The 80s were already the second decade of the decline after the gold standard was revoked in 1971 and wages became decoupled from productivity. Everything was on a slowly accelerating slide downhill from there, although it took until the 90s for the first people to truly notice things were going sideways.
You want a real economic golden era? Try the 50s and the 60s, where a single wage earner could work a low-end service-level job (selling shoes, for example), and make enough to own a detached SFH, a car in the garage, support a SAH spouse and several children, go on modest vacations every year with at least one more ambitious one every few years, and still have enough left over to save generously for retirement.
Abandon your monetarist goldbug worldview, the gold decoupling and subsequent floating of the international exchange rates are downstream of the actual policy decision that have emiserated the population.
The globalists open the western worker to global competition, they lost their leverage by losing their scarcity and competence.
The subsequent decline comes from the system’s inertia and the burning of the future with debt and literally the future by having spending money instead of kids.
If you want the golden age back for normal people, then there is NO REMEDY other than giving them their leverage and power back.
But how do you do that ? Taxes and interest rates serve to dis-empower those who need it the most and regular people are the one MOST hurt by these.
The neoliberal religion refuses to treat people who “win” the game of capital differently than regular people, as if they were somehow on an equal footing.
The result ? The more wealth you have the easier it becomes to acquire and accumulate more of it. This needs to be exactly reversed, the poorer you are, the easier it should be to acquire but the more you have the harder it gets. Up until a point where it becomes nearly impossible to go beyond the “capital horizon” some kind of equilibrium state where wealth can lo longer be acquired faster than you lose it.
It’s not some shiny metal bullshit which only serves the status quo like discussion about which toilet should a trans person piss in.
Boomerfying
That’s a scary word.
It is, but didn’t genX own the 80’s?
They were 20 year olds, they didn’t own shit
80s nostalgia ai slop to relive memories? 😴
80s nostalgia to relive memories by looking at vhsrips of 80s home videos and media? 😎👉👉
Reminds me of all those stupid “cyberpunk 1994, office nights 1998” ai slop playlists on YouTube. They all have a common theme: they don’t represent or even remotely sound like the kind of music from the year they claim to take you back to. and the tracks, if one can call them that, are the same repetitive, thoughtless rhythms. If you go to YouTube to find some background music to listen to, these kinds of uploads dominate the search results today. And it’s all D-tier shit.
Fake 80s
I have a dream!
That’s based on tropes from an era we’ve already lived through.
We need to work together!
To to backwards.
Dare to dream. Be somebody.
Be somebody
*in debt
It’s all real here, no filters, no screens.
… said the AI.
Fuck I hate that garbage. The 80’s were amazing. We don’t need new tech ruining that memory.
yeah! let’s go back to a time when gas was $12 a gallon. where women had two jobs, making babies and making dinner. where teen pregnancy was at its highest ever. where the government fueled a drug and arms war in South America. where the constant threat of thermonuclear war was banging on the iron dome every single day.
yeah…sounds like a fuckin blast from the past. fuckin rad.
where the constant threat of thermonuclear war was banging on the iron dome every single day.
That’s good. Memento mori, carpe diem.
Dont forget the insane racism and misogyny and HOMOPHOBIA on another level. It made news when someone shook a gay guys hand. And the good ol death by AIDS sweeping the nation. The horrific parenting that led to PSA asking if they know where their kids are. The fucking unsolved kidnappings. The escalators that didn’t have emergency stops and would choke you to death on your own shoelace.
I can’t tell if the joke is that now is just back then, but again.
Still better than the current full steam ahead into fascism.
woosh
I think you might have been too young to remember the Regan years.
not nearly as tumultuous as today, but certainly similar in spirit.
I might be old, but I have not forgotten him. He is one of the root causes for what is currently happening in the US.
People tend to filter out the bad memories, like the fact that crackheads were breaking into cars constantly, making it nearly impossible to have a decent car stereo. They started making them that you could pull out, and take into the house. It was common to see cars parked on the street with a sign that said “No Valuables in car.”
The crime rates in America in the 80s were through the roof. It wasn’t until the earl/mid 90s that they dropped.
