I dunno. I kinda consider 9/11 to be the shifting point. That’s when racism came roaring back and also the introduction of the Patriot Act. The 2008 crash was just the solidification of the shit show to come.

Sure. Prison would be fine. Hell, I'll gladly argue for the reduced sentence after they're brought to justice. I bet I'll be feeling generous.

Someone hasn't heard of late nineties, early two thousands boy bands if they think music wasn't formulaic...

What are you talking about? The golden age was obviously 2010 when the Last Airbender movie came out! You're way off

I think it turned out worse than that.

I am ok with “question everything”, the problem is that people don’t believe in reputable sources that don’t confirm their beliefs, they look (possibly unreliable) sources that confirm them

I think it is due to the echo chamber of social networks. People have constant confirmation of superficial “sources” and they continue to want that.

Incidentally it’s the reason I use lemmy where the algorithm is not optimised to the point of echo chambers (also looking for “all” helps)

That's good. I remember doing the scene in the 90s there were fuck all trans people

100% agree with this. The 90's were awesome for white males in North America and a few places in Europe born after 1950, and not a ton of other people. The same could be said of the 80's or the 60's up to 1973. Just because the Boomers (and then later Millennials) were great at the marketing associated with the entertainment detritus of when they had general periods of feeling awesome about life*, doesn't mean it was the peak of anything.

Case in point, TWO of the most popular TV shows in the US in the late 80's/early 90's were one about living in the 1960's (Wonder Years) and a show that included a lot of time travel to the 1960's (Quantum Leap).

• To clarify this, Boomers dragged Western culture around on their emotions, so periods where a lot of them hit seminal age ranges (15-20 becoming and adult, and 30-45 when you have career and family and haven't yet hit midlife crisis point) line up generally with larger periods of nostalgia setting in and being marketable. This is then extrapolated out to Millennials, who unlike Gen X, gobbled up their Boomer training and penchant for nostalgia hard. So the 80's and 90s were sort of this perfect inflection point of career-oriented Boomers taking the lead and feeling like kinds of the world, then selling us the most brightly-colored plastic crap in the history of humanity, and then Millennials thinking that time, when they were also hitting 15-20, was the peak of human civilization. While the births per year are not quite a bell curve, there's a range of earlier people in the generation that set the tone of that generation, which people a few years younger often go a long with. So it's the first 5-10 years of a generation that are setting the trends and tones, and then another 10 years backing them up. Schools, specially high schools and colleges with 4-year cohorts, facilitate this by having the older classes informing the younger classes pre-internet. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

In between the Matrix in 1999 and 2011 you have 9-11, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the 2008 financial crash. And that's just the big US-centric stuff.

Nah, '95 was best. BBS systems were in their final bloom, Usenet was better than everything that came afterwards (OK, the fediverse maaaay be a good successor) and there were still the COOL systems (Atari, Commodore...) around even after their respective companies had abandoned them.

You also could make some decent money if you had some rudimentary coding skills... I financed my first motorcycle (for which I hadn't a driving license, mind you) by writing a (QBASIC? Visual Basic? I don't remember) software for managing car parts for some local used car dealers.

It honestly still felt like a “sky’s the limit” mentality like it probably was in the 50s. The internet and computers were just really starting to catch on and everyone was talking about how great they would make our lives and people were doing what they could to deliver on that promise.

Terror was something that wasn’t really on peoples radars. You could still go directly to the gate to meet your loved ones when they travelled, people were endeavoring to be inclusive as you could see from TV and other media, and racists we’re very much immediately dismissed without much of a platform.

It wasn’t the best for LGBTQ people, especially with Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but it was generally just considered a matter of time before it would be accepted.

And finally the climate wasn’t trying to actively kill you and people were talking about things we could do around renewables and other energy initiatives.

I’ll take off the rose colored glasses as I know there are some bad things, but it’s hard not to say that objectively it was a good time.

to sum up in one word "hopeful". Things were getting good. it was still the fairly early days of the internet and while speeds for the majority of people weren't great honestly unless you were in college on a T1 line you didn't know any better. you had IRC, ICQ, AOL IM, Forums, etc so you met and talked to interesting people and friends from the world over. you expressed yourself and found people with similar interests via geocities, livejournal and/or myspace.

Technology was progressing rapidly and new opportunities were opening up. Suddenly you could make a living building said Geocities sites or designing things on your computer. It was a fun time, a lot of cool and interesting things were happening and it felt like things could only go up from there. So yeah, we were hopeful for the future.

Okay so the fascism was still thoroughly deniable if you were straight cis and white.

The internet was this like magical cool thing that was going to change everything.

The illusion of ownership was a lot more substantial, because while we were connected, we weren't all always connected to everything

There was more space for privacy, interiority.

Houses were basically free (it was a scam but most people didn't want to know that)

'Conservative' old dudes with nazi memorabilia usually got it the right way.

Even the literal nazis regularly shot at the cops. The cops even shot other nazis sometimes!

There were rarely more than 4 genocides going at once, none of them as bad or directly by major powers.

The cold war had just ended, so the libs were like 80% less insufferable (i know) and everyone was haopy the world couldnt suddenly end in nuclear fire with like two hours notice

A buncha annoying hippies and nerds were whining about 'global warming' but nobody really had to listen.

None of your tech had the juice to do what it said on the box and spy on you. Everything was unsecured. You could get into any computer anyone who mattered used by just deleting the password.

That last part sounds like some hyperbole i made up for a joke. It is not hyperbole and i did not make it up. It was, arguably, a joke.

Lots of stuff in the news how things could go wrong and it could be the end of civilization. Because of all the scaremongering however there was enough money to go around to fix all critical systems.

In the end only minor things happened, like a library charging people 100 years of interest on their late fees. It could've been a lot worse. Banks charging 100 years of interest were avoided, no infrastructure went down. But the checks and fixes done were needed. Some computers in production systems would just brick themselves when the date was set to 2000.

Then after new year came the comments of people complaining that all the money was spent and nothing happened.

Obviously this is just my perspective on things... I'm a UK millennial probably old enough to be your mother

The millennium was hyped up but came to nothing weren't as big as it was supposed to be.

Terrorism barely got mentioned before 9/11. In the UK we had the IRA so we had more awareness.

Internet wasn't really around as much. Online shopping definitely wasn't a big thing, big stores had few or no shopping options. It was absolutely NOT used by everyone, and not everyone used computers. Mobile charges were expensive.

I've noticed a big generation gap between millennial and Gen Z. Better awareness towards MH, inclusiveness etc. Also seem to be more health conscious and drink less.