Book Review: The Nineties

Book Review: The Nineties

Here on Amazon.

I love Chuck Klosterman. His writing style and signature wit have inspired me since I discovered him in college. 

Why did I read this book?

Firstly, it came highly recommended by my friend and frequent sparing partner in political and cultural trends: Charles Iannuzzi. And I’m on the search for what’s next, and thus, I’m consumed with how the economic cycle is turning but also the cultural one. Klosterman is one of the most insightful minds on culture and our perception of the past and how it manufactures into the culture. If one wants to improve their judgment and independent thinking (as I strive to!), you have always to think about what can be extrapolated from the past and what is noise. 

Why the past can be difficult to derive insights from:

“People change, and they tend to view past actions through the prisms of their current self. Memories are replaced by projections. It’s more relevant to examine what people were saying at the time.”

“The compulsion to reconsider the past through the ideals and beliefs of the present is constant and overwhelming. It allows for a sense of moral clarity and feels more enlightened.” 

I give this book a nine out of ten. Klosterman's book But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past might have been better. But this may be because it’s the overarching theory he then applies to the 1990s in this book. Klosterman’s writing and understanding of the cultural underpinnings of an era set the stage for the present and what might repeat in the future. 

Klosterman delivers these insights so searingly: “what society classifies as ‘credible’ is almost always a product of whichever social demographic happens to be economically dominant at the time of the classification.”  e.g., whatever the tech industry thought from 2010-2021.

And truisms like :

“Unlike life, sports make it simple for the ordinary person to deduce who is good and who is bad, who has won and who has lost.”

On Keanu Reeves: “He fell somewhere between a smart person’s interpretation of a meathead and a meathead’s projection of an intellectual.”

When discussing Titanic, the movie, he shows the ways the film bucked the cultural trends at the time by appealing to the universal human instincts that always win: “Titanic tapped into the reservoir of industry realities everyone always claims to concede while continually refusing to fully accept: Some people want entertainment to challenge them, but most people don’t. Some people care about acting, but more people care about actors. Some people see computerized visual spectacle as a distraction from cinematic art, but most people consider visual spectacle to be the art form’s central purpose.”

The book and the nineties foreshadows and explains the origins of current thinking, things like “a growing belief that super-rich private citizens might have better solutions to problems once considered responsibilities of the state” concerning the bio-dome project (one I had forgotten about until I re-read about it here).

Today, I see fragments of the same fashion trends returning from the nineties. As the economic cycle turns, maybe there will be increased disgust with consumerism (second-hand clothing is pretty grunge), and maybe people will dial back from the performative social media games we all have been trained to play and hustle porn people display. “In the nineties, doing nothing on purpose was a valid option, and a specific brand of cool become more important than almost anything else. The key to that coolness was disinterest in conventional success” and “An unvarnished desired to be loved was viewed as desperate and pathetic, so any attempt to alter or soften one’s persona was inauthentic and weak.”

One of the themes throughout the book is how the medium of media consumption - the television - strongly impacted culture and how the Internet evolved out of what was always there in human behavior.

“The sensation that the mediated version of an event will overwrite one’s own personal memory of the same experience, forcing the individual to re-interpret the way that memory skits within their own mind. The internet abbreviated this equation by eliminating the need for a mind. The software does the remembering, relentlessly and inflexibly, for you and for everyone else. The mediated version of the event is the memory, even if the context is false or invisible.”

…

“Television had become the way to understand everything, ruling from a position of one-way control that future generations would never consent to or understand. “

On OJ Simpson and the Bronco chase with people holding makeshift signs proclaiming “The Juice Is Loose”: “Yet this can be understood as the primordial impulse of what would eventually drive the mechanism of social media: the desire of uninformed people to be involved with the news, broadcasting their support for a homicidal maniac not because they liked him, but because it is exhilarating to participate in an experience all of society was experiencing at once.” 

And maybe that explains why I was consumed this week participating in the exhilarating experience around the downfall of FTX. Living through history and the story in the making.