yes it is peak TV. Also sad how young people are. I was a child though. But am rewatching it. Yes no modern TV comes close. And the remake... I suspect HN aggress with the casting but I wont speak on it or I will be banned.
My wife and I rewatched X-Files start to finish a couple years ago. It still holds up. The monster-of-the-week where Mulder sings the "Shaft" theme song is still hilarious.
But in retrospect, I wish we hadn't all collectively decided to winkingly go along with conspiracy theories. While crackpots will always exist, I think a lot of people took this and other shows too literally. Yes, conspiracies exist. But no, most of the time, the guy at the metal desk in the grey government office is just doing what his job description says he's suppose to be doing.
I don't know that X-Files directly led to idiocy like antivaxxers and climate change denial and election truthers. I do think it gave a lot of people social cover to start exploring those dumb ideas, and no one took them seriously until it was too late.
Literally everything is just shite now. Movies and TV are shite, food is shite, the economy is shite, politics is shite, dating is shite, electronics and tech is cheap ad infested shite, even the reffing in sports is shite! Things get more expensive yet also worse somehow, our wages don't even come close to matching inflation, housing is propped up to keep old people's investments secure meaning we don't even have places to live.
Im a young millennial so I can relate both with millennials and gen-z, and from what I can tell the vibes are just really really bad. People don't even really care about the future anymore because they know it's just going to continue to be shite.
The best TV shows today are as good as or better than TV has ever been and there's usually an ad-free option.
Televised sports is an exception- the number of ads is insane and there's no real way to avoid them. On the plus side though, I have access to a lot more games/matches/races/etc...
My backlog is crazy long. As much as I love TV I don't get nearly as much time to watch it as I'd like. From the last couple of years:
* Andor
* Black Rabbit
* Dune
* Last of Us
* Percy Mason
* The Paper
* Pluribus
* Severance
* The Studio
* Succession
* White Lotus
Of all those, Andor was the biggest surprise. I'm a mild Star Wars fan (I've seen the movies and that's about it) but I really enjoyed this, probably more than the movies. It looked amazing, was well written and acted. It's a prequel to one of the movies and we watched the movie right after we finished the series and I ended up liking the movie a lot more than I did the first time I saw it.
The Paper and The Studio are comedies and watching them made me miss the great sitcoms of the past. Why aren't there more comedies?
I liked the Last of Us game and I think that's a big part of why I enjoyed the tv show. If you haven't played the game or aren't a zombie person, you could probably skip that one.
I liked The Peripheral but it was canceled so I have a hard time recommending it. What they made was very good but there just isn't enough of it. The William Gibson book it's based on is worth reading IMHO.
I think it ended in the late 2010s, when streaming took over:
Over the 2000s and early 2010s, writers were perfecting the style first experimented with by the great shows of the 90s and earlier, where seasons were mostly episodic but led into serial plot. Several of those early ones have been mentioned in these comments, and often alternated episodic and serial, while the later ones were figuring out how to mix the overarching plot into the episodic ones, advancing it slowly as something extra so viewers could miss one or two episodes without getting lost. Then at the midseason and season finales it'd be a big event for the larger arcs, bringing it all together.
Streaming no longer had to worry about viewers missing an episode, so all the episodic filler started getting dropped in favor of streamlining the overarching plots. Unfortunately, what we lost along with it was things that were less filler and more character and world building. Getting to know the characters through action instead of summarizing it with narration, making the setting feel more real, laying out events and actions in a more natural way instead of it feeling contrived.
The backstory that makes this scene work so well was almost all in those episodic character and worldbuilding episodes we don't really get nowadays. We actually watched these characters develop and grow and change over years before this scene. I don't really think modern TV in its serial format could have a scene with as much impact - all that "filler" makes them feel like three dimensional people rather than plot devices.
The media landscape we have is something I couldn't have even imagined when I was young in the 80's. However, I can go back and watch, for free, essentially every movie ever made. I've gone back and watched dozens (maybe hundreds) of movies that I remember coming out when I was a kid, wanting to see, but never getting to because I was too young, or I couldn't find them at video stores, etc.
There were a _lot_ of _really_ bad movies and TV shows that came out when I was young, including movies and TV shows that I loved at the time. They were awful - we just watched them because there was literally nothing else to do. We're bombarded with entertainment choices now and our standards have gone up.
Homelessness was a giant issue in 1991, there were pop songs about it: Gypsy Woman (La da dee la da da) by Crystal Waters, and Walking Down Madison by Kirsty MacColl. We don't seem to have pop stars singing about issues any more. Unsure whether that's a plus or minus.
In the US, homelessness per capita peaked in the 90s. It remained relatively high afterwards compared to the pre 1980 numbers, and has recently spiked higher in the wake of 2020 and following, but in the 1990s there were a lot of homeless people in the US.
My country had a complete economic collapse in the 90s and people could barely afford food, so mileage varies.
As an oil exporter country we were saved in the 00s by oil prices ballooning to the moon, so that was the golden decade for us instead (relatively speaking, and mostly in the big cities).
Groups that are excluded from unemployment statistics aren't a specific generation. They are retirees, students, people who gave up on seeking a job, etc.
I have a lot of nostalgia for the pre-9/11 world too but be careful with the rose tint.
It wasn't so wonderful if you were gay, for example. AIDS was still new and scary in 1990, and society was not so accepting of that lifestyle.
I remember when I was a teen it wasn't uncommon to go to a Boston Pizza-tier restaurant and have the waiter make a quip about "not wanting to look like a fag" by ordering the same thing as the guy next to you. This was a thing into my 20s, as late as 2007 probably.
It's interesting to me that many of the comments about not romanticizing the 80's and 90's across all forums reference 'it wasn't that good if you were gay' which would be like 3-5% of the population at the time? We had a society that 95% of people would say was ideal and the only knock is that it wasn't great for a small minority versus now we have a lifestyle that is universally panned...
As long as you didn't have any gay friends or family, or just cared how other people get treated.
It's not like being straight was perfect protection. You'd get abuse just for acting in ways that had been arbitrarily decided to be gay-coded.
There was plenty of other bigotry to deal with as well. For example, support for interracial marriage was under 50% at the beginning of the decade (in the US), and was still under 2/3rds by the end. Bigotry is still plentiful, of course, but it was quite a bit worse then.
I agree with a lot of that person wrote. I'm a healthy white guy born in 1970 into a very supportive family in a middle-class town in Canada. I basically won the lottery.
I was a kid in the 1970s, a teenager through the 80's and turned 20 in 1990. I had everything I needed and most things I wanted (eventually). High school was easy and actually fun. University was cheap (compared to now) and I had a blast. Graduating with a degree in comp. sci. in 1995 was bonkers. Opportunities were everywhere.
There have been some ups and downs, but I really don't think I would have wanted to be born any other time or place.
They mention being a teenager then, so a lot of their feelings might come down to "it was fun being a teenager" sprinkled with some effects of late stage capitalism.
I was born in 1974 and I remember being vaguely annoyed in my 20's at how the 90's "ruined" the 80's - I remember things being way better in the 80's and society starting to go downhill around 1991.
I will say, though, the poster's lament that he's nostalgic for a time he never knew is one I've heard a _lot_. My kids watch "Stranger Things" and ask if it was really like that when I was a kid ("did you really just get on your bike and go over to your friends houses?") and wish they had experienced the 80's (and even the inferior 90's). I _never_ felt that way about my parents generation - the 60's were interesting from a historical perspective but I never wanted to be there.
> the poster's lament that he's nostalgic for a time he never knew is one I've heard a _lot_
For sure; the 2011 film Midnight in Paris is a great comedic exploration of this feeling as its central theme. (well, if you can set aside any well-justified reservations about writer/director Woody Allen.)
Ehhh, the post-grunge world was a bit of a musical wasteland. Rock died as a culturally relevant force with Cobain, but hip-hop hadn't ascended yet, so we were stuck in this weird doldrum that gave us things like the swing revival, ska, nu metal, and boybands. I mean Counting Crows were the big megastars at the time. Really hard to name a timeless album from '96-'99 the way you easily could on either side of that range. Just see the set-list for Woodstock '99 to further illustrate the point.
Mezzanine from Massive Attack, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Big Pun’s Capital Punishment, You’ve Come a Long Way Baby from Fatboy Slim, and Hello Nasty from the Beastie Boys. The K&D Sessions from Kruder and Dorfmeister. Stunt by Barenaked Ladies. Then there’s one of my personal favorites, Mermaid Avenue from Billy Bragg and Wilco.
You mentioned rock. How about Hellbilly Deluxe from Rob Zombie? Follow the Leader by Korn. The New Radicals released Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too. Garbage’s Version 2.0, and Lenny Kravitz 5, and Van Halen III. What’s more rock than Walking into Clarksville by Page & Plant?
OK Computer (1997). Mezzanine (1998). New Forms (1997). Peak trip hop and drum and bass. I remember it being pretty great. But yeah, I was like 17, so …
Wow I've never disagreed harder with an HN comment in my entire life. Counting Crows were a single band that got some radio time in the early 90s. Calling them the big megastars during '96-'99 makes you sound like you weren't alive then. That statement just sounds so utterly ridiculous to me. It's like a narrow-minded European claiming that everyone in the US just eats nothing but hot dogs. Timeless albums from that era:
- Odeley (Beck '96)
- Aenima (Tool '96)
- OK Computer (Radiohead '97)
- Homogenic (Bjork '97)
- This is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about (Modest Mouse '96)
- Stankonia (Outkast '99)
- Kid A (Radiohead '00; began recording in Jan '99)
You were just rage baiting, right? The late 90s were an absolutely legendary time in popular music history.
Edit: Yes, agree with commenter who mentioned Underworld. Didn't mention it because it seemed more niche. But I adore Underworld.
