this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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It seems obvious to me that when people idolise the 90s and before, they're mostly talking about the fact that there were still significant areas of life that had avoided complete atomisation. I don't think many people are really arguing the law was better, or that peoples' material conditions were super amazing, just mainly that it was actually slightly achievable to go out and TALK to people.
It at least feels, to significant numbers of people, that atomisation has significantly increased in the couple decades since 2005. And for all the horrible things you can rightly point out about the 90s, being able to actually have a fucking friendly conversation or a friend or two, basically on demand, certainly made it a lot better for people.
I remember as a kid we would regularly go to the town square, have a friendly chat with the baker, have a friendly chat with the greengrocer, friendly chat at the corner shop, get some advice from the ironmonger, talk to some weirdo while we waited for a bus, regularly asked people for directions, etc. All in a single morning. Because going out of town to shop was much rarer, we were known locally as a poor family, so half the shops gave us an unofficial discount and a smile. And all that didn't happen because I was a kid, it happened then because the bakery is now a chain where you can only order on a computer screen, because the greengrocer and ironmonger shut down, because the corner shop is now a supermarket and the staff change every week and they give 0 shits because they only pay minimum age, because there is no bus where we're going now (and talking on the bus is seen as weird now), because nobody is supposed to need to ask for directions anymore. These are all things that have changed just since the early 2000s, and whether they realise it or not, this is what made the 'vibe' that people miss.
The 90s could've been hell on Earth, but if you got to experience it with some fucking company, then people will be nostalgic for it, and I don't think that's necessarily wrong.
This is 100% it for me
The 90s were shit politically and socially. 1996 was when welfare was destroyed. Rodney king. Desert storm. “Colorblind” racial awareness. “Don’t say gay”. Etc.
But when I think of that era, when I was in middle school and starting high school, before the walmart came to my smallish town where I grew up and wrecked the economy, things were genuinely and observably different.
It’s basically concurring what you say. We would walk home after school and stop by neighborhood shops, owned by people who lived in the community, and were amongst our homes. Suburbia track homes didn’t exist yet so the idea of a small store in your neighborhood wasn’t so foreign even though it was a small town and not a city. It was probably about 4-5 miles between the furthest of my friends houses and we would convene at a central friends house or a park or something. And like you said because the shops were all run by people in the community they got to know us. I’m not gonna lie, I wasn’t a poor kid, I was solidly middle class, but there would still be shop owners that would throw me a free drink or whatever every once and a while because I stopped by every day after school
When I was in high school walmart came to town (probably like 2001?). People protested in town hall meetings and a ton of dissent was raised but it was allowed anyway. Looking back as an adult im betting walmart just paid off the council members or whatever. They built a fucking huge one and disrupted the town for literal years. It was a small town with an actual “main street” and the construction closed this for years which starved a ton of the local businesses and closed off a bunch before it even opened (again looking back as an adult this was probably a tactic, walmart had the resources to get that building up in like 6 months and it took like 4-5 years).
By the time it opened I was at college. It quickly started closing other local businesses. Every summer I’d go back and the town would be a bit more dead. By the time I graduated basically every shop I had gone to was closed, replaced by walmart and a few other big chains that had moved in like home depot and autozone, putting everything else out of its misery. At this point the development of suburbia track homes had been ongoing as well so you’d drive past these monstrosities of the same fucking house copy pasted 800 times with nothing to do for miles.
It’s been like 15 years since then and the last time I went back it was just so depressing. There’s nothing to do there now. The only stuff is bars and restaurants. The only non conglomerate stores are weird shit like spirit Halloween, hair salons, yoga studios, and there was actually a trump memorabilia store where my favorite hangout used to be which broke my heart
I do mental health stuff and when I work with people who are under like 20 years old I feel so bad because they just never got to experience that. Their version of america has entirely been overtaken by corporate overlords. It’s crazy bc it wasn’t always like this. Like there were always corporate overlords, in the 80s and 90s they were telecoms (and they were actually declared monopolies and broken up! Only to eventually reform into basically the same monopolies 20 years later) and the emergence of big tech (the lack of any kind of regulation on microsoft in the 90s is something we are paying dearly for now). But when I work with a teenager who lives in one of those suburbia environments and struggles to make meaningful social connections because they can’t hang out with people unless their parents drive them around I feel awful for them. Utter failure on so many levels. Civil planning, zoning, regulatory, economic, etc.
