"the 90's is gonna make the 60's look like the 50's"

Are the '00's going to make the 30's look like the 20's?

The only concrete differences are economic ones. Outside of economics life is alot to do with what you make it I feel, pardon the cliche. Carpe Diem! Be the best plum you can be! Don't be an elephant!

Sorry I don't mean to try and kill the thread Fritz!

I mean you can describe them to a point, but you're ultimately relying on creating glossy image rather than an accurate one, because an accurate one isn't really an image at all.

Sorry to be pedantic and go down a totally different route........

Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper and Alex P Keaton and our beloved beknighted Royal Order of Punk Rockers had supposedly laid the hippy dream to rest, but I think it was still around in 90 but we "the kids" weren't sure if we wanted to zap it back to life like frankenstein or pull the plug on it once and for all. Maybe that's why definitive 90's counter-culture events like Lolapalooza & Burning Man have a weird utopian-nihilism duality about them.

I don't think that mode makes much sense anymore, people want things to be clearer now.

I feel, on this matter as on lots of others, I should probably read up on this and find some good arguments for what I believe, made by smarter men than I because I doubt I'm alone or just plain wrong.

Nowadays someone would probably say "It's like the '60s - on speed!" and we could all kick them to death.

*runs into the woods and hides for five years*

and thats all u can really say about them....

The future is near.

The future is near.

OTM. Lately I've been asking my friends "When do the 2000s actually kick in?", because, culturally, we're just living in an extension of the late 90s.

- "blogs"
- iPods

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v160/cyanidesmile/0319168.jpg

welcome to the 2000's!

When more pub jukeboxes are itunes-store connected, like the ones in St. Albans, it will be the 00s.

How so?

people are listening to it via technology that was not available ten years ago

I think the Dennis Hopper quote from the film is a garbled version of a J. G. Ballard quote in which he claimed that " the 90s are going to be like the 60s, only more violent." Which was wishful thinking, a longing for a cathartic upsurge of open confrontation that never arrived. What we got was, of course, rather different. I guess the other cliché that was afloat then in relation to AIDS was that the children of the 90s were "paying the price" for the sexual revolution of the 60s, a lame and, in every sense, opportunistic moralizing response to the virus. As for the 00s, what seems "new" is usually a matter of degree- ie. the level of availability for technological advances (more electric cars, more convergence between file formats, the web's omnipresence in discourse) . . . but at the level of ideas, we seem to be moving backwards rather drastically- politically, religiously, in terms of behaviours and codes and norms. Fear seems pervasive.

Our obsession with the Middle East and North Korea this decade is going to look especially quaint and wrongheaded in about 20 years (maybe as soon as 10), because obviously the real places to watch are 1.) China 2.)India/Pakistan 3.) Africa 4.) South and Central America.

http://www.thecatgallery.com/images/World%20Trade%20Center.jpg

minor details, i know

A) 9/11
B) ipods & blogs

i'll be in the corner, sobbing quietly.

History: Barbie Style!

What else would Channel U put on between all those ringtone adverts if it wasn't for grime, huh?

Oh wait, that's crunk. Sorry. Move along, nothing to see here.

Statements like these are kinda technically correct, but seem ultimately to be a little beside the point. I'd like to know in what way mp3s changed music itself in the last decade, if at all. It's not like stuff from the eighties was especially jolted by the move from record/cassette to CD.

Dreadlock VR guy Jaron Lanier pines for the good old days of cyberpunk, Mondo 2000, etc.

It would be fitting to rue Lanier's fate as mere sausage for search algorithms if he had organized his opinions into a coherent thesis. The reality is that Lanier's stimulating, half-cocked ideas are precisely the kind of thinking that gets refined and enlarged on vibrant Web places like Marginal Revolution, Boing Boing, and MetaFilter. Lanier maintains, for example, that musical development has essentially stalled. He has a challenge: "Play me some music that is characteristic of the late 2000s as opposed to the late 1990s." Lanier claims that listeners can't distinguish between recent musical eras because music is "retro, retro, retro." I would like to see that debate play out in the forums on Pitchfork. Being scanned and rehashed in a blog post somewhere will be the best thing that ever happened to some of these words.

As near as I can make it out, Lanier's view is that the Web began as a digital Eden. We built homepages by hand, played around in virtual worlds, wrote beautiful little programs for the fun of it, and generally made our humanity present online. The standards had not been set. The big money and the big companies had not yet arrived. Now Google has linked search to advertising. The Internet's long tail helps only the Amazons of the world, not the little guys and gals making songs, videos, and books. Wikipedia, a mediocre product of group writing, has become the intellectual backbone of the Web. And, most depressingly, all of us have been lumped into a "hive mind" that every entrepreneur with a dollar and a dream is trying to parse for profit.