It was such a great time for fringe musical subcultures.
Black metal was a 1992-1998 thing. It was dead (and many of the genre's leading lights were looking to move beyond it, mostly without success,) by the end of 1999.
Those six years also produced an explosion of experimentation in industrial, ambient, darkwave, and many other niche genres. In some cases, musical and aesthetic boundaries were pushed as far as they can possibly go.
From where I'm standing, the 26 year period from 2000-2026 absolutely pales in comparison to just those few years 1992-1998.
The X-Files was the right show at the right time; a "bubble" of the '90s, if you will. The internet and mobile technology was nascent. The world was getting bigger, but was still quite "small". I definitely feel quite privileged to have lived through this time, and enjoy all things '90s quite a bit. Any, and I mean any, attempt to remake this show is doomed to failure, and I wish they would just stop. Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to hang out with the Lone Gunmen for a bit.
The one thing about that era that has always seemed unique is that for people who lived it, a few years was a very big deal. Even now that I'm much older, talking to people in my age range it still blows my mind how different people's life experiences were just due to be 2-3 years different in age.
Especially for anything tech oriented.
Talk to people who were computer science majors in the 90s, you'll find that their curriculum varied wildly depending on exactly what years they were there. a 2-3 year difference could be huge.
Same is true for how they experienced the internet, interacted with media, whether or not they were mobile native or landline native, and so much more.
Less tech oriented but the 90s had an enormous shift in terms of corporate culture. The people who were a few years older than me reported wearing suits to work. By the time I went off to be a corpo, it was usually casual wear, not even business casual. For the same types of roles & companies!
The list is endless.
In retrospect, nobody remembers the exact date of an invention/product.
In the moment, there's a sharp "time before it existed" and "time after it existed."
I.e. late 2006, there was no mass market iPhone-like device; late 2007, there was
There were ones before that, my mom had one. Apple added polish and used a capacitive touchscreen instead of a resistive one, then amped up the hype in their commercials, so everyone forgot these existed.
Possibly a Palm Treo, introduced in 2002, or a Windows-based PocketPC, introduced in 2000.
I always felt that Apple basically reimplemented PalmOS with the benefit of ~10 years newer technology and a wildly efficient Chinese supply chain.
I definitely wouldn't say that these devices were mainstream. They were very much targeted toward business people and hardcore nerds. The iPhone definitely revolutionized the market, with its vastly more desirable aesthetic and approachable interface.
It may have been a 2005 phone or something. I think it was a Nokia, Motorola, or Samsung phone (our whole family was on those at the time), but whatever it was it had just about the complete form factor and an app store - mostly a screen with a grid of apps on home, with a couple of buttons at the bottom (more Android than iPhone). Maybe it had a slide-out keyboard? Can't remember that part for sure.
> Any, and I mean any, attempt to remake this show is doomed to failure
I second that. Please, for the love of all good things, do not remake the X-Files, or Firefly.
Fringe was kind of a remake of The X-Files. It wasn't an exact copy but clearly derivative. Still a decent show.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1119644/
I wouldn't say it was "derivative", although it was clearly made by people who had enjoyed The X-Files, and Twin Peaks.
I loved the trick with the colour grading. Won't say more because spoilers, if you know you know.
Fringe definitely handled the continuing storyline much better. The way they blend in, then transition from, the monster-of-the-week format is excellent writing. It did put a deadline on the story, something which the X-Files writers seemed allergic to as the series began aging.
Worth remembering that both the X-Files and Babylon 5 premiered in the same year (1993).
TV science fiction was just beginning the transition from "monster of the week" to season+ long pre-written plot arcs.
Twin Peaks was only a few years earlier (1990), which pioneered(?) bringing the hitherto only soap opera and family drama continuous storyline to other genres.
TNG is indicative of this too, with the adaptation of season-long plotting between 1-2 (little), 3 (some), and 4+ (more).
Which is to say when the X-Files premiered, having a series-long plan of any sort was still a novel idea in TV scifi.
The upcoming Firefly series will be animated, seems like the right choice
I hope they pick up on the thing in the last episode of Firefly, where River hears everyone's thoughts except for one person.
There was someone else on the ship like River.
[dead]
If it's anything like the animated Babylon 5, no thanks :(
If you love animated stuff I guess it might be fine.
Damn, now I want to binge-re-watch Firefly.
Well, I for one would not be disappointed at a sequel or continuation of Firefly, as long as they figure out a way to bring Wash back from the dead and Joss Whedon has absolutely nothing at all to do with it.
I feel like I'm the only person who didn't really vibe with Firefly. I usually like the "space Western" motif but Firefly was so broad and over the top with it that it just seemed silly to me.
Firefly is "Western" in the same way that 1960s spaghetti westerns (and arguably even John Ford's) were.
Which is to say they used a facsimile of a lawless frontier to tell stories about ideologically stark, independent characters.
Less cactus, more open carry.
I'll grant that Firefly's sci-fi western motif was novel, but it could have done fine without it. The show's magic for me was its characters and clever dialogue. It it was funny, and it had heart. There was an enormous amount of satisfying character development for such a short run.
The Expanse is fairly good on its own and I did enjoy it but it could have totally filled the void left by Firefly if they would have just had a few comedy writers on the team. Instead, we got a ship full of gloomy self-loathing heroes with poor mental health who were too caught up in second-guessing everything they did to fully appreciate the absurdity of everything happening around them. (I know, I know, the show came from a book series, just humor me...)
Devil's advocate: deft use of zeitgeist-known settings in time-limited media can make for more efficient storytelling.
A captain of a ship.
An outlaw.
In a western-seeming system of planets.
If nothing else was said, that already paints a pretty vivid background from the audience's preconceptions. All of that exposition can be skipped. Or at most, quickly nodded to in order to confirm.
Sure, a show could rebuild the same thing neater from primitives, but how much show time would that take? Western was "close enough" to the point, so they went with it.
They're going to, because there is no property that will not be milked for nostalgia.
Although honestly, it could work if they played into the cynicism and uncertainty of the modern UFO phenomenon. If the "conspiracy" is a hall of mirrors comprised of psyops, lies, grift and folklore and the truth is something very weird exists but the government doesn't know what it is. Establish a "post-truth" narrative where the only thing we know is that everything we thought we knew (Roswell, Area 51, Dulce, Majestic 12) was a lie.
Maybe at some point have the in-universe version of Northrop-Grumman (or pick whatever defense contractor you like) actually make a breathrough in reverse engineering alien technology (or say it's China, to play on American xenophobia) and now the enemy isn't some vast government conspiracy but dark capitalism. Have an Elon Musk analogue, AI death cults around weird alien artifacts, SV startup culture, UFO grifters within the government, creeping fascism, all of it.
Someone could make an intelligent and interesting show that studies the nature of hyperreality, the evolution of UFO folklore as a mirror of generational fears, and the embrace of metaphysics as a trauma response to the dehumanization of modern technological society. The problem is, that wouldn't be the X-Files. Something closer to Lone Gunmen, maybe, as written by Grant Morrison, without cops being protagonists, but the vibe of the 90's and the Smoking Man and all of that is just too quaint to be plausible nowadays.
They'll do it anyway, and they'll do it badly, and they'll probably do it with AI.
They're already working on it:
https://www.tvline.com/news/the-x-files-reboot-ryan-coogler-...
Also Fringe, which captures every plot point parent suggested (salted with a heavy dose of post-9/11).
That wouldn't work. The X-Files revolves around a government conspiracy because governments are genuinely scary. They have near infinite resources, can break any law they want at will, are frequently motivated by convoluted social engineering schemes, don't investigate themselves (so it requires a plucky outsider hero character) and so on.
If you try and make capitalism the enemy you just end up with Erin Brockovich.
I don't know. Obviously a certain personality type considers government to be an all-encompassing evil (which is the Cold-War era fear the conspiracy theories of the X-Files drew from) but in the modern day corporations (particularly tech companies) seem to be far more competent and dangerous.
And I think it makes sense that if there were defense contractors and companies secretly reverse engineering alien technology, that capitalism would be their primary motivation. I'm just saying the zeitgeist of conspiracy theory tends to reflect current generational fears and a remake of the X-Files should reflect that.
Defense contractors only have one customer - the government. They are "capitalism" in the weakest sense of the world. Tech companies aren't scary. Everyone interacts with them, they're run by well known personalities, they're subject to the courts and follow laws etc. The story tension you'd need just isn't there.
I think the government conspiracy fear works best for the audience who still has some belief in government. So it is a disturbing moral corruption of something they consider powerful and benign. Lots of people older than myself reported this feeling from the 60s and 70s as things like the Pentagon Papers came to light.
The corporate fear works if you assume either fascism (top-down collusion between the two), government incompetence/irrelevance (so corporate power is unchecked), or widespread government corruption (more bottom-up collusion).
So feelings on these themes may help indicate your worldview or the worldview of the audience and writers in different eras?
24 is another one that was at the right time, although the big one was not under their control. It started showing 2 months after the 9/11 attacks. More to the general point, it was also at the time that computers and internet usage was fast growing, but gaps in the digital side meant it was still plausible that field agents were important. They also had plot lines such as the bad guys using online video game chat (a smaller but growing thing in the early 2000s) as a hidden communication channel which I believe is pulled from real events.
24 was extreme racist pro-torture fear porn propaganda.
So yes - definitely had its finger on the pulse of early 2000s America.
I'm at least happy to hear that you think America is better now. Typically agitators say things like America is more racist now than ever (including before Civil Rights).
> I'm at least happy to hear that you think America is better now
Pretty certain I said nothing of the sort.
Given that both major parties in the US are now fully complicit in arming and enabling live-streamed genocide, there's a pretty strong case to be made that anti Arab and Islamophobic racism is reaching new heights.