In Russia there are some nostalgic memories from the older people, but it’s all about education and science, some kind of common dignity (with less personal dignity, probably, but common dignity is important too) and the nation not being openly ruled by thieves, that kind of thing. And total losses in Afghanistan were 15k people, that was a reason for mourning and being terrified, that was talked about everywhere in the news, apparently. While now - you know.
I mean, they remember that kids would just be let out to play, and that they’d go to school and other such places all by themselves. That kids would make knuckles from lead, or make explosive things, or (when in less destructive mood) some kind of perfume and such, radio, all kinds of DIY more often, more serious and more dangerous than now.
They also consider it absolutely basic to accompany your guests to the bus stop or metro station or train station, and only leave when the bus\train leaves, to call your friends regularly and raise panic when they don’t answer, to preferably not go out at night, and to never ever say things too open or offensive, because any weirdo at all could hear them, feel offended, follow you and fucking kill you, no cameras everywhere.
And their memories of relative security are not about lower crime anyway, they involve teenage and youth hooligan gangs being literally normal. They would be those who maintained that relative safety. If you were a man, you’d do well to not be outside your district after dark, you could get beaten and robbed just for that.
Judging by what I’ve read about 80s in the west, all this was kinda similar there. Less depressed probably.
It’s true that this is all AI slop and that they are disgustingly manipulative videos but I do disagree with the notion that the nostalgia and The era was fake and never existed. As a child of the '80s and '90s we really did stay out all day until the street lights came on, and hang out in pizza places and malls and the internet and our screen life has played a major role in changing that. What is heinous here is that people are creating triggers just to manipulate generations. Not the nostalgia.
Yep. As a child of the ‘80’s, life was definitely like that for the most part.
A lot of it comes down to both smartphones and the loss of ‘third spaces’ in general. I read an article in Newsweek this morning about an MIT study that analysed footage from between 1978 and 1980 and compared those same spaces today.
It shows people are now walking faster and not hanging in groups as much. There’s less eye contact and less engagement in general.
As stereotypical as it sounds, hanging out with your friends at the mall was just what you did. We spent hours just hanging around game stores and such. It connected you with people you knew and people you didn’t. Hang out with someone in the mall for 30 minutes and you’re now friends.
The current generation is a lot different. There’s no real physical, organic hangout. And when there is, it’s now more often seen as a nuisance rather than an integral part of the social fabric.
I definitely feel like the author of that article posted here missed the mark. The 80’s were definitely radically different from today.
I didn’t grow up in the period. I was born in '93. I’m old enough to have seen third places, but for them to be dead by the time they mattered to me. It’s not screens that killed them. It’s suburbia and also helicopter parenting.
Parents don’t feel they can let their kids run around safely because there’s no where to go within walking distance, and traveling anywhere requires a car. I’d agree devices with tracking probably do play a role now, but they weren’t a thing for me.
Car dependence has created a world where almost everyone goes to work/school, then go home, only sitting in their car between, not engaging with anyone else. We’ve destroyed any sense of community that used to exist.
I’m certain this is one of the largest drivers for all the issues we’re seeing today. It used to be you’d talk to your neighbors and share things with them, but today everyone is isolated and gets everything from the news, which tells them to be scared of everyone else.
The purpose is to gaslight the generations that have known a better world
we really did stay out all day until the street lights came on, and hang out in pizza places and malls
We don’t need AI slop to remind of of this. All it will do is bastardize the memory and replace it with cringy imposters of what once was.
Sure, but we also drank in parking lots because there was nothing to do, had guys physically grabbing at us instead of just yelling stuff, got bullied in school more, and the violent crime rate was something like 10x what it is now. Oh, and our friends were dying of AIDS as well. And the bay was polluted, and downtown was so dead we could walk around it like a ghost town.
I will never understand nostalgia. There are good things and bad things about every time. But even with the fuckers trying to pull us backwards now, there has been progress.
I will never understand nostalgia.