Yet, just when you're about to sigh and go check your Twitter feed, Lanier writes something that gives you pause. On who really benefits from Facebook, for instance:
The real customer is the advertiser of the future, but this creature has yet to appear at the time this is being written. The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers—we might call them messianic advertisers—who might someday show up.
A touch overblown, but we can easily forget that Facebook needs to build a profit with our friendships. Our favorite distraction awaits a Messiah that will justify its billion-dollar valuation. "The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view," Lanier writes, "is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable." Have you checked your privacy settings recently? Lanier has been proven prophetic.

Like others who have been on the Web from its early days, Lanier thinks the place has "lost its flavor." Perhaps homepages in the mid-'90s did have a folk-art quality to them, though one heavily dominated by Simpsons and Star Trek references. Perhaps our regimented Facebook selves have made things more vanilla. Perhaps you did stumble down more idiosyncratic paths of knowledge before Wikipedia dominated the top Google search results. But these are the kinds of nostalgic observations that are ridiculous to anyone young. The Web hasn't lost flavor; you've lost flavor. What Samuel Johnson said about his hometown holds true for the Internet: "No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."*

In addition to the general standardization and corporatization of the Web, Lanier sees the Web's "open culture" as a failure. Instead of creating new songs or videos, we just steal from the previous decades of pop culture and create parodies and mashups. Instead of writing brilliant new computer programs, computer jocks toil at improving the free, open-source Linux, which offers no real innovation over the decades-old Unix. His best and most comprehensible critique of how the Web has smothered creativity involves what you could call the Ani DiFranco problem:

In the old days—when I myself was signed to a label—there were a few major artists who made it on their own, like Ani DiFranco. She became a millionaire by selling her own CDs while they still were a high-margin product people were used to buying, back before the era of file sharing. Has a new army of Ani DiFranco's started to appear?

In Lanier's eyes, there is no longer a middle realm in which musicians can make music according to their own standards, sell it directly to fans, and not starve. Musicians are either kids in vans making just enough money for the next gig or dilettantes with a vanity career. The Facebook generation gets its music for free and doesn't expect to pay for it, and this has helped bring about a musical Dark Age. That's not a crazy idea, but it's just Lanier's hunch. When you start to poke around for data, you get a sense of the landscape. According to this U.K. study, artists now make the majority of their money doing live performances, and the total revenue accrued by artists has increased. Today's theoretical middle-class musician would probably have to travel more, but he or she could still make a living.

There's also the problem of the counterexample: What great artist has been left unrecognized by the Internet? Who hasn't found a niche? Lanier, to his credit, is not a simple pessimist. He does propose a solution to the difficulty of how to compensate artists, artisans, and programmers in a digital era: a content database that would be run by some kind of government organization: "We should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression—as with a book or song—and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it's accessed." Again, not a bad concept, but a platonic idea that sounds great in theory. I don't see the government opening an iTunes store anytime soon.

Lanier is a survivor and has good instincts: We need to be wary of joining in the wisdom of the crowds, of trusting that open collaboration always produces the best results, of embracing the growing orthodoxy that making cultural products free will benefit the actual producers of those cultural products. But his critique is ultimately just a particular brand of snobbery. Lanier is a Romantic snob. He believes in individual genius and creativity, whether it's Steve Jobs driving a company to create the iPhone or a girl in a basement composing a song on an unusual musical instrument.

The problem is that the Web is much bigger now, and both Jobs and the bedroom oud player must, in their own ways, strive for attention from the hive mind. And the results can arrive like lightning: Just a few weeks ago, a man in Uruguay was given a $30 million dollar movie deal after posting a sci-fi short on YouTube. No one likes to become obsolete or cranky, but my sense is that Lanier doesn't want to play on this new field. The talents and insights of Lanier and his peers were aimed at a tech-savvy elite whose impact will never be the same again. The innovative momentum is now about democratizing the Web and its uses—Flickr, Twitter, and, yes, Facebook. It was a lot of fun at the beginning, but virtual reality has moved on. It's time to take off the goggles and gloves, and join us here on Earth.

Correction, Jan. 4, 2009: This article originally stated incorrectly that Samuel Johnson wrote the quoted phrase about London. In fact he spoke the quoted phrase in conversation with his biographer, James Boswell. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0Yg9wjctRw

In addition to the general standardization and corporatization of the Web, Lanier sees the Web's "open culture" as a failure. Instead of creating new songs or videos, we just steal from the previous decades of pop culture and create parodies and mashups. Instead of writing brilliant new computer programs, computer jocks toil at improving the free, open-source Linux, which offers no real innovation over the decades-old Unix.

kinda feeling this a fair bit myself lately, possibly brought on by seeing the worst sub-sub-sub-girl talk mashup bullshit at a music festival last month - just horrendous.

no man, don't you see, you WERE living a semi-charmed kinda life

I think Dennis Hopper was talking about his personal wealth here

In addition to the general standardization and corporatization of the Web, Lanier sees the Web's "open culture" as a failure. Instead of creating new songs or videos, we just steal from the previous decades of pop culture and create parodies and mashups.

The pop-culture eating itself shtick has been really popular for about twenty years now though.

you'd hope we'd be over it by now then, jesus!!