And while most actual Americans are very much against the arming and enabling of said genocide, that hasn't motivated them to move on from the two party system.
There's a widespread notion that "agitating" against two genocidal parties is idealism, or perfectionism. It's really just doing your duty as a person, and the fact that so many Americans don't care/understand that points to... Massive widespread racism, ding ding ding.
Uh, no. Totally different times. To me the mid to late 90's where almost the same, among 2000 and pre S11 2001, chill, futuristic times, with computers, consoles, comic books, everything, the final death blow to the 80's which began at 1992/1993. Maybe from 2001/2002, but from 2002-2003 the one was grim, dark, pro-torture on series and tons of war propaganda in movies from the US.
It might just be age and experience, but the world felt bigger in the 90s than it does now.
Not only bigger, but more mysterious at that. Information wasn't instant and wasn't readily available. There were tales, there were rumors, there were news, and you had to rely on those for your own worldview. Anything further you had to make an expedition to your encyclopedia or library or other means to dive deeper into it. If you made an appointment with someone, you had to rely on the fact both sides will be there; No portable means of communication (easily / cheap). Now we have portable comm devices where we even use them between rooms.
As sibling comment said, I feel privileged to have experienced that, but especially the whole transition from analogue world into digital and then online. It was quite a ride. Around dotcom boom, the second wave of internet users coming online, internet was relatively widespread,. It was also heterogeneous. Quite amazing actually. Now we're down to few big walled gardens and it's definitely different and, in my opinion, worse.
In the world of "strange stuff that occasionally happened on the internet back then", my favorite example is from September 11, 2001.
Nearly all US news websites were at a crawl. But somebody at CNN - knowing that their website was basically nonfunctional - piped the closed caption feed from their regular news channel into an IRC channel. (It was hosted at CNN, so clearly it was internal.) And I found that out because someone posted about it on Slashdot.
It's funny, being someone who was terminally online then and now, back then I had immediate access to orders of magnitude more information than I did a few years prior as well as a normal person. These days the amount of information I can pull at the drop of a hat is so much more than back then it is mind boggling. Also a normal person isn't that much different in capability vs a terminally online person such as myself.
Yes, and that imo kind of cheapens the whole effect of it. We're witnessing something similar now with genAI and slop people produce with it. First few moments it was wow, look at all of this and now it's noise.
Conspiracy theories were a lot more recondite back then, less accessible to what people today would call "normies." Before X Files you would rarely encounter them unless you subscribed to the Loompanics catalog, or ran into a LaRouche activist on a college campus, or shopped at the kind of used bookstore where an old guy woud talk your ear off about the FEMA secret government or something.
I don't really agree. I remember getting books from the library in the early 90s that talked about UFO conspiracy theories. There was a lot of weird stuff on TV, before the X-files, like In Search Of (which I think was from the 70s).
Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World was a thing among such things. It was present in popular culture, it wasn't obscure, but it did culminate with X-files for sure.
Unless you had access to unusual books they didn't really talk about conspiracy theories per se. I remember reading 90s books about aliens and they tended to be collections of UFO encounter reports, sometimes alongside or in the same books as reports of fairies, werewolves and other monsters. They were very much treated as a modern version of the local villager swearing he saw a goat that looked like Satan... just random tattle, repeated for amusement more than as part of a coherent thesis.
> Unless you had access to unusual books they didn't really talk about conspiracy theories per se.
Definitely remember at least one mentioning "the men in black" (with a picture) and government coverups.
> They were very much treated as a modern version of the local villager swearing he saw a goat that looked like Satan... just random tattle, repeated for amusement more than as part of a coherent thesis.
IIRC, the tone was more "some people think." They weren't especially skeptical or judgemental.
It felt bigger because of a few things:
1. The world felt farther away. It was much harder to learn current events about far away places, and talk to people there.
2. The number of websites you spend most of your time on has shrunk. Facebook/Insta/TikTok is a lot of people's entire internet diet.
Yeah, the internet felt more like an unexplored place then. Now it feels like a service to access some other services, but back then, it felt like a real world that could contain anything.
It totally felt bigger because so many experiences required access to specific physical objects and getting those took forever.
35mm film processing, CDs (tapes even worse), VHS . . . these were all things deemed not exactly ideal at the time.
It was happier, with plenty of opportunity for everyone and society felt like it was held up on common ground. It defnately felt bigger, because it was.
People used books a lot more and it was fun to sit on the floor at Barnes and Nobles.
I remember planning trips with Lonely Planet books. I just really don't miss the pre-GMaps era. I don't think I'd ever drive now without one a phone.
I wrote an essay for a private journal last year about how the X-Files mainstreamed anti-scientific and anti-government conspiracy thinking and thereby led to the downfall of American democracy in the 21st century. It valorized the fringe, presaged "do your own research" and consistently told us that the skeptic is always wrong, the believer is always vindicated.
It wasn't a bubble of the 90's, it was a prescient blueprint for the 2020s.
I've heard this idea before but I think it's primarily hindsight. At the time The X Files was on, there were even more popular shows about strong institutions, like Law & Order or The West Wing. So if popular TV was influential, why didn't society evolve toward those portrayals? I think we can look back today and say "that looked like this," but it doesn't mean that caused this.
It took something far more powerful than a TV show that was mildly popular for a few years to create what we live today. It took the great flatness of the Internet. As Terry Pratchett predicted to Bill Gates back then.
It took the great flatness of the Internet. As Terry Pratchett predicted to Bill Gates back then.
Can you say more about this? All I'm finding are articles about PTerry predicting the rise of fake news:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/30/terry-pratchet...
LOL, we must've been typing in parallel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47980081
The X-Files didn't presage it, the X-Files were inspired by it. Conspiratorial "do your own research" style thinking long predated the X-Files (both in existence and in popularity).
If anything, the 90s were the one era where that thinking had receded more than at any other time. Then 9/11 brought it roaring back.
I think it’s simpler than that, the internet makes it easier for conspiracy people to reinforce each others beliefs in a space where no one is going to challenge their fallacious reasoning.
Any attempts to remake this show including the new X-file seasons were a failure. I believe it was this insane time in history where two young federal agents in the early 90's without smartphones and mobile internet would make this conspiracy stories even more believable. This time felt due to the emerging underground tech scene more mysterious than probably any other span in history. So if someone would want to make a new conspiracy mystery drama it would have to play again in the early 90's.
There are still lots of us alive who have experienced this. And to us, X-files felt high tech for the time. This was a time period when I think people were just waking up to powers of computers and technology, in particular alien tech, due to the incalculable complexities of ideating and creating magical electrical boxes - microprocessors. How could humans be capable of doing this, after all?
One poster already mentioned Matrix, but games like Alpha Centauri and others had also explored socioeconomic themes of power laws and what massive sweeping changes entail.
You can still get the 90s and 2000s experience to some extent. It hasn’t truly left, but society has moved on so it is a rather isolated journey and somewhat limited. But you won’t get MTV or any of that nowadays sadly.
For me, my car is a mid 2000s model so the way I listen to music is to buy CDs. I haven’t stopped. That part of 80s/90s hasn’t gone away, but it doesn’t really feel nostalgic either because it’s normal. To others of course, especially newer generation, they don’t even know we had to rewind tapes manually sometimes because the device would fail to do it properly.
The larger thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this.
What I remember most about the 90s was the overwhelming optimism. Technology was going to make our lives better and unlock opportunity, not take all our jobs and render us irrelevant.
To me, the weirdest thing about the AI hype cycle is the inherent nihilism of it all. If there's one thing I miss, it's the optimism. I used to be enthusiastic about what the tech industry was doing and where it was going.
> The larger thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this.
How about this: Back in the late 90s, after Google appeared, search actually worked, worked well, and was not yet deeply tied into creepy tracking and ad tech.
I would wade through thousands of geocities memed sites to have that experience again.
I miss the optimism too. What drew me to tech was how it felt like we were trying to make people's lives better.
These days, it feels like tech is primarily interested in extracting value from us. I guess this is nothing new. Profits at any cost, and all that.
I don't know, I'm just kind of sad about all of it. Even though my smartphone is like 100x more powerful than my first computer, it still feels like something was lost
There was the sense that tech and the internet would change human systems. Information wants to be free and all that. The individual power granted by tech would lead to individual liberty. Traditional power structures would crumble when faced with this.
We didn't realize that it only felt that way because the people with power didn't care yet. Tech was like an ant crawling across a picnic blanket and thinking it's powerful because the people aren't doing anything about it. Once traditional power structures woke up to tech and the internet, they coopted it all.
This is a great point and way of saying it.
It's all feels though. If you stare into the void, the apocalypse is coming. OTOH, bringing an AI assistant to every person in the world to make their lives better, is one perspective to take. It's all a matter of framing.
There's still that at usenet at comp.misc, comp.arch and so groups. Good discussions with almost no clickbaits and the like.
> These days, it feels like tech is primarily interested in extracting value from us. I guess this is nothing new. Profits at any cost, and all that.
Not just that but the whole "shaping the future whether you like it or not" push.
In the 90s, building the computing future meant figuring out a user need and building a product that fit that need. Now, there is this idea that technology companies are just building their idea of what the future should be, minus any product imperative, minus input from customers or the public, and then it's up to us to "get on board" and adopt it. The cart is driving the horse.
The optimism died a long time ago. I’m a Millennial, the 90s flew by as I was growing up, but one of my formative experiences was playing Deus Ex in 2001, after 9/11. It gave me healthy distrust of technology, governments, big corp, and what the world is going through today only reinforces this vision of the world. Of course I am nihilistic about AI: when I read about Altman and Karp, I see Bob Page. These are NOT the type of people I want to create a new world order. Yet these are exactly the people positioned to create a new world order.
I feel the older generations still believe that technology will set us free.
