2) I think 90s culture was in many ways not only more commercialized than what came before, but also what came after. The height of the "synthetic boyband" wave was in fact during the 90s. There also was a much more materialistic mindset to buying clothes. I remember reading about several studies saying how valuing expensive clothing had gone down in the 00s, that people would rather pay for vacations and club nights, and instead shopped at the ultra-cheap clothing stores that sprung up (tellingly) during the 00s - whereas during the 90s, clothing was often valued
in particular for their price. So it seems to me the 90s, and especially 90s pop culture and youth culture, were overall
more commercialized-materialistic than succeeding decades.
90s youth were the height of consumerist conformism, basically
You know what I just realized is going to feel like a particularly dated version of consumerism, such that one could work it into an 'lol 90's' sort of story?
Malls.
Okay, it's kind of obvious. Vaporwave has an entire subgenre dedicated to tracks that sound like mall ambience, all echo-y and interspersed with "I'm gonna take my laptop, and put it over there", you know what I mean. But that doesn't take away from the fact that we shop on Amazon now, instead of going to the mall, parking the car, going into the building, wandering around, etc. We just - click. It's less about the experience, which is what I feel like malls were / are supposed to emphasize, a sort of twisted commodified version of the Roman Forum, and more about getting the damn thing and having it.
(I remember the Cyberpunk 2020 Night City Sourcebook had an entire district that was one bigass mall hooked up to an apartment complex like a mini-arcology. It feels so dated now but it must have felt weirdly prescient at the time.)
Perfect, too, for the minimalist, stripped-down aesthetic that permeates our virtual worlds in contrast to the blingy, if not outright baroque UI's of old websites and kludged-together HTML. We've gone from a mindset of abundance, running victory laps around the Russians because we
won, and to an ethic of austerity where we have to cut back on every excess if we want to
survive, much less
thrive. Capitalism has stopped promising us things, and started threatening us with a lack of things.
So, uh, yeah. I started writing this post about malls and then got into the ethos of capitalism in different eras. I guess that gets back to the question of initial tone. Ooh, maybe the local Venusians just triumphed over the collapsing authoritarian Martian Empire, and everyone is left kinda reeling, wondering 'what now?' Earth is sort of the Third World that Venus and Mars were fighting over, and now it's going to be 'redeveloped'? That way one could have history
progress, but end up right where it started, at its supposed
end, with there thus appearing to be no historical motion at all.
Then -
then - the inciting incident is a financial crisis. Either a dotcom-bubble sort (new technology turns out to be mostly hooey) or a 2001 sort (major terrorist attack / similar crisis scares the bejeezus out of everybody, shatters illusions of stability), or even an '08 housing crisis sort (promises of new prosperity turn out to be built on grift dressed up as legitimate business). Either way the point is that the system the protags have grown up under, thought would last forever, is no longer a gauranteed thing. You'd just have to make it happen in the middle of the story, instead of before it (the way Ghost in the Shell SAC_2045 placed its financial crisis before the story, so one of the most iconic cyberpunk franchises out there just ends up feeling kinda post-apocalyptic).
Whoo! Man, I missed this thread.
Edit: I just remembered that I reread Snow Crash a few weeks back! How about that. Plenty of idiosyncratic bits about the setting, like the whole burb-clave system where the Mafia are a corporate neofeudal empire sort of thing (man, remember when the mafia was awesome fodder for fiction? Feel like that stopped with The Sopranos), or the fact that Hiro's roomie is a rockstar (for in our timeline, rock n' roll has gone underground, died a silent death, replaced with SoundCloud rappers who get high on cough syrup and Sprite), or the ol' 'hijacked Russian nuclear sub' thing that basically makes Raven the biggest badass in the book. I forgot how over-the-top the book is, and how different it feels, in its prose and in its obsessions (gatling railguns, The Raft, the nuclear-powered guard dogs), than Stephenson's other books, where everything feels a bit more straight-laced and less indulgent.
(Did it have something to do with the fact that Stephenson originally planned to write the book as a graphic novel with another guy by the name of Tony Sheeder, a CGI-based one at that? Who knows.)
Snow Crash's fundamental obsession with language, information, viruses, Sumerian, though, that shit's classic Stephenson. Reminds me of Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind theory to an uncanny degree. I wonder - would it be worth it to try to work in some stuff about the bicameral mind or something similar into the hypothetical story this thread is about? Get a little transhuman / postcyberpunk-y? Sea changes in consciousness itself brought about by the 'Net'? It might end up too close to Ghost in the Shell, but that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing...
Okay I'll shut up now.