Yes, I was born in 1996, so not quite 80s, but even my nostalgia being applied to life wouldn’t mean mimicking old days. It would mean making some comfortable change in what exists now. Like there’s an abandoned cinema building (belonged to USSR ministry of defense, then was a small auto dealership, then was rented to shops and cat owner events, and finally it turned out nobody can untangle who really owns it, and if it’s still Russian military of defense or private property) nearby, and the ownership issues with it have apparently been almost resolved.
So there are from time to time posts in our house chat about this or that plan involving something being built in place of that building.
That’s not needed. If they demolish it, they can just make sort of an antique amphitheater with low benches to seat on. Just a place with many benches and trees around, formed so that people in it can all see each other. And it’s weird, it seems someone doesn’t like benches in Moscow, there are fewer and fewer of them on the streets and in parks and everywhere.
I mean, yeah, realty costs are a bitch there, but apparently nobody needs that particular place if the building has an owner, but is in fact used as a toilet for homeless people.
Yeah, the article repeatedly suggesting it was a disingenuous depiction of the era, but didn’t seem to make any attempt to support that assertion.
I’d love a breakdown as to what specifically was disingenuous.
I mean, like any social media, it’s selectively showing “the good”, and ignoring the bad. Is that it? Like, they can’t (and wouldn’t even if they could) put the heavy cigarette smell of any restaurant of the era through the phone.
If you watched Stranger Things, the depiction of Nancy going to work and being relegated to making coffee for the boys instead of being taken seriously at an actual job is an iconic representation of women’s struggle in the workplace. Remember, women were only allowed to have their own bank accounts, credit cards, and home loans as legally protected assets, starting in the late 1970s. We were deemed more incompetent, and more wards of our husbands in those respects. Inertia of those notions remained even after the legality changed. That whole bit in Delores Claiborne, where her husband finds her “private”, “personal”, only her name on it bank account and just empties it: real. (That is what RBG had a deciding vote on btw, what gave her such credit back in the day, changing financial freedoms for women to match those of men.)
Yes, this may seem a little focused on women, but it’s a significant piece of the “things were better” push on the right. The right did grow, in part, as a reaction to the loss of the more controlled, traditional, “kept” female. It’s important to keep a full visual of what going back could mean. Roe has already fallen.
Moving away from screen time to more face to face is good. Doesn’t mean texting is bad, it’s fantastic, amazing even, how easy it is to communicate. I love it. But I still drive 10-15min to sit down in a living room face to face with people. I feel little to no stress when disagreement, argument, or even anger occurs. Facing the normal range of human emotion in another doesn’t make me want to hide.
Even just moving back to more long form media would help stop the destructive, anxiety perpetuating, focus reducing rewiring happening. YouTube statistics are now saying anything over 10 minutes is doomed to die based on viewer preference. 9 minutes or less or gtfo. Shorts are quickly taking over and perpetually rewiring people on the daily.
Can be summed up us our time having solved some unpleasant things with computers and networks, and created some other unpleasant things with computers and networks, things that many didn’t expect because I don’t think in the 80s it was easy to imagine electronics so omnipresent and powerful.
I think it’s like so many things. Sugar. Enjoyable on occasion or induced diabetes. Beer. One on occasion or alcoholism. Dating. Nurturing or controlling/manipulation/obsession. We’re fine until our baser natures take over.
Wow that was well stated. Bravo.
What was disingenuous?
It was fucking AI slop posing as real people.
I guess so. This is from the article:
Their political project uses the aesthetic of the past to sell a future where minorities are marginalized, women have no political power, and white guys are in charge. That’s how they think it all worked in the past and they’d love for it to happen again.
What the videos don’t show is how bad racism was before everyone is able to record at anytime. Shows and movies were very streotypical. Actually since cancel culture wasn’t a thing for not famous people, people were really racists in just everyday conversations.
The government’s war on immigrants is very much like the war on drugs with were specifically created to target hippies and black communities while at the same time suppying the communities with the drugs they deemed illegal.
In terms of the environment, lead was banned in gasoline in 1996. I thought it was way earlier than that when I looked it up. Shame really. I am no a scientists and the results of microplastics in our system is still being researched but lead poisoning effects are very well documented and I believe the pernament mental effects of it can be seen in a large portion of the boomer population.