Ironically libre games gave me that faith back when I saw roguelikes coming (in 2002 with Slashem, Nethack being back and Angband), libre engines, Linux distros working with AvermediaTV pirating media streams and whatnot. Corporate computing was hell, full of virii, shitty interfaces (and now even more with even more control), adware, and tons of shovelware.
But the common folk was doing amazing stuff. A 3D suite/raytracer for free? Free as in freedom math books with easy algebra teachings? Free compilers, operating systems and whatnot? You don't need to pay about $600 (or $3000 on industrial basis) for everything in Debian Sarge? Just an $20 DVD? It was like getting a damn interdimensional UFO for free when everyone was paying for expensive cars, gas and highway tolls.
> I feel the older generations still believe that technology will set us free.
I still have my original copy of High Noon on the Electronic Frontier[1] and still hold out hope that computer technology will ultimately end up on the positive side of the scale rather than the negative side, despite how our current tech leaders are racing as fast as they can toward the negative side.
1: https://www.amazon.com/High-Noon-Electronic-Frontier-Concept...
I’m a Millennial, the 90s flew by as I was growing up
I'm a young GenXer and I've told some Millennial friends that I feel bad for them because they had probably the best childhoods in human history[1] and then were plunged into worldwide terrorism, the Great Recession, and now the affordability crisis and incoming AI Apocalypse.
As a GenXer, at least I lived with the anxiety of nuclear annihilation at any moment as a child to set my expectations for the future.
[1] assuming you're at least vaguely middle-class and American or, presumably, living in Western culture. I can't speak to the experience outside this realm, but I watched my Millennial cousins grow up in a flourishing economy with endless products and media designed to delight them.
Still somewhat optimistic here. It's easy to fixate on the negatives, and tech has brought many negatives for sure. It sometimes feels like governments and big business read all the dystopian sci-fi novels and turned those ideas into operational playbooks. But tech has brought many good things as well.
If you're a basic bitch consumer and complainer, that's on you. The world is hard, life is hard, humans are beautiful and terrible. These things don't change. But there are more options now, and it's never been easier to learn, explore, and DIY.
Besides all the nice luxuries like power tools and google maps and online shopping, my true optimism lies in digital data, transparency, and accountability. The powers that be of course are allergic to latter two, but tools are there now and we're slowly making inroads. There are real problems being solved across all industries that wouldn't be possible without technology.
Nostalgia is fine and all, and the 90s were certainly a more naive time of course, but it's not like everything was great and now it's terrible.
> What I remember most about the 90s was the overwhelming optimism.
To me it felt we were slowly making the world better for all. Progress was happening and would continue to happen.
Now it feels like we are rapidly on the path to a dystopian Elysium like future. A dystopia for everyone but the sociopathic ultra wealthy that want to rule over us. And they’re not even hiding their intent from us anymore.
I think it's pretty funny to call out the clothing as stylish.
As far as I remember, Mulder's suit was meant to look like the cheap and ill-fitting suit that a low-level, young government employee would buy for a dress code and because he didn't want to think about clothing.
And so much of the environment was slightly strange to US viewers, I think, because it was mostly filmed in the Pacific Northwest and Vancouver, and felt just ever so slightly in the uncanny valley of being like much of the US but also not.
I also think the technology was somewhat reduced for plot purposes. Consider the "road warrior" template that already existed for business travelers, with more use of laptops, cell phones, email, etc. I think the writers just found it convenient to make communication and information research more cumbersome than it really had to be in that era...
I agree with most of that, but disagree about the "road warrior" bit. Laptops and cell phones and email existed, but not pervasively when the show started in 1993. It was around 1998 or '99 when work issued me my first cell phone that didn't require me be careful how I used the minutes. A powerful laptop of the time had a 250MB hard drive, a 486, and 2 hours claimed battery life (but in reality the battery was more like a UPS so you could carry it between power outlets). Pagers were common but coverage sucked outside metro areas. Email was uncommon. Email that worked between organizations was science fiction for most people.
On a personal level, when X-Files first aired, I navigated around with a Thomas Guide, and you were out of luck if you got to a friend's house and they weren't home. My dad had a car-mounted cell phone and warned me not to touch it at risk of my life and bank account. No one I knew could afford a laptop. I dialed into a lot of local BBSes with my Amiga but only knew of the Internet from magazine articles and hadn't actually seen it in person. FidoNet was the closest I got to wide-area email.
No, I'd contend that X-Files was reasonably accurate for the time.
It would be interesting to hear anecdotes about whether FBI agents were being issued or were finding it worth purchasing their own notebooks, cell phones, for use in the field back then!
Anecdotes about what we thought was affordable or common place in our neighborhoods isn't very relevant to whether the tech was available for enterprises and workers who needed it.
With no insider knowledge, I can only guess whether a federal agency like the FBI was aggressive with such options or lethargic and stuck in their legacy methods. Likewise, the writers and show producers may have made choices based on what they thought the audience would relate to rather than what was actually possible or in use. Or maybe they didn't have any insider knowledge either..?
However, the term "road warrior" was jargon for a category of business travelers in PC advertising by the late 1980s. There were various portable computers back then, and "notebooks" became idiomatic in the early 90s. PowerBooks and ThinkPads were already around when this show launched, and being used by companies and individuals who saw the value. It's hard for me to imagine that a Hollywood writer wouldn't know about these things if they did any background research at all.
People had modems and various forms of dial-up interface with larger enterprises. You likely dialed a modem bank specific to your employer to access some kind of mainframe app or terminal server within the enterprise. But the transition to things like SLIP and PPP was also happening at this time in some enterprises. And CompuServe and Prodigy were more retail focused. You could imagine agents using something like this in the field much like people today use unofficial social media and personal phones. It's hard to prevent it...
The first 2G digital cellular networks were rolling out in the US around the same time this show launched. But, yeah, coverage was not as universal as it is now.
I can't speak to the FBI, but I was in the military at the time and almost no one had a personal laptop. Our department got one in 1994 that we could share around the office. I would be gobsmacked to hear that the FBI were given the budget for laptops and cell phones back then.
Remember also that 2G didn't meaningfully have data until the very late 90s. Its first "data" offering was SMS, which was pay-per-message. Not that it mattered, because a phone couldn't do anything with data at the time, and if laptops and cell phones were rare, cell modems were unicorns. In any case, cell coverage outside cities sucked until 2010 or so. My wife had to commute to a nearby city once a month to run a medical clinic, and she lost signal about 5 miles outside our town and picked it up again when she could physically see the other. Those tiny towns in the middle of Washington state forests were probably busy upgrading to IP over Avian Carrier during X-Files times.
This is quite the tangent, but you could use regular analog modems with AMPS analog cell phones. They actually did circuit-switched analog like a wire replacement.
And I used my first 2G phone as a modem to dial up my work modem bank. I believe this was on Pac Bell Wireless, before Cingular. In this GSM scenario, the phone itself had a serial port accepted modem control commands. My computer still saw it like a normal modem call, but as far as I know the digital stream was sent over the air and something on the telco side terminated it with an analog modem that called my work number over POTS lines.
These were slow, somewhere in the 2400-9600 bps range.
It was a capability designed into the networks, since dial-up was so important back then. You generally just had to have the right adapter cable that split out the serial (or USB) from your phone's proprietary multi-pin port.
This strikes me as weird. In 92/93/94 I was on packet radio, a ham equivalent of digital lora which used hopping to get you to neighbouring countries. Most had 1200 baud, some 9600. I downloaded executables from bbs’es over the air and chatted with likeminded folks. Around that time we also had the first guest lectures about software defined radio with proof of concepts. I find it impossible to believe that a bunch of amateurs in EU were more digitally connected than the folks this thread talks about. Without a monthly payment, mind you.
Right, the capabilities were there. One question is what was realistic for an FBI agent relegated to the basement. I agree with the other poster that Mulder probably wouldn't receive government issued packet radios or even a laptop. He probably got an old IBM electric typewriter to go with his limbo office.
But, what was his pay? Could he have decided to equip himself, much like US servicemen were known to upgrade their own body armor, GPS, etc. in recent decades? The Lone Gunmen side characters surely must have known about all this stuff, and his character could have been informed of the options.
And, in the timeframe of the show, I know that US college professors and various "creatives" were buying the Apple PowerBook and using the online services I mentioned. They were not the executive class in terms of pay or prestige. But they saw the value, and prioritized the spend from their own modestly middle-class means.
I absolutely believe it! I’ve seen exactly one packet radio in my life, a giant rack mounted thing on a US Navy ship. It was neat tech but you’ve gotta admit it was far from ubiquitous. I think the modern analogy would be surprise that they don’t issue Meshtastic radios.
First and foremost, Mulder and Scully worked for an enormous federal agency. They have some pockets of incredibly high tech stuff. They don’t procure cutting edge gadgets for the average employee. Think of it like going to work at IBM or similar, where you get issued exactly the set of tools that your job description and organization say are required for your job. If that still says you need a Pentium 4 desktop and a BlackBerry, guess what’ll be in your cubicle on your first day at the office.
Remember that AOL hook into the internet in late 1993 just as the X-File was showing season one. Dial up internet was a big thing by the mid-90s, especially for CS students who used it when at college.
>As far as I remember, Mulder's suit was meant to look like the cheap and ill-fitting suit that a low-level, young government employee would buy for a dress code and because he didn't want to think about clothing.
1000% times better than what people are wearing today.
Today is so hoodified you have office workers in sneakers.
The white shirt, suit and trench looks so good. ALSO people where not as obese. This has of course an effect on the fit.
His uniform was pretty much the federal worker equivalent of the off-the-rack oxford shirt and chinos for a corporate cubical drone like in Office Space.
