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[-] umbraroze@slrpnk.net 33 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I was born in '79. I know a lot of 1980s/1990s stuff that's floating in popular consciousness right now is fictional romanticised bullshit, because it's based on romaticised fiction made in that era.

For example, I knew most kids didn't hang out at The Mall. I was a kid. We didn't have a goddamn mall. American movies and TV showed kids hanging out at The Mall. Maybe hanging out at the Mall was an aspirational thing. Or something.

It's a thing that happened for some people but it's not the entire truth about the era. It's not just that people tend to remember the good bits, they tend to remember the good bits that happened to someone else.

There's a reason why nobody makes AI slop about the Finnish 1990s banking crisis and its wide systemic repercussions felt to this day. Edit: Sorry if none of this makes sense, just ate something other than cheap potatoes for the first time in a week

[-] Underwaterbob@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 day ago

One of my most vivid memories of the 80s was that bullying was absolutely rampant and no one did anything about it. Parents then were just like, "It's part of growing up!"

[-] ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 6 points 1 day ago

Bullying from all sides with adults taking part in ways no different than the children. Made me wonder if they whole 'respect your elders' made any fucking sense.

[-] 0x0@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago

Wouldn't call it rampant.
Didn't really cause a dent on that generation either.

[-] notgold@aussie.zone 1 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

I copped a few dints

[-] seejur@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

He is talking about his own experience, not for the whole generation

[-] Heliumfart@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 day ago

It was rampant where I grew up.

[-] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

Finnish 1990s banking crisis

I was curious and I came back with a Wikipedia link for everyone else.

[-] notgold@aussie.zone 1 points 22 hours ago
[-] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

That’s the thing about this. We lived through the 80s and know what it smells like, so this isn’t aimed at us. It’s all the kids who are into Stranger Things and the like with their weird Instagram Filter take on the decade.

[-] Shamber@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

Gotta love when the Internet calls 80's kids boomers 😅 and no it was never a utopia but it was our fucked up times, and no one else's.

[-] Pulptastic@midwest.social 5 points 1 day ago

My take on boomerifying is getting other generations to behave like the stereotypical boomer, not that they are actual boomers by birthday.

[-] Darleys_Brew@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

I agree with you, but it is a lot like Boomers calling everyone younger a Millenial.

A very heavily biased article, discrediting that many people's lifes were indeed better in 1985.

Who is this article written for? Who do you try to reach that way? Why sow division?

You're only going to reach people if you actually help them have a better outlook in life. Writing incisive articles like that is not gonna do any good.

[-] ShittDickk@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

I'm losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties

[-] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 16 points 2 days ago

Boomerfying

That's a scary word.

[-] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

It is, but didn't genX own the 80's?

[-] KingDingbat@lemmy.world 108 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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.

[-] zerofk@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago

I don’t know. I also remember spending summer nights talking under street lanterns, riding my bike around the block, and playing the Snoopy tennis game & watch. But the video I saw did not feel nostalgic. It felt like a TV ad that I didn’t believe even back then. Or worse, it felt like a cult, which was terrifying.

[-] FinishingDutch@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[-] Windex007@lemmy.world 32 points 3 days ago

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.

[-] Zephorah@discuss.online 45 points 2 days ago

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.

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[-] RBWells@lemmy.world 18 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] LillyPip@lemmy.ca 2 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Yep, I was gonna say, as a child of the 70s/early 80s, I was a totally unsupervised latch-key kid. The paedophiles loved that. It was a predator’s paradise. Most of us knew kids our age who either vanished or died by misadventure, and many of us were assaulted in some way.

I don’t like helicopter parenting, either, but anyone who sees the Wild West of the 80s as some sort of ideal either has a faulty memory or is deluding themselves.

[-] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] Cethin@lemmy.zip 7 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

We’ve destroyed any sense of community that used to exist.

What's wrong? Paying rent to your landlord once a month isn't enough socializing for ya? Its more then enough for me that's for sure.

[-] MourningDove@lemmy.zip 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

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[-] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 21 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 11 points 2 days ago

80s nostalgia ai slop to relive memories? 😴

80s nostalgia to relive memories by looking at vhsrips of 80s home videos and media? 😎👉👉

[-] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 87 points 3 days ago
[-] the_q@lemmy.zip 61 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)
[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 39 points 3 days ago

A perfectly cromulent word.

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[-] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 27 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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.

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[-] MourningDove@lemmy.zip 24 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] elucubra@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 day ago

I may have been one of the lucky. With all it's warts, the 80's, for many young people, were a banger. Sort of the final bang of the 60's and 70's. Perfect? Nowhere near, but the music, social, artistic, and so many other aspects, were pretty damn cool, and for the young crowd it was mainly what mattered. Things like the fall of the Berlin wall, the perceived end of the end of the cold war and the nuclear Armageddon threat gave us a sense of optimism. Looking back there are things, like the Reagan/Thatcher tandem, that were setting the stage to the neo-liberal clusterfuck we live in, but our focus was elsewhere.

[-] MourningDove@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

I fucking loved it in the 80’s. Yeah, the music, the films… so good. The politics were crap as it usually is. And I’ll say that even with the latest admin being wait it is, diversity has come a long way- but the 80’s were an oasis for me.

I remember it bitter-sweetly. We can never have that again.

[-] TotallynotJessica 2 points 1 day ago

It honestly fits tho. It was an era of rising neoliberalism and technology, establishing the cyberpunk critique of the world we're currently living.

[-] _NetNomad@fedia.io 25 points 2 days ago

what confuses me the most about these videos is the call to action. go back? that's not how time works!

[-] IzzyJ@lemmy.world 17 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Anyone who actually knew a damn thing would want to stop right at 2015 abd stay there forever

[-] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

No thanks.i long for a time that never was, and may never be.

[-] Auth@lemmy.world 18 points 2 days ago

In 2015 I actually thought the world was going to get better. Haha what an idiot I was.

[-] emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 2 days ago

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.

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[-] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 31 points 3 days ago

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.

[-] apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world 26 points 3 days ago

Mullets are back, my dude.

[-] salacious_coaster@infosec.pub 24 points 3 days ago

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.

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[-] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 21 points 2 days ago

People gotta stop watching slop. But it seems impossible to get people to stop using tiktok, twitter, instagram, et al. They just don't care enough.

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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2025
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