Lead was out of most gasoline in the 70s. It is still available in some, for example airports. The big thing about the 90s was that was when teens and young adults didn’t grow up around it. It’s a long term poison.
Lead was out of gas for new cars starting in the '70s. It wasn’t actually banned in the US until 1996 (1990 in Canada). There were leaded and unleaded pumps all through the '80s.
Thank you for the info. The 70’s is what I thought.
Yeah, I kinda imagined this was the nature of the issue.
Not really sure how I feel about the implied argument, though, which appears to be that it is wrong to create period art (or ask an AI to generate a video) which doesn’t include some (all?) negative experiences of that period.
May I paint the view from my balcony, omitting the mosquitos biting me while I paint?
I think the crux must be intention… Which is notoriously hard to prove.
It’s really not. We know foreign countries are using ai to radicalized boomers and incels. So it’s just safer to assume the worst until we are back in control of our society
It’s not even just the bad they’re not showing, they aren’t showing anything outside of a suburban straight white guys point of view. Which does reflect a lot of 80s media but doesn’t reflect the experience of a lot of people in the 80s
I think that’s an interesting take, especially because it’s AI generated.
I think it’s fair for artists to depict their own experiences. If these were hand-crafted, I don’t think I could vibe on that criticism. I think it’d be truly disingenuous for a white suburban straight man to be creating art of the experience of a rural black lesbian.
But, AI isn’t an artist. It has no experience.
I know I have seen some way off depictions in tv shows and movies.
*Your experiences may differ
If there is nothing to love and hope for, people start to cling to memories of better times, if only perceived better ones.
Every day, the future looks a little bit darker. But the past… even the grimy parts of it… keep on getting brighter.
I can’t wait for a brighter past!
what confuses me the most about these videos is the call to action. go back? that’s not how time works!
Anyone who actually knew a damn thing would want to stop right at 2015 abd stay there forever
September 2016, so we’d have finished existance off with the summer of Pokemon GO
In 2015 I actually thought the world was going to get better. Haha what an idiot I was.
2012 was pretty much peak imo. Cant really think of anything after that thats worth saving. Guess the mayans were kinda right after all. Smartphones had come out and evolved into something decent but weren’t terrible yet, facebook was still kinda useful and not a propaganda cesspit, google would give you useful results, reddit was full of unique and interesting information. Tv and movies were really hitting their stride with some of the most bou dary pushing original tv series and movies hadn’t all devolved to remakes and superhero rehashes, global warming was bad but people seemed concerned about it and it wasnt past the point of no return yet, youtube didnt shove a million ads down your face. Netflix was streaming content but didnt have any competitors buying up rights yet, spotify was fairly new and revolutionary still, forums still existed for all sorts of niche interests, ads werent completely pervasive everywhere, google wasn’t an evil monopoly sucking up everyones data, memes were still fresh and original, gaming pretty much hit its pinnacle of graphical fidelity relative to performance costs, you could order awesome drugs off the internet unregulated (not even just the dark web, research chemicals were fucking great and hadnt started to be banned yet). Idk i could go on and on but literally everything felt like it got worse from there. I didnt even touch on productivity or the economy but it still felt like a bit of a boom in the wake of the rebound from 2008. If im missing anything good that happened post 2012 please let me know.
You read like my poster^(And both are right)
My poster:
There’s a lot to be said for the late 90’s. Post Cold War, but pre 9/11.
It’s not perfect for everyone, especially if you’re LGBT+, but it’s got a lot going for it.
. . . What?
Boomerfying!
A perfectly cromulent word.
The thing about the English language is that you can verb any noun you like and get away with it. Just like I did in the previous sentence.
Well, I just nouned your verb right back to the way it was, checkmate.
Pretty sure the majority of the English dictionary is just loanwords, too.
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
― James D. Nicoll
English readily absorbs both the best and worst of all the other languages. If some other language has a word that really hits the mood of even just a small amount of English speakers - bam! - it’s English now, motherfucker!