Yes, the tech world brought "casual everyday" to the office. But, ironically, the SF tech scene is full of designer t-shirts and jeans, so the obscenely rich and/or sartorial types can still signal their elite status among casual wear...
The Mulder equivalent today would be wearing a clearance rack hoodie from the megamart, rather than the hand-woven, artificially distressed version from this year's runway show.
You make the point for me.
An off the rack OCBD and suit with a herring or trench over is so so so so so SO much more stylish than "designer t-shirts and jeans" or "clearance rack hoodie from the megamart"!!!
Or do you honestly set a = between them? Are they equal?
We are truly lost, my god.
Explains why I have to fight to get a decent OCBD and Slacks. I have found it and never leaving.
Hoodies are for kids and african americans when in public and I am neither.
I do not mean runway style if you think that. I mean business and/or business casual. YES give me the 90s slacks, OCBD and blazer anyday I am trying trying so so so hard.
Personally, I don't care about fashion. I'm not in any way interested in passing judgement on fashion norms of this era or that era.
My real message here is, perhaps, old fashioned. I believe art's meaning is in the intention of the artist or author, in this case the show producers and costumers who did their work in the 90s. You can understand it by considering the context of their intended 90s audience. If there are records of their production decision process, that would be even better.
It is through this lens that my original post found mild amusement in this young person's misunderstanding of the show's costumes. In the originating context, nobody should consider the federal drone as fashionable. Rather, it signals the least effort the character could get away with. It expressed a "phoning it in" vibe. This person has other priorities and just wants to bypass the cultural gatekeeping of the time.
By comparison, I'd say Scully's clothing started off expressing the straight-laced, eager college graduate of the time who is trying to manage her appearance, on a budget. Something like "adulting" for later generations? I'm not passing judgment on that either. It's just the contrast that was there to establish characters.
> Today is so hoodified you have office workers in sneakers.
I'm not sure if that was intended as a dog whistle but you might want to consider that it's coming across as one.
[flagged]
You're wrong. Style is subjective and it's abhorrent to suggest that fashion associated with certain races is inherently less tasteful than others. You should be ashamed of yourself.
I would be baffled if someone actually preferred the hypebeast style over 90s office blazer/suits of XFiles, but you do you king!
I don't think it matters what you wear, you will still be a disgusting, frightened little racist hiding behind your anonymity.
Are you okay my gentleman?
You can be a hoodrat in public with your sweatpants and hoodie, your mom thinks you look great! :) And your fellow hoodrats too!
you’re admitting this is a dog whistle?
on behalf of the amazingly well dressed colleagues over my career, post a fit and let’s see.
Yes.
On the second question, you make the mistake of framing it as a completely personal choice. But we are formed by our environment. I had no chance growing up in the 00s. Everyone had jeans and hoodies, maybe a sweater. I did not pay attention. I carried that into my 20s and only in my 30s have I started to care about my clothes and weight, which I regret so, so much I want to die almost.
I blame everyone. My parents are and where preppy but they made the mistake of thinking I would pick it up through osmosis somehow. But getting things handed to you or seeing, you dont learn tools, what things are called. I really have had to study and try on things, I remember I saw well dressed people in our capitol and HM models for inspo. 4chan fa board has helped a lot too but now overrun with zoomers but there are good threads.
I am too paranoid to post myself openly online, I have no instagram nor an active facebook so I will not post some imgur of myself here. But for work I tend to go with business casual chinos, OCBD and boots or loafers. You must understand, everyone is casual here and wears jeans at most.
Same with books and quality movies. It really is a struggle to find quality, but the internet does help. Like finding xfiles. Our state does upload good old movies to sort though the modern slop.
Geocities had a ton of xfiles fansites https://geocities.restorativland.org/
(beware, has auto-playing audio!) https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/5795/
https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/8406/main.htm
https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/6601/
https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/8616/
https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/2133/
https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51/2442/
and many more.
On a similar note, go back and watch the party scene from the 1991 movie “City Slickers.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Slickers
For 90s kids who remember their parents having people over, parties were really like that! Obviously without the drama and comedy. But people would come over and socialize and not be glued to screens. And we have data that things have changed dramatically. In 1990, 55% of men reported having six or more close friends. In 2021 it was down to 27%. The percentage of men who have no close friends is up by a factor of five, to 15%.
> But people would come over and socialize and not be glued to screens. And we have data that things have changed dramatically.
My wife and I are moderately social with diverse groups of friends. I haven't been to a party where guests were glued to screens in years.
I can think of a few, but they were so uninteresting that we didn't prioritize future events with those people. Why would I spend my limited free time hanging out with people who don't want to socialize?
Thinking back, those people probably think that staring at phones at social events is just what people do, so it was okay. When you don't see your friend group self-selecting into a bubble of people with shared beliefs and behaviors, you think everything around you is how everyone in the world operates.
I remember back in the early 80s my father knew the drummer or bassist of some "A-minus-list" up and coming 80s band (the actual band escapes me, maybe Poison way before "Every Rose Has Its Thorn") and he convinced the band to hang out at his house and jam. Well I remember the whole small town Pennsylvania community showed up and it was a total ripper. I never properly capitalized on the cool-kid-cred I should have gotten from that night.
Recommend "Halt and Catch Fire" series, if you haven't already seen it.
Its set slightly earlier in the PC rush.
The magic of that era, I think was that there was this new explosion of technology and a smart teen could figure out how things worked and tinker.
It coincided with a relatively low level of economic inequality, meaning garage bands and garage startups were doable, imo.
If you enjoy The X-Files, you really should check out Millennium, by the same creator (Chris Carter) and broadcast at roughly the same time.
It's very intense, with an Emmy-deserving performance by star Lance Henriksen (whom you may remember from the movie Aliens). It mixes Christian theology and eschatology, mythology, horror, and serial killers, leavened with delightful humour.
The first season is mostly "serial killer of the week", but is important to establish the characters and long-running story arcs.
The second season is a delight, with some of the best writing of any TV show I know, and a lot of complex situations with no easy answers.
The third season changed (and cheapened) everything, and is only worth watching for completists.
To anyone with this kind of nostalgia I'd recommend watch 'Perfect Days'. You can live however you want.
While it is impossible to not have a smart phone at this point you get to decide how you use it. Want to feel like you are in the 90's? Stop using your phone. Consume only old or physical media if you want, get rid of streaming services. Go buy an old car if you feel like it. Go read a book. Anything you could do in the 80's and 90's you can do now just as easy. You just have to curate such a life.
I think the only place you have to compromise is work. You can't roleplay like it's the 90's if you work in tech. But hey when you clock out of work turn your laptop off and go do whatever you want. Again, there is nothing stopping you from doing anything you could have done back then now (except maybe buy a house).
That was a great time to be a kid and so much of what I did in that era is gone now. Going with friends to Blockbuster? Hanging out at the arcade? Stopping in at the mall because you will probably run into friends there? From age 15 to 25 I was at a house or field party a couple times a month.
And things like streaming services are no replacement for video stores. Scrolling though a list doesn't compare to going to a video store, wandering the aisles, bumping into people you know, talking and flirting and finding out about parties, and totally changing your plans based on who you happened to run into. The random social interactions were important.
You can do 90's larping, but unless you are doing it with all the people of the same generation from your community it's only a shallow facsimile of the real thing.
> That was a great time to be a kid and so much of what I did in that era is gone now. Going with friends to Blockbuster? Hanging out at the arcade? Stopping in at the mall because you will probably run into friends there? From age 15 to 25 I was at a house or field party a couple times a month.
This is true. I didn't really think about it from a kid/youth perspective. As an adult I think you can live a similar life style but kids definitely have been robbed of all of this. I'm past 25 and I average a house party a month still I would say. House party's are permission free though, if you want one then host one.
> And things like streaming services are no replacement for video stores. Scrolling though a list doesn't compare to going to a video store, wandering the aisles, bumping into people you know, talking and flirting and finding out about parties, and totally changing your plans based on who you happened to run into. The random social interactions were important.
Video stores still exist. Depending how big of a town/city you will still bump into people you know if you are out and about.
>You can do 90's larping, but unless you are doing it with all the people of the same generation from your community it's only a shallow facsimile of the real thing.
Live how you want. If it's good others will follow your lead. I deleted all social media over five years ago and I have some friends who have at least tried to follow my lead. I read a ton, my friends do as well. I have a group of guys to play magic with every week where we take turns hosting.
If you have a vision of what you want the world to be the first step is to live that way yourself. Either others will follow or they won't, but you can't force people to do anything.
That is larping. No amount of wacky pomo carpeting and Outhere Brothers cassette tapes can actually transport you to a post-cold-war-pre-9/11 world.
The nineties literally ended in a party where at least one person in the room thought they were going to die the next day. You cannot recreate that with a Doug t-shirt.
Works for the amish.
> I think the only place you have to compromise is work.
Or if you have a family.
The next time I say "We didn't have (to do) X in my days and things were just fine (or better)", I'll be kicked out of my house. :-)
Books have been replaced by DVDs at my library. I spent almost all my time at a book store for a year in Austin and can count the number of active readers I saw in there on one hand. It's depressing.
Reading is an independent activity by nature. I don't really see how other people not reading should affect you. There is nothing depressing about nature. It's natural that the majority of people would shift away from reading and gravitate towards easier forms of media consumption.
> Reading is an independent activity by nature.
This wasn’t my experience at all. I read similar novels as friends, we talked about them, tried to replicate some of the stuff the characters did, have suggestion about books to each other, lent them out, went to the bookstore together, etc.
People read books on public transport before the iPhone and that was often the path to strike a conversation with a complete stranger who nonetheless shared interests (depending on the book they were reading).
Books certainly could be completely individualized experiences, but they offered a whole world of socializing opportunities.
Reading is an independent activity, but wandering through a magazine store with friends while you were on your school lunch break wasn't.
