This is such an interesting take, about which we could probably write whole paragraphs.
Can the 90s be really summarized in such way? Yes, we had the "information highway" and "waiting for year 2000", but at the same time people distrusted their governments. X-files was all the rage, maybe grunge.
In USA there was Bill Clinton - the president that didnt do any wars and balanced the budget.. who got removed for blowjobs. But at the same time there was outsourcing. In rest of the world it also cannot be summed up so easily - I remember that 90s were a struggle, especially for post communism countries.
Obviously later on we got cell phones, but we also got the cancer such as Jack Welch style management that lead to various methods of enshittyfying everything.
I had a talk some time ago - I have a genuine polo bought in a supermarket in the 1980s (wont tell the brand since it is irrelevant). This piece of cloth feels and fits very well - after 40 years. It was worn through many summers.
Now I cant buy a polo shirt that will last more than 2 seasons. And I buy the "better" ones. There is lots of crap that falls apart fast.
For me the 90s were a start of that trend - enshittification of products that are designed to last 25 months (with a 24 month guarantee) and be thrown away.
But maybe it depends on life experience and anecdotes.
Was there optimism in 90s? Lots of it in marketing materials. But did people really believe that?
I had in mind the sort of networking/software people that I imagine read hackernews these days, not the overall people in the world, nor the overall population of MBAs/business people. There was a lot of idealism, among the people writing drivers and servers, and plugging in wires to enable the connections, that connecting the world would be good, increase understanding and solve problems faster and so on.
I will point out that in the US, the overall picture was we'd beaten the Soviet dictatorship, and democracy seemed to be spreading, and the income inequality was better than it is now and houses were affordable to a lot more young people. Also we had a budget surplus one year. Gay people couldn't get married and could be kicked out of homes and jobs, and there was a lot of anti-Black police brutality and war on drugs, but it seemed possibly less than in the 1950s and we hoped it would continue to decline. (Possibly distributed and networked cameras via cell phones have put pressure against police brutality, I think the outcome there is not certain either way, but the people of good conscience now have much more awareness of the violence inherent in the system.)
I certainly felt optimistic. Of course, I was also a young adult, found my calling in writing network services, had my first child, bought a house, all that good stuff. Unlike many software engineers today, I had sort of stumbled into the distributed networked computing world, having worked at other much less fun jobs, and I appreciated, not getting paid to be a lord of the society, but getting paid at all for such interesting and fulfilling work. Every raise I got was an astonishment and a delight. Once I passed $60,000 per anum, I was able to get a house. It was quite cool, given all the mocking that math/programming people had been subjected to the prior several decades.
Oh it gets better than that: he didn't even get impeached for the blowjob, it was just for lying about the blowjob. If he told the truth up front, it would have been out of the news cycle in a week or two.
This is such an interesting take, about which we could probably write whole paragraphs.
Can the 90s be really summarized in such way? Yes, we had the "information highway" and "waiting for year 2000", but at the same time people distrusted their governments. X-files was all the rage, maybe grunge.
In USA there was Bill Clinton - the president that didnt do any wars and balanced the budget.. who got removed for blowjobs. But at the same time there was outsourcing. In rest of the world it also cannot be summed up so easily - I remember that 90s were a struggle, especially for post communism countries.
Obviously later on we got cell phones, but we also got the cancer such as Jack Welch style management that lead to various methods of enshittyfying everything.
I had a talk some time ago - I have a genuine polo bought in a supermarket in the 1980s (wont tell the brand since it is irrelevant). This piece of cloth feels and fits very well - after 40 years. It was worn through many summers. Now I cant buy a polo shirt that will last more than 2 seasons. And I buy the "better" ones. There is lots of crap that falls apart fast. For me the 90s were a start of that trend - enshittification of products that are designed to last 25 months (with a 24 month guarantee) and be thrown away.
But maybe it depends on life experience and anecdotes.
Was there optimism in 90s? Lots of it in marketing materials. But did people really believe that?