Add to this, it’s chock-full of complicated and often hidden rules that can - or absolutely cannot - be broken, depending on context. No wonder people learning it as a second language have that permanently confused look on their face.
The good thing about English is that you can puke out the most half broken grammar and pronunciation and still be understood by most. I’m not aware of many other languages like that.
Well it doesn’t help that modern English is a hybrid of a Germanic and Romantic language not even getting into the Celtic aspects.
Remember all the propagandaish art of the 50s, 60s, and 70s based on advertisements of the time? Like all the Norman Rockwell stuff, sanitized hippie shit, and 70s rock star junk?
Apparently AI is being used to pump out the same kind of thing for the 80s but more blatant.
Is there a c/TitleGore up in this bitch?
I hate to tell you this, but the mullets were very real. It was a dark time and we’re all glad it’s in the past.
Mullets are back, my dude.
Like actually back. Popular, even. I get downvoted to oblivion for making fun of mullets. I don’t understand a world where mullets are not just here, but defended as a legitimate hairstyle.
The party is behind us.
We gave our kid a wolfcut mullet, and honestly it’s working 🤙
Says you. We the transmasculine population refuse to let mullets die
In the past? Ever since that '70s show was on, I see '70s and '80s hair everywhere on every kid now. It makes me feel like such a boomer to want to yell “cut your GD hair!”
Lemme help you spice things up: Wait until you’re passing by a guy who’s super clean cut and wearing business attire. As you go by, yell: “Get a haircut, hippy!” It’s funny every time.
🤣
Covid made me a hair farmer.
That’s my headline of the day
This all or nothing, either or bullshit needs to stop being perpetuated. It is why we have such an inured two party system that effectively makes their followers dance each election.
The tactic here is exactly the one used by Jordan Peterson, mixing truth with garbage for the sake of manipulating an audience into his way of thinking. And it works.
We did stay out in groups of friends, face to face, until it was dark out. We also used destinations like malls, pizza places, and water as an excuse to do so. Cars were a big deal, a means to get there without parents. Summertime involved backyard bonfires in states without burn bans. Uninvited friends and neighbors would randomly show up. Being occupied socially sometimes meant sitting with other people saying nothing, a little bored, doing nothing other than sitting in a room with others, sometimes listening to uninteresting people or TV. But that was ok because you were with friends, spending time.
The reality is there are brain changes due to screens and the invasive format of the “short”. Literal re-writing at the level of how neurons talk to each other. Shortened attention spans. Increased anxiety. Increased impatience. Inability to focus. Worse, inability to go all in on a single point of focus, for hours to create, produce, invent, or simply develop thinking skills. Increased anxiety and lack of coping in interpersonal, not even relationships, but interaction such that this idea of sitting around with groups of people, deliberately, as a way to use free time appears weird and fictional.
That said, the world wasn’t necessarily better. Just watching Wills mom on Stranger Things trying to make a phone call when her phone burned out was painful. It is nice to have a map with a “You Are Here” star wherever you go. No more perpetual cloud of cigarette smoke with all white walls and decor perpetually stained beige or yellow with nicotine sludge from cigarettes. Women’s lib had (past tense) made more progress away from rape culture and towards reproductive freedom. Less racism. And so on.
Articles like these, similar to political pundits, seek to muddy what is true by using truth to spread lies.
This all or nothing, either or bullshit needs to stop being perpetuated. It is why we have such an inured two party system that effectively makes their followers dance each election.
Yeah, this, ahem, is strengthened by this:
The reality is there are brain changes due to screens and the invasive format of the “short”. Literal re-writing at the level of how neurons talk to each other. Shortened attention spans. Increased anxiety. Increased impatience. Inability to focus. Worse, inability to go all in on a single point of focus, for hours to create, produce, invent, or simply develop thinking skills. Increased anxiety and lack of coping in interpersonal, not even relationships, but interaction such that this idea of sitting around with groups of people, deliberately, as a way to use free time appears weird and fictional.
Because you have a dopamine farming machine that goes as good as it can, why do an activity where nobody’s even trying to compete with it?