The weekly book club is very active at my local library for some reason. Strange but true.
Ah, the 90's. Bill Clinton raised taxes, which eliminated the deficit, which made interest rates go down.....My biggest problem in life was wondering which company which was trying to recruit me had the best stock option package.
There are a few things which have gotten better. Gay marriage. Marijuana legalization. But Entshitification is real and for the last 25 years has been relentless.
And let's be honest, that is also partially Clinton's legacy. Him and Tony Blair, with their "Third Way" triangulation bullshit, effectively moved the Overton window to the right for good. And here we are.
As a layman in politics, why did that shift things right in a bad way? Reading a summary of "third way triangulation" makes it sound good.
A couple of things happened. One, the Supreme Court handed the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, and not Al Gore.
Bush did not continue the policies of Clinton. He cut taxes, which increased the deficit, which made interest rates rise, which made the subprime market collapse, which resulted in the worst recession since the great depression.
What gave him political cover to do this was 9/11. He took the opportunity to spend Trillions on oil wars, which we fought for the next 20 years, and which accomplished absolutely nothing.
The result was that for the first time in American history, the next generation had it worse than the previous generation. When I graduated from college, my biggest problem was choosing which stock option package to accept. When my son graduated from college, his biggest problem was deciding which meals to skip to afford his insulin.
Thank goodness Obamacare fixed my son's insulin problem. And Obama wasn't able to get rid of the deficit, but he at least put it on a path where it was shrinking relative to the size of the economy.
I can't bear to rehearse what the Trump administration has done. Absolutely incalculable damage to the budget, the deficit, civil discourse, our international goodwill, and to the rule of law.
It's hard to even convince people how bad it is, because nobody under the age 40 even really understands what a functional government and economy looks like.
It accepted unfettered capitalism in a very fundamental way. Once you make it axiomatic that taxes should always be low, that the private sector is always better, and that massive inequality is just fine, you basically renounce all meaningful tools to fight for the little guy.
Plus, you can only triangulate effectively if there are two radical sides to play off of. Once your policies effectively disqualify one of those positions, you're left alone to face the other radical group - and they now have no incentive to compromise. Which is exactly what happened over the following decades.
> As a layman in politics, why did that shift things right in a bad way?
Whether it's good or bad is subjective, and depends on your perspective on both major parties being "Fiscally conservative"
Mostly because of the implications for deregulation.
Anybody who remembers the last century knows that any Democrat left of Clinton would have resulted in a President Bob Dole. And at least the Clinton administration tried to give Americans Hillarycare.
Growing up in the 90s in Moscow wasn't all cakewalk (immigrated to US soon after), but I fondly remember watching the show and reading Russian-translated X-Files books. I don't know why the books were so fascinating to me. Imagined my life in America as something akin to Fox Mulder: suit, nice hair, car, hotel, official business. The lifestyle was all foreign to me, and also the coolest ever.
There are two shows I still watch from start to finish every few years: The X-Files and Star Trek: TNG
For me, it's The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle. Those are the shows I watched as a kid and I'll love them forever.
I think I have watched Star Trek: TNG all the way through 3 times with my kids already. They also love Deep Space 9.
DS9 is also great. I don't go through it as often but it's definitely in rotation.
I learned to love Sisko a lot more than Picard tbh. I find him much more relatable than some pretentious english-frenchman who gets weird around kids. I never understood why he’s such a jerk to Wesley in the beginning.
Over the course of a few years, my wife and I did TNG, DS9, and VOY in order, back to back, without missing an episode. Such great TV.
And then there's Babalyon 5.
Yup, X-Files were great and I did experience it. "The Lone Gunmen," was good idea as well but they, i.e. tv gods should have waited five years after the X-Files ended, to allow some time for nostalgia to creep into fandom, to do the show. I remember discussing with someone, who knew a guy who knew a guy, online regarding how their personalities should be crafted for the show. They ended up with, funny. Too, funny was not a good fit for them since they had genius level intellect. This show was one of the few places I saw Linux being mentioned by an ape in the episode where The Lone Gunmen receive a message from an ingenious chimp attempting to escape a government laboratory. The way they were killed off was really crappy. They should bring then back on the new series, perhaps as cloned versions.
Lone Gunmen I go back to more than X-Files. It is short and very fun.
A less fun show I go back to is Harsh Realm.
Yes, it was short and fun, to those who appreciated it, but the world was saturated with X-Files. I would have waited 5-10 years, then brought the Lone Gunmen back for a revival. The viewers would've had time to miss X-Files and thus Funny & Quirky would have appealed more to a nostalgic audience. I think it can work again, given the right conditions, the writers, same actors + new faces, even different shows/genre crossovers. There I go, again, giving advice for which I am never credited :|
Harsh Realm was interesting, noticed Gillian Anderson's voice narrating the Harsh Realm training video. Rewatching it now, nice piece of Nostalgia :)
Yep, things went downhill after social media.
Social media + mobile phones pit the ingenuity of our cleverest minds against the will and habits of the many, to sell ads.
The 90s were my 20s - I still remember walking back with my girlfriend from the sea in the evening, across a residential area and we could here the jingle of X-Files on tv through open windows.
This is one of the images in ly life I keep going back to and cherish.
It is interesting hiw sounds and smells are strongly embedded in these memories.
I have been kicking around this idea for a bumper sticker. "The '90s were lame, but they were still better than this."
I remember not loving the '90s when I was living through them, but my sense now (and I am hearing it more and more from others) is that we didn't realize how good we had it.
The X-Files reminds me that there was a time when conspiracy theories were funny and cool and not something that members of our government earnestly believed and used as the basis for their legislative agenda.
In the pre-internet era, when you heard a fantastic story, you couldn't just google it to see if it was true. People either believed everything they heard, or they took it with a grain of salt. Either way, it was incredibly easy to let your imagination run wild with a crazy idea, even if you firmly believed in science and the burden of proof. That was the one-half the magic of The X-Files.
The other half was that so much of it took place almost entirely in rural or at least tight-knit suburban settings because that's where all the weird stuff happened. You couldn't grow up in the rural US (or probably anywhere) without spending many long summer evenings staring up at the clear starry sky and wondering what was out there, or hearing a sound in the woods that you couldn't readily identify. Pets occasionally disappeared without a trace. Livestock and wild animals behave strangely sometimes for no apparent reason. That guy living on his own a few miles down the road who hurls insults at anyone who walks by.
Weird rural shit still happens of course, but it's shrinking as suburbs continue to grow, and you see less of it on TV and in movies these days.
That is exactly why I deleted my reddit account years ago. For every factual post there, there were two inaccurate or false posts. I didn't like my head becoming a receptacle for other people's falsehoods.
I remember back in the early seasons of the show, logging into Delphi (the VAX hosted text forum) immediately after to chat with other fans and sometimes people involved in show production. There were huge threads about the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade (actually there were a bunch of these, but DDEB was the biggest by far) and the Gillian Anderston Testosterone Brigade, lots of fanfic, consipirary analysis and more. It made it feel like more than just a show and more like a community.
ELO's 1981 song "Ticket To The Moon" lyrics said:
"Remember the good old 1980s?
When things were so uncomplicated?
I wish I could go back there again
And everything could be the same."
At the time, it was a bizarre and crazy idea that the 1980's would be better than the future.
The idea that the future would be MUCH better has always been a given - at least for me but I think much of society felt that way back then.
Can’t remember where I first heard it (message board? Kumail’s podcast?), but I read/heard a really strong case that the core theme of the X-Files is informational enclosure/the dawn of the modern cyber panopticon, and how for good or bad all the little weird, secret corners of the world get catalogued and dissected as technology encircles all.
I was there and I can tell you that it was genuinely better times.
The 80s and 90s were peak western civilization.
Tech was exciting, futuristic.
Politics - whilst certainly always grubby and adversarial - had not descended into lies and manipulation and misinformation and attempts to destroy the democratic systems.
People talked socialized read books.
Dating hadn’t been turned into a high volume marketplace in which no one is ever satisfied and everyone is always upgrading.
The environment and global warming were an issue for sure but not like now.
It's looking more and more like The Matrix was correct ... the end of the 1990s was peak human civilization.
Economic inequality was relatively low in 60s 70s, and economic growth was high in late 80s and late 90s. That seems to be a good backdrop for human flourishing, not just in science/tech but also in art, music, film etc. Recommend Piketty / Gary's Economics for more opinions on this.
A couple snippets from my own experience / wow points :
> People talked socialized read books.
Reading books - perhaps more than they do now, but in the 90's it was already on its way out.
> The 80s and 90s were peak western civilization.
Only if you consider west "civilization" as the US.
I enjoyed things in the 80s and 90s, but many things about it sucked too.
In many ways I like the current times a lot more than this idealized past.
> Only if you consider west "civilization" as the US.
Not just the US, it was pretty peak for the UK as well. Probably even moreso, considering the deleterious austerity policies that followed. The 90's were great for Germany, and formerly eastern-bloc countries.
The 90s truly were a wonderful decade for human creativity.
Most of the scientific writing up until mid 2000s seems to have been a golden age.
It's fascinating to read the perspective of someone seeing X-files as a show from before their time. The clunky phones in the show, for example, were actually advanced technology that most of us had never seen in real life. The closest thing I'd seen was the IBM technician Brick that an uncle had.
> I want to twiddle the dials on a car radio
That's one thing I miss. As a kid in the early 90s, I used to collect car radios whenever someone was replacing theirs (which seemed to happen a lot more back then) - they were fun to take apart because so much of it was mechanical. Even the buttons to remember a station were mechanical and worked by using latches and levers.
One of the all-time great shows. Mythology episodes mixed in with the "monster of the week" ones for the casual viewers. The music was also pretty special. Each episode was like a mini feature film.
