• ORbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    20 days ago

    Not sure if this will make sense, but the 90s were the calm before the storm. They were the last breath before the plunge. Nobody was there to police you for words or anything else you did.

    The 90s were the last time people existed before the internet connected us and exposed us to one another without edges. We were innocent because we didn’t know we were wrong. The Web being introduced in 1996 was the modern day apple being eaten in the garden of Eden. After that, we all learned shame.

    ~I’m sure l’ll be corrected shortly for some mistake I made above.

    • Hegar@fedia.io
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      20 days ago

      Nobody was there to police you for words or anything else you did.

      On cue, i’d like to correct you on this.

      After my fellow goth friend alvin was seen wearing a skirt on the weekend, our high school paid a christian youth group to lecture our entire grade. Their leader said they used to believe they were real actual vampires, but when his friend came home wearing a skirt, that’s when he knew they’d gone too far and turned to jesus.

      The satanic panic was also still going strong - i played d&d in the 90s.

      People have always been trying to police others for some bullshit. It’s easier online, but we got it done plenty before that.

    • theneverfox@pawb.social
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      20 days ago

      I think that’s only one shard of a bigger picture. And it wasn’t woke, it was political correctness

      The 90’s were pretty PC if you lived in a diverse area. LGBT was handled a little… Awkwardly, but in general things were pretty live and let live, people started adjusting to different cultures

      Those areas were the first to colonize the Internet, because they were places with people and money.

      That’s where the PC came from, when all the racist backwaters connected to the diverse cultural centers, and people were like “holy fuck, how can people be this racist?”

      It started an effort to scrub out racism everywhere, where these already generally tolerant people panicked at the thought of being seen as a bigot

      It was misguided from the beginning, it made all the public shaming superficial and based on word choice. It didn’t shame the racism like it should have

      • ORbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        20 days ago

        Of course it is. It was just a wistful moment as I was waking up. Everyone is proving my point, though.

        • theneverfox@pawb.social
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          20 days ago

          I agree with that. You were gesturing at something that’s just true, how can you know the full picture without comparing perspectives?

      • frostysauce@lemmy.world
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        19 days ago

        The nineties were kind of accidentally sex-negative in how acceptance was peached. I remember a lot of media back then being like, “It doesn’t matter who you are with as long as you love them.”

        Yeah, that’s cool and all, but what about the people you just want to fuck? I don’t think many people in the nineties were ready to accept people can fuck whomever they want and as long as there is consent it’s cool.

    • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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      20 days ago

      Counter point, the apple was social media.

      Anonymous forums that had a barrier to entry of needing to be tech savvy worked really really well.

      It was the dumbing down of software this did us in.

        • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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          20 days ago

          Yes but the tree was not the problem in genesis, eating the apple was.

          We can go as far as to say it’s God’s fault for not restricting them (especially since he should have predicted the future).

          Internet would have been fine without the money parasites trying to monetizing everything by maximizing engagement (rage).