And I hate to say it, but being autistic I’m more, not less, vulnerable to said machine. Willpower.
So - there are similar extremely optimized dopamine farming machines everywhere looking nicer than some truths around. Instead of continuing to write a program to do what I’m dreaming of, or at least find tooling, I can argue in a TG chat about whatever. Instead of going to a friend group meeting I can sit all day playing video games. Between going for a walk I can read things I don’t need. Or comment on Lemmy.
When everyone is used to picking a glossy advertised easy way over more real and dimmer one, it also reinforces “all or nothing” thinking.
In addition, “short” forms, right down to the trite, terrible music, mimic TV ads of yore. (Maybe current too, idk. I don’t consume ads. I don’t have a TV, and when I do watch YT it’s on a PC with uBlock on.)
Basic Psych 101: people are drawn to the familiar. Are high shorts consumption individuals more likely to consume ads?
With everything we’ve said, it wouldn’t be so bad if it was light consumption, maybe with morning coffee, left off for the rest of the day, but instead there’s an insidious pattern I see at work. Do the work, rush back to a chair to thumb swipe up on a screen for the next 30min to an hour. Work, back to the seat for more low attention span crap, rinse/repeat, for an entire shift.
I’m old. If I try to watch shorts like that my brain feels like a cross between watching TV ads and like I’ve been working on busywork/bullshit homework worksheets from school back in the day. It’s an awful sensation, so I don’t do it. I can only speculate that my crystallized wiring has a different format that isn’t so compatible with this new consumption pattern.
This, our discussion, fits more with long form discussion boards in academia, but as part of a graffiti wall. With bullshit, screaming, and bots filling in the gaps. The attention span problems aren’t so much an issue, depending on how you consume, but the dopamine bit is the same. There’s also a partial reinforcement rewards schedule there but that’s another discussion.
Gods thank you. If lemmy is any indication of youth culture and beliefs and attitudes, fuck me. (Am middle-aged with mostly 20-something friends, they are not like y’all.)
Freaks the shit out of me how scared young people are of simple social interaction. “LOL, I’m too autistic to answer the phone!” Yeah, well there are reasons we no longer want to do so, but y’all are NOT all autistic and ADHD. “Hate talking to a cashier.” Fuck is wrong with you?! I want to scream, “You’re not autistic for being socially uncomfortable you wuss! That’s a normal part of growing up!”
Fuck me, thought I had a handle on it from my junior year until I went to college, BAM!, like puberty all over again. And then the same damned anxiety hit in my late 20s! “Welp. Guess I gotta do this every 7 years or so.” We had words for this: “Growing up.” It can suck, but we all have to do it. Get the fuck over yourself, you are not special or strange or different. The horror may be, you are normal.
And yes, anyone trying to mix us up, make us see through rose-tinted glasses, is a liar with something to sell. And anyone trying to make the past into a hellscape is at best ignorant, wasn’t there.
It’s more than that, the anxiety and lack of practice in real, that includes the awful, social encounters growing up creates an environment in which those kids, now adults, have incredible anxiety for social engagement. It’s almost like we created our own Black Mirror world by putting a screen buffer up in front of our children’s faces starting as early as 2yrs.
Helicoptering. Planning the child’s week to enrich them, scheduling play dates with no organic initiative by the child, and inadvertently dictating a script so when that ordered script and mommy umbrella are torn away at college, near panic level anxiety hits. And why wouldn’t it? No practice at deciding for oneself or engaging with real people with the full range of normal human emotions. No chaperoned play dates or protections by mommy when a bad grade happens any more.
But there is a haze right now of sorting out true ADHD from the lack of focus and attention fostered by screens. Which we do want to do, because it’s still reparable if we can start on therapeutic work no later than the early 20s.
Again, yes, with social anxiety being confused with autism. Same deal.
Of course both autism and ADHD are very real, which of course I need to spell out in no uncertain terms because this is Lemmy, but the upbringing of the latest crop of kids also, at the same time, can foster symptoms of both and that needs to be sorted through. It’s not right or healthy to assume either way on this one.