Here's another, next-level of nostalgia: a copy of the official Gillian Anderson website (1) with her favorite music from the 2000s.
1. https://gilliananderson.ws/webarchive/about/favmusic.html
Wow. I didn't realise how much I miss that era of web design. Reminds me of PhpNuke/game clan sites.
Scully fans may feel weird in this present alternate universe, where Gillian Anderson has gone into witness protection in the UK as... an actress with an English accent.
Watching millennials and gen Z discover her previous life on American TV is cute.
I remember watching the weekly x-files episode. My and my colleagues would discuss it the next day at work with great enthusiasm. In those days you had time to absorb tv shows like this, something that doesn't really seem to exist anymore today. The 90s where a great time.
besides already recommended Fringe, Millennium and Halt and catch fire I enjoyed at same time as X Files in 90s also new Outer Limits, opening credits were great and episodes are always thought challenging, I'm just rewatching it and still enjoy it, though technical quality is horrible since I think FHD was never released
but if you wanna straight up X Files just based on 50s check out Project Blue Book, it's like retro X Files, you won't get closer than that to X Files
I love the X-files. Season 5 & 6 are the best. Maybe the best episode of all time is Tithonus. Tho many greats. What a fantastic show.
Morpheus was right, the 90s were the peak of human civilization.
That was Agent Smith:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrBdYmStZJ4
You're right!
Cigarette Smoking Man! I was a kid when I first watched the show, and he seemed so mysterious and fascinating to me from the moment he appeared.
X-files was great for the first couple of seasons but then it went downhill, fast. I watched it start to finish twice, including fillers, and I gotta tell ya, past the first 2-3 seasons it really ain’t that great a show. I remember playing the live action video game that was split across several cd’s. that one was real nice. sometimes i still rewatch let’s plays on youtube about it.
I feel like most people who are nostalgic about X-files, me included. Are only nostalgic about the vibe it gives you in the beginning.
I think the big mistake the X-Files made was trying to solve its own lore. The mystery was what made the show work. The more it explained, the less interesting it became.
Yeah, all my friends watched it when it was new. After an episode played we would talk about it the next day.
Im pretty sure none of us saw the final few seasons, with it moving to a late night time slot and noone caring.
Best show on network TV at the time (and possibly since then). I look forward to seeing how Hulu is going to ruin its remake.
I watched it back then, but I don't think it held up over time. Twin Peaks did though.
I was a huge X-Files kid growing up. I was 10 when The X-Files (and Brisco County Jr.) debuted and I watched "Encounters" on FOX in the years before.
Are we talking about the same 90's?
There's no one like you in your area? I hope you like sitting in your house alone. You saw half of a movie late at night? Heard a song in a show? Hold onto it, it might take you a decade to finally track it down (it was Land by Patti Smith.) Have an medical issue that the doctors in your area aren't interested in diagnosing? Good luck, I hope it's not progressive.
You had to fight for access to everything in the 90's. Even if you could track down the thing you want (big IF), actually getting it was SLOW. That book you finally found, it might be 2-3 months away.
Today is the best day in human history to be alive.
We have instant access to everything and yet we choose to waste our time on short-form garbage. We are the people Homer Simpson was designed to mock. Homer and the people of the 90's wasted their time watching whatever trash TV was sloshed into their troughs. We're watching whatever an algorithm is slopped into ours.
You live in a fantastic world with instant access to everything in recorded history and yet you choose to rot in front of YouTube.
Here's the secret. It's not the 90's, the 90's were nothing special. It's the Past World, the one that you can only see when you're looking back at it. The world that we live in today was built in the 90's and the world that we will live in tomorrow is being built today.
The world is and will be what we make of it.
Our current moment will pass. I want to see what we'll achieve in another 100 years and I'm jealous of the babies just getting started now. I hope that something that I make will be seen as a stepping stone towards something better.
"You live in a fantastic world with instant access to everything in recorded history"
I hear this a lot, particularly from Millenials, and it's entirely incorrect.
There are vast amounts of information still only available in books, or on the shelves of archives.
Sure, the Internet might provide 99% of pop-culture information, but don't mistake that for 99% of knowledge.
Name an important archive that isn’t in the process of being digitized or an unimportant one that’s likely to crumble before we get around to snapping a picture of its contents.
But if we look under the hood you can see where you’re taking an obvious exaggeration literally. See it? Right? That’s what’s making the thunking noise.
Over there on the left. No, your other left. There. The point is over there.
>There are vast amounts of information still only available in books
You can get every book ever realeased in PDF or ePUB on the web my guy. Hello?
Just because your internet is just TikTok on your phone...
You live in a fantastic world with instant access to everything in recorded history and yet you choose to rot in front of YouTube.
YouTube is full of excellent content. I regularly watch several highly skilled YouTubers the same way that I would watch Norm Abrams and Roy Underhill on PBS as a child.
As a child, I could have watched grifting religious folks or Public Access conspiracy peddlers on TV, too.
Another response that (deliberately?) misses the point. I’m going to stop responding after this one.
Again, deliberate exaggeration. When I say “rotting in front of YouTube” the key to understand my point is the word “rotting”, not “YouTube”. Good work is done in every medium and on every platform.
Another response that (deliberately?) misses the point.
First, when many people "miss the point", perhaps you should review your communication.
Second, perhaps you are missing the point that garbage has always been available and, generally, preferred by the masses.
Oh well I guess I'm going to have to rewatch X-files now.
Still re-running almost daily on comettv.com
X-files was so great show...
Yes it is peak TV. Also sad how young people are. I was a child though. But am rewatching it. Yes no modern TV comes close. And the remake... I suspect HN aggress with the casting but I wont speak on it or I will be banned.
But yes I mostly rewatch 00s and 90s TV only
Like Synthwave
My wife and I rewatched X-Files start to finish a couple years ago. It still holds up. The monster-of-the-week where Mulder sings the "Shaft" theme song is still hilarious.
But in retrospect, I wish we hadn't all collectively decided to winkingly go along with conspiracy theories. While crackpots will always exist, I think a lot of people took this and other shows too literally. Yes, conspiracies exist. But no, most of the time, the guy at the metal desk in the grey government office is just doing what his job description says he's suppose to be doing.
I don't know that X-Files directly led to idiocy like antivaxxers and climate change denial and election truthers. I do think it gave a lot of people social cover to start exploring those dumb ideas, and no one took them seriously until it was too late.
Just watched the X-Cops episode last night for the first time and it was hilarious. I didn't know I could nostalgic for absolute trash TV.
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Literally everything is just shite now. Movies and TV are shite, food is shite, the economy is shite, politics is shite, dating is shite, electronics and tech is cheap ad infested shite, even the reffing in sports is shite! Things get more expensive yet also worse somehow, our wages don't even come close to matching inflation, housing is propped up to keep old people's investments secure meaning we don't even have places to live.
Im a young millennial so I can relate both with millennials and gen-z, and from what I can tell the vibes are just really really bad. People don't even really care about the future anymore because they know it's just going to continue to be shite.
Im a elder millennial and i hope that things are ripe for a change, because it really does feel like everyone is pissed off about the system
Yep, I'm not a socialist but I don't even care if thats where young people are moving towards, we just need change.
I agree with some of that, but not with TV.
The best TV shows today are as good as or better than TV has ever been and there's usually an ad-free option.
Televised sports is an exception- the number of ads is insane and there's no real way to avoid them. On the plus side though, I have access to a lot more games/matches/races/etc...
What is a good TV show that is on today (or was, say, within the last couple of years)? I'm looking for recommendations.
My backlog is crazy long. As much as I love TV I don't get nearly as much time to watch it as I'd like. From the last couple of years:
Of all those, Andor was the biggest surprise. I'm a mild Star Wars fan (I've seen the movies and that's about it) but I really enjoyed this, probably more than the movies. It looked amazing, was well written and acted. It's a prequel to one of the movies and we watched the movie right after we finished the series and I ended up liking the movie a lot more than I did the first time I saw it.The Paper and The Studio are comedies and watching them made me miss the great sitcoms of the past. Why aren't there more comedies?
I liked the Last of Us game and I think that's a big part of why I enjoyed the tv show. If you haven't played the game or aren't a zombie person, you could probably skip that one.
I liked The Peripheral but it was canceled so I have a hard time recommending it. What they made was very good but there just isn't enough of it. The William Gibson book it's based on is worth reading IMHO.
The golden era of TV just ended. All that’s in our future is endless remakes.
I think it ended in the late 2010s, when streaming took over:
Over the 2000s and early 2010s, writers were perfecting the style first experimented with by the great shows of the 90s and earlier, where seasons were mostly episodic but led into serial plot. Several of those early ones have been mentioned in these comments, and often alternated episodic and serial, while the later ones were figuring out how to mix the overarching plot into the episodic ones, advancing it slowly as something extra so viewers could miss one or two episodes without getting lost. Then at the midseason and season finales it'd be a big event for the larger arcs, bringing it all together.
Streaming no longer had to worry about viewers missing an episode, so all the episodic filler started getting dropped in favor of streamlining the overarching plots. Unfortunately, what we lost along with it was things that were less filler and more character and world building. Getting to know the characters through action instead of summarizing it with narration, making the setting feel more real, laying out events and actions in a more natural way instead of it feeling contrived.
For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fjd9RgRUQDY
The backstory that makes this scene work so well was almost all in those episodic character and worldbuilding episodes we don't really get nowadays. We actually watched these characters develop and grow and change over years before this scene. I don't really think modern TV in its serial format could have a scene with as much impact - all that "filler" makes them feel like three dimensional people rather than plot devices.
The media landscape we have is something I couldn't have even imagined when I was young in the 80's. However, I can go back and watch, for free, essentially every movie ever made. I've gone back and watched dozens (maybe hundreds) of movies that I remember coming out when I was a kid, wanting to see, but never getting to because I was too young, or I couldn't find them at video stores, etc.