The idea of actually being able to start a retail business and have a 3rd place in your community is basically unheard of now. Even service businesses (like repair shops) are basically extinct outside of auto repair because tech and appliance manufacturers have conditioned us to accept that everything is disposable even if it’s like 2 grand and our regulatory bodies are worthless. You can’t build anything anymore, you can only slave for the bezos/walton empire
I'm sorry did you live in the fucking Hanseatic League or some shit? Fucking iron monger?
It's Brit for local hardware shop
"Oi gubvenor I'm goin' to the iron monger to buy meself a smackerwhappy (hammer)"
You don't need to make words up, "spanner" already exists along with others that I'm forgetting.
Look it's not my fault the British have a lot of weird twee nicknames for things
must be regional because people where I am wouldn't make that connection
It's pretty common for shop signs, but is limited to 'small local hardware shop' rather than any hardware shop. I've seen it across south England up to north Scotland, so it's definitely not a 'local local' thing.
I know some parts of the world use "ironmonger" for "hardware store" but the number of people using that phrase unironically must be quite low nowadays
Well, it's at least in the tens of millions. Source: I live on an island wiv'em
Sometimes you just need some spare iron mongered.
I think the telling thing about Cyberpunk 2077 (the original TTRPG of course is written by a communist) is that to achieve a dystopian hellscape worth looking at they needed to blow up the internet. Realistically you are not going down to the local hyper-cool nightclub with your best friend to dance the night away while hooking up a risky job involving putting a laser sword through the brains of some chuddy corpo. They're gonna Whatsapp you in your timeshare pod and use time tracking software and real time AI guidance to optimise your hits/time ratio on your 18 hour day.
Cruelty Squad, underneath it's sewer candy aesthetic, is premised on this idea: that you're a gig economy hitman. The reason you can replay missions is because your targets are so rich they can't actually be killed, and are replaced by new clones (or something equivalent) after every mission.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the internet is responsible for most of this
I was extremely online in the 90s, but there was a real feeling the internet was "somewhere else". Because you had to find a desktop and shut down the house phone to get on it, it took effort and planning, almost as much as walking down to the local shops. And because it was "Somewhere else" you had to weigh up being there over doing other things, in other places.
I'd say the smartphone, and really, proper 3g and substantial data allowances killed real life.
Additionally, at the same time there was the slow monetisation of the commons. Libraries shut down, squares and pavements lost public seating and became places for outdoor cafes that weren't the type that let a kid sip a coffee for 5 hours with friends because they knew they'd be back as cashed up adults. Quiet local dive pubs became either overly loud clubs or sports bars, or shockingly expensive gastros. So not only did the internet go from "somewhere else" to "Right here, all the time" but all the other "somewhere else"'s disappeared.
This is at least partially because the old places became uneconomical with the internet taking people away.
Social activity is a zero sum game.
For a very long time, the Internet was seen as a place for cranks that fortunately didn't spill into real life. It's still the place for cranks but now real life is online as well.
I partly blame those TouchTune jukeboxes (which themselves are a consequence of the Internet) for the decline of the bar atmosphere.
Before them, each bar had their own eclectic collection of songs, which either slapped, sucked or were somewhere in between, but they were all unique and reflected the atmosphere of the place they were in. Now every place has the same flashy RGB Internet connected screen kiosk that theoretically has hundreds of thousands of songs to pick from, but almost everybody in every bar picks the same pop, country or dad-rock slop.
