A recent piece in US publication the Cut has picked up on a curious sentiment seen floating around TikTok; public yearning to recreate a “90s summer”.
One can see the temptation of nostalgia for Americans, given the present they’re trapped in – and, perhaps, the El Salvadoran gulag they’re trapped in – is hardly so rosy. But as bombers fly over Tehran and their out-of-his-depth president handles a fragile situation by swearing at Benjamin Netanyahu on TV, it’s worth asking if the promptings of nostalgia may be what got us all into this mess in the first place.
Millennials are now parents. As the Americans of this generation have preoccupied themselves with scheduling activities for their summer holidays, the Cut relates stated longing for youthful experiences they remember as “going to the public pool by themselves, biking around aimlessly, watching daytime TV with elderly relatives, and taking no-frills family road trips”.
Some Australians, no doubt, concur – given the interminable circulation of Facebook’s like-harvesting slop insisting on a never-had-to-lock-your-door, none-of-this-woke-rubbish paradise that was supposedly once lying around in the stubby shorts of Australian back yards past.
Personally, the idea of inflicting a “90s summer” on children makes me anxious. It’s only because I was there. As a flanno-wearing, Nirvana-bothering resentful ex-smoker whose character retains something of a black beer tang, I am gen X, purely distilled. It has been affirming to watch younger generations lambast us as “the worst generation” on TikTok but, sadly, in this Era of Failure to Ask Follow-up Questions, the youngsters haven’t been asking us why.
Kids, the 90s are a significant part of it.
A fantastically bleak epoch of pop culture archives gen X’s cold war terrors of the 1980s, but the youngest of us were only nine when the 1990s kicked off with the first Gulf war. Bombs rained on the Middle East, with American boots on the ground and genuine fear of nuclear escalation. I was 15 and finally phoned that boy I liked only because I’d been watching the news and was convinced I had nothing to lose, we were all going to die.
If your trips to the pool were unchaperoned, it was because in the wake of stagflation and globalisation male-breadwinner models of household income were suddenly unstable and it wasn’t so much feminist destiny as neoliberal necessity that drove even white ladies from the suburbs en masse into full-time work. Highlights of the TV news kids watched with their grandparents included: Iraq, an entire decade of Yugoslav wars, the LA riots (1992), the standoff at Waco (1993), the OJ Simpson trial, the Oklahoma City bombing and Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination (all 1995) and Pakistan becoming a nuclear state (1998). Biting neoliberal doctrines of mass casualisation, smashed unions, public service layoffs and privatisation meant that “no frills” car trip holidays were all many working- and middle-class families could reasonably afford. And if you were biking around aimlessly, it was because Francis Fukuyama had announced in 1992 it was never going to get better than this … and turned out to be wrong in the worst possible way.
Kathryn Jezer-Morton pinpoints “90s summer” nostalgia as simply grasping for the memory of unstructured time before the “gaping maws” of mobile internet and social media swallowed it; she rightly identifies “anxiety over screen management” as the modern parenting crisis. Australia’s upcoming social media ban for kids is wildly popular and yet may become even more so, given Jezer-Morton’s revelation that American families now drop up to $5,500 US on two-week summer camps to just keep their kids screen-free.
There’s something even more insidious about the relationship of our phones to nostalgia. “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were,” as a man once said to a madeleine. The main character of our memories is ever a subjective take our earlier selves.
If gen X remembers the 90s with stark contrast to millennials, it may be because the handheld doom machines are profoundly affecting the way we understand – or don’t understand – the past.
An emerging body of scholarship has identified the corrupting effects of new tech on memory and recall. Digital photography collapses the boundary between past and present, rendering the past as immediate, retrievable, portable and available. It places viewers in a loop of ongoing memory reactivation. The irony of this is that distance – and, with it, reflection – become harder to achieve, an effect made worse by the quantitative overload of storing so much material. Meanwhile, knowing it can outsource its histories, the brain encodes fewer details. The combined result makes memory less about accuracy and more about the emotional management of the overwhelm; suppressing trauma, reinforcing denial or romanticising difficult realities. The photographs don’t teach history to the viewer; they are recruited to the viewer’s narrative.
The selective exclusions and recontextualisations are how millennials might remember the era of the Srebrenica genocide (per The Cut) as “the last time ‘things were good’”.
They’re also why “Make America Great Again” is so mobilising as a political mission and so disastrous as a policy framework. Weaponising nostalgia can grip a psychology but it can’t change the facts underneath.
Alas, one glance at today’s headlines and no one should wonder why Americans might want to escape back to their “90s summers”. The past is, after all, another country. They do things differently there.
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