There were a _lot_ of _really_ bad movies and TV shows that came out when I was young, including movies and TV shows that I loved at the time. They were awful - we just watched them because there was literally nothing else to do. We're bombarded with entertainment choices now and our standards have gone up.
We have amazing cell phones, though.
The 90s were incredible. The Matrix had it right when it mentioned in 1999 "peak of human civilization".
* Music was incredible
* Movies were amazing, enough to go to the theater 12 times a year at least
* Homelessness was pretty much non-existent
* People were friendly and had time for strangers
* Employment was 10x better than today, and not by today's way of counting (which don't count group x y and z)
* Jobs actually made people feel needed and going to work was an incredible feeling for your soul.
* Very few people were on drugs 24/7 like they are today
Our biggest problem was probably Alcohol, which has actually dipped today (but probably because people are on pot instead)
If I had $200 Billion I would literally give all of it to be a teen again for ten years from 1990 to 2000 again.
Homelessness was a giant issue in 1991, there were pop songs about it: Gypsy Woman (La da dee la da da) by Crystal Waters, and Walking Down Madison by Kirsty MacColl. We don't seem to have pop stars singing about issues any more. Unsure whether that's a plus or minus.
In the US, homelessness per capita peaked in the 90s. It remained relatively high afterwards compared to the pre 1980 numbers, and has recently spiked higher in the wake of 2020 and following, but in the 1990s there were a lot of homeless people in the US.
My country had a complete economic collapse in the 90s and people could barely afford food, so mileage varies.
As an oil exporter country we were saved in the 00s by oil prices ballooning to the moon, so that was the golden decade for us instead (relatively speaking, and mostly in the big cities).
> * Employment was 10x better than today, and not by today's way of counting (which don't count group x y and z)
I'm pretty sure we count unemployment the same way. Those groups are just larger now because of age, education and economic malaise.
There were a lot of millennials at the time. Still are, it's just that they're pushing 40 instead of 14.
Groups that are excluded from unemployment statistics aren't a specific generation. They are retirees, students, people who gave up on seeking a job, etc.
I have a lot of nostalgia for the pre-9/11 world too but be careful with the rose tint.
It wasn't so wonderful if you were gay, for example. AIDS was still new and scary in 1990, and society was not so accepting of that lifestyle.
I remember when I was a teen it wasn't uncommon to go to a Boston Pizza-tier restaurant and have the waiter make a quip about "not wanting to look like a fag" by ordering the same thing as the guy next to you. This was a thing into my 20s, as late as 2007 probably.
It's interesting to me that many of the comments about not romanticizing the 80's and 90's across all forums reference 'it wasn't that good if you were gay' which would be like 3-5% of the population at the time? We had a society that 95% of people would say was ideal and the only knock is that it wasn't great for a small minority versus now we have a lifestyle that is universally panned...
Different strokes and all that but I'm pretty happy it's much less socially acceptable to beat the shit out of 5-10% of the population for no reason.
As long as you didn't have any gay friends or family, or just cared how other people get treated.
It's not like being straight was perfect protection. You'd get abuse just for acting in ways that had been arbitrarily decided to be gay-coded.
There was plenty of other bigotry to deal with as well. For example, support for interracial marriage was under 50% at the beginning of the decade (in the US), and was still under 2/3rds by the end. Bigotry is still plentiful, of course, but it was quite a bit worse then.
> versus now we have a lifestyle that is universally panned
I don't agree with this premise at all.
Its true that it wasnt as good if you were gay, and im glad that its better now.
But, its also true that it was better in many ways that affect both gay & straight people!
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> If I had $200 Billion I would literally give all of it to be a teen again for ten years from 1990 to 2000 again.
I so so wish I could go back as well. Its such a magical time in my memories. I was 6 in 1990 and I was 16 in 2000. God, what a world that was!
Ah, a fellow 1984 release.
I'm pretty nostalgic for the 90s. Maybe everyone who had at least a halfway-decent childhood feels that way about their kid years, though.
for 200 billion you better throw in knowing what you know now in to the mix, then it would pay for itself
I am not sure where you experienced the 90s or at what age, but your experience is the opposite of mine.
I agree with a lot of that person wrote. I'm a healthy white guy born in 1970 into a very supportive family in a middle-class town in Canada. I basically won the lottery.
I was a kid in the 1970s, a teenager through the 80's and turned 20 in 1990. I had everything I needed and most things I wanted (eventually). High school was easy and actually fun. University was cheap (compared to now) and I had a blast. Graduating with a degree in comp. sci. in 1995 was bonkers. Opportunities were everywhere.
There have been some ups and downs, but I really don't think I would have wanted to be born any other time or place.
They mention being a teenager then, so a lot of their feelings might come down to "it was fun being a teenager" sprinkled with some effects of late stage capitalism.
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> The 90s were incredible
I was born in 1974 and I remember being vaguely annoyed in my 20's at how the 90's "ruined" the 80's - I remember things being way better in the 80's and society starting to go downhill around 1991.
I will say, though, the poster's lament that he's nostalgic for a time he never knew is one I've heard a _lot_. My kids watch "Stranger Things" and ask if it was really like that when I was a kid ("did you really just get on your bike and go over to your friends houses?") and wish they had experienced the 80's (and even the inferior 90's). I _never_ felt that way about my parents generation - the 60's were interesting from a historical perspective but I never wanted to be there.
> the poster's lament that he's nostalgic for a time he never knew is one I've heard a _lot_
For sure; the 2011 film Midnight in Paris is a great comedic exploration of this feeling as its central theme. (well, if you can set aside any well-justified reservations about writer/director Woody Allen.)
Eh, the anti-gay sentiment was really bad in the 90s. A couple of my college buddies came out and instantly lost half their friends.
> Very few people were on drugs 24/7 like they are today
Kinda like the opposite man, kinda like the opposite.
>Music was incredible
Ehhh, the post-grunge world was a bit of a musical wasteland. Rock died as a culturally relevant force with Cobain, but hip-hop hadn't ascended yet, so we were stuck in this weird doldrum that gave us things like the swing revival, ska, nu metal, and boybands. I mean Counting Crows were the big megastars at the time. Really hard to name a timeless album from '96-'99 the way you easily could on either side of that range. Just see the set-list for Woodstock '99 to further illustrate the point.
Here’s a list of albums just from 1998.
Mezzanine from Massive Attack, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Big Pun’s Capital Punishment, You’ve Come a Long Way Baby from Fatboy Slim, and Hello Nasty from the Beastie Boys. The K&D Sessions from Kruder and Dorfmeister. Stunt by Barenaked Ladies. Then there’s one of my personal favorites, Mermaid Avenue from Billy Bragg and Wilco.
You mentioned rock. How about Hellbilly Deluxe from Rob Zombie? Follow the Leader by Korn. The New Radicals released Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too. Garbage’s Version 2.0, and Lenny Kravitz 5, and Van Halen III. What’s more rock than Walking into Clarksville by Page & Plant?
You're making his point for him.
Yeah I'm not sure if that was a troll actually
Also Mechanical Animals (Marilyn Manson).
All those albums are hilariously overrated and not representative of the truly good music coming out at the time.
OK Computer (1997). Mezzanine (1998). New Forms (1997). Peak trip hop and drum and bass. I remember it being pretty great. But yeah, I was like 17, so …
Edit: commenter below with Underworld - 100%.
Tool, Weezer, Sublime, RATM, Radiohead, Foo Fighters, Blink-182 all put out amazing albums from 96-99.
Rose coloured glasses though - I was a teenager at the time.
I was in my 20's at the time. I saw all of those guys as being inferior GnR, Motley Crue or Metallica wannabes.
Metallica's St. Anger it's a grunge wannabe disc.
The 80's died but not with Cobain, but with The Pixies and R.E.M.
And in late 90's the industrial rock/metal basically made 80's glam rock cringey and obsolete.
Endtroducing.... (1996)
Second Toughest in the Infants (1996)
In Sides (1996)
Homework (1997)
To name a few. The 90s were great for electronic music.
Wow I've never disagreed harder with an HN comment in my entire life. Counting Crows were a single band that got some radio time in the early 90s. Calling them the big megastars during '96-'99 makes you sound like you weren't alive then. That statement just sounds so utterly ridiculous to me. It's like a narrow-minded European claiming that everyone in the US just eats nothing but hot dogs. Timeless albums from that era:
- Odeley (Beck '96)
- Aenima (Tool '96)
- OK Computer (Radiohead '97)
- Homogenic (Bjork '97)
- This is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about (Modest Mouse '96)
- Stankonia (Outkast '99)
- Kid A (Radiohead '00; began recording in Jan '99)
You were just rage baiting, right? The late 90s were an absolutely legendary time in popular music history.
Edit: Yes, agree with commenter who mentioned Underworld. Didn't mention it because it seemed more niche. But I adore Underworld.
It was such a great time for fringe musical subcultures.
Black metal was a 1992-1998 thing. It was dead (and many of the genre's leading lights were looking to move beyond it, mostly without success,) by the end of 1999.
Those six years also produced an explosion of experimentation in industrial, ambient, darkwave, and many other niche genres. In some cases, musical and aesthetic boundaries were pushed as far as they can possibly go.
From where I'm standing, the 26 year period from 2000-2026 absolutely pales in comparison to just those few years 1992-1998.
Underworld / Second toughest in the infants
NIN / The Fragile
Radiohead / OK Computer
Daft Punk / Homewerk
All of these are generation defining albums.
I would like to add, all the jungle/dnb of the 1990’s and Rhythm & Sound.
The R&S / Maurizio / Burial Mix records are absolutely timeless.
Not to forget cheap housing !