Even the quiet bars that adopted those jukeboxes became loud clubs not long after.
I'd have to agree. The internet combined with the capitalist model, anyway. Bourgeois control and mindless pursuit of profit, regardless of the not-directly-monetary benefits of previous methods, was an essential element.
How do we fix it? I seriously think this will remain a problem in a socialist world. What do we do to mitigate atomisation created by people sitting at home on the internet during all the free time they have in-between going to work?
I don't think it's just capitalism at fault here. The internet existing at all will still play this role of removing people's need to go anywhere for social activity. The internet has essentially replaced all social activity people were seeking outside or with meeting up with friends previously.
You're not wrong - The internet is, in some aspects, an inherently atomising and isolating thing, that is also addicting. I do think the pre-corporate internet was a significantly healthier (though also significantly flawed) ecosystem. And I do think the world sans capitalism would return to significantly more local and 'friendly' services, stalls, and public areas that would largely improve the problem.
That being said, further help, initiatives and incentives probably would still need to exist to coax people out of addictive self-isolation. I personally have no idea what that would look like - I can only wish I had meaningful experience and knowledge of how to coalesce people into fun joint activities - but it's an important question that should be answered.
Maybe if we get rid of online services that are paid for solely by advertising or data selling?
This would kill almost all social media services (the big ones anyway) and it would return to a decentralised system of hobbiest-run online communities over time.
I still think this began before social media though.
That'd certainly help massively, I suppose I just bundle that measure up in my idea of moving away from capitalism. I agree there's more to be addressed than just social media (though that's a large part), but it's hard to predict precisely what the internet would become after that measure alone.
I would guess it could take a long time of trial, error, and research into how to best incorporate the internet into our lives without compromising actual quality of life.
I feel like (emphasis on feel, I'm just spit balling) reducing how much of the internet exists on mobile devices could help.
We had "social media" back in the day in the form of old school (non-news aggregator) webforums, live journal, Myspace, chat rooms, etc, but you had to sit at a specific desk in your house to utilize it. You probably weren't also playing videogames, you weren't streaming Netflix, you weren't doing it between every step in a multi step chore.
I think raising the barrier to entry a little (and getting rid of styles of content designed to addict people specifically, including most social media designed in the last decade or so, maybe a little further back even) makes it something people will do for a bit, before moving on to other activities that are possibly more social.
If Instagram is only checkable on a desktop, you're not going to ignore your friends to scroll it when you go out to a restaurant with them.
I thought about this, and my conclusion is that personal computing itself has to be completely overhauled. Personal computing started out as a petty bourgeois hobby. Your average prole wasn't fucking around with mainframes or PCs during the 70s and 80s. The closest thing to a computer that an actual member of the working class interacted with were arcades in third places.
My sketch of what needs to happen:
Computing goes back to the mainframe-client model. The mainframe would be various servers set up to service a particular physical community (town, suburb, city) and the client is a smartphone.
The community-issued smartphones are all connected to a community intranet that's handled by those servers and only connected to the community intranet, with exception being its basic functionality as a phone.
Average people are restricted or banned from almost all other computing devices and peripherals (consoles, PCs, printers, smart devices). Exceptions would be something like a software dev being loaned a laptop to hone on their coding skills or disabled people getting smart devices to help with their disability.
"Classic" computing devices will all be stored and maintained within a community center, perhaps in the same place as the community servers. So, people can still play videogames or do film editing, but instead of doing it at home, they would do it all in a third space. Convenience is sacrificed for the sake of deatomization.
The "classic" computing devices will be maintained by hobbyists and professionals. So, instead of building an individual gaming PC for their own individual use, the PC gamer would be in charge of building multiple gaming PCs. This has an added advantage of training people.
The computers within the community center has access to the internet instead of just the community intranet. This is where "classic" social media could still exist.
This sketch isn't perfect (it doesn't have a good answer for privacy concerns), but the current status quo has got to go.