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.
My take on boomerifying is getting other generations to behave like the stereotypical boomer, not that they are actual boomers by birthday.
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.
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
Finnish 1990s banking crisis
I was curious and I came back with a Wikipedia link for everyone else.
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!”
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.
Wouldn’t call it rampant.
Didn’t really cause a dent on that generation either.It was rampant where I grew up.
He is talking about his own experience, not for the whole generation
Then maybe they should choose their words more carefully, because that is not what their words portray
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 they like with their weird Instagram Filter take on the decade.
I’m losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties
The 80s were already the second decade of the decline after the gold standard was revoked in 1971 and wages became decoupled from productivity. Everything was on a slowly accelerating slide downhill from there, although it took until the 90s for the first people to truly notice things were going sideways.
You want a real economic golden era? Try the 50s and the 60s, where a single wage earner could work a low-end service-level job (selling shoes, for example), and make enough to own a detached SFH, a car in the garage, support a SAH spouse and several children, go on modest vacations every year with at least one more ambitious one every few years, and still have enough left over to save generously for retirement.
I think you may be missing the word ‘white’ somewhere in your analysis
Married with children isn’t a fib
Abandon your monetarist goldbug worldview, the gold decoupling and subsequent floating of the international exchange rates are downstream of the actual policy decision that have emiserated the population.
The globalists open the western worker to global competition, they lost their leverage by losing their scarcity and competence.
The subsequent decline comes from the system’s inertia and the burning of the future with debt and literally the future by having spending money instead of kids.
If you want the golden age back for normal people, then there is NO REMEDY other than giving them their leverage and power back.
But how do you do that ? Taxes and interest rates serve to dis-empower those who need it the most and regular people are the one MOST hurt by these.
The neoliberal religion refuses to treat people who “win” the game of capital differently than regular people, as if they were somehow on an equal footing.
The result ? The more wealth you have the easier it becomes to acquire and accumulate more of it. This needs to be exactly reversed, the poorer you are, the easier it should be to acquire but the more you have the harder it gets. Up until a point where it becomes nearly impossible to go beyond the “capital horizon” some kind of equilibrium state where wealth can lo longer be acquired faster than you lose it.
It’s not some shiny metal bullshit which only serves the status quo like discussion about which toilet should a trans person piss in.
The subsequent decline comes from the system’s inertia and the burning of the future with debt and literally the future by having spending money instead of kids
The 1% can make their own wage slaves.
The more wealth you have the easier it becomes to acquire and accumulate more of it. This needs to be exactly reversed,
you have a good point, we should tax the rich
The globalists open the western worker to global competition, they lost their leverage by losing their scarcity and competence.
again, you have a good point, neoliberalism including world-wide free-trade hurt american economics more than it helped them, both for the individual worker and big business. i’m all for closing borders (including high tariffs on imports, which are a kind of “soft” border). unfortunately, most people stand against that because the neoliberal brainwashing that open borders benefit us all was very effective and now a lot of people, including leftists and people who openly hate on neoliberalism are against borders. (which is highly ironic).
but also, i think your analysis is short and lacking.
you’re only looking at the supply of human workers. if that increases, wages go down. but also, you’re ignoring the demand for human workers. that demand is far from constant and directly coupled to economic growth. The Limits To Growth predicted back in the 1970s that the economy would have to stop growing and now it does, and that reduces the demand for human workers a lot a decreases wages. Consider how many people it takes to build a house vs. maintain a house. No growth, no significant demand for human labor.
All nation states should be dissolved so there are no borders to wring your hands over.
The demand for human labour is consciously manipulated to create artificial scarcity and then gluts on purpose, to guide human growth, a recent a egregious example of this is excessive hiring followed by excessive firing by big tech, is clearly intentional and integral to the labour supply side of their blitzscaling machine.
Create excessive demand by overhiring, drawing masses to overwrite their souls with the machinery required by industry, once saturation was achieved, they massively purged, leaving the manipulated humans with useless information indelibly etched into their brain. I cannot overstate how evil this is and how irresponsible communities are for just letting that happen to their members.
Of course the paralytic stunning of the duty of care of those communities is a major feature of global neoliberalism.
There will not be a reduction in demand for labour, in fact I believe we will see demand far beyond that which came after the Black Plague. But the elites are positionning themselves to “win in a seller’s market” with their incessant manipulation.
While I agree somewhat with the limits to growth narrative, it has largely been recuperated by the club of rome / population bomb narrative to turn the limits to growth from a rational anti-capitalist narrative into weapons of the elite against the people for maximal exploitation in the very name of capitalism and it’s fake lures “innovation” and “efficiency” something it can never delivery, by definition, by being a greedy parasite on both and having massively slowed technological progress that could have delivered both, either by patent (3d printer delayed 20 years) or bombs (killing cybersyn so Walmart could make it instead).
A reduction of demand for human labour should have been a boon and desirable, all jobs should be abolished and made obsolete, “work” is an heinous and exploitative imposition on others for profit extraction, life extraction of the human cattle. Work IS the tool of the enemy.
Wages should not have been allowed to be boxed in by convoluted supply and demand models of fabulating economists, we live in a world much richer than excel spreadsheets than will never fit inside the skull mush of some economist no matter how much they want us to believe we must sacrifice our lives to the profit of their masters.
The problem is distribution, it has been the entire time, capitalists have been distributing all the wealth into their pockets and buying dominating power of the state with it.
The state has been infected by the capital parasites and it’s time to amputate
Abandon your monetarist goldbug worldview, the gold decoupling and subsequent floating of the international exchange rates are downstream of the actual policy decision that have emiserated the population.
I never said they were directly related, I just wanted to point out that they both occurred in the same year, in 1971.
This needs to be exactly reversed, the poorer you are, the easier it should be to acquire but the more you have the harder it gets. Up until a point where it becomes nearly impossible to go beyond the “capital horizon” some kind of equilibrium state where wealth can lo longer be acquired faster than you lose it.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Absolutely.
80s nostalgia ai slop to relive memories? 😴
80s nostalgia to relive memories by looking at vhsrips of 80s home videos and media? 😎👉👉
Boomerfying
That’s a scary word.
It is, but didn’t genX own the 80’s?
They were 20 year olds, they didn’t own shit
Pop culture of the 80s was defined by genX, so any nostalgia for that time would be catering to them.
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.
I have a dream!
That’s based on tropes from an era we’ve already lived through.
We need to work together!
To to backwards.
Dare to dream. Be somebody.
Be somebody
*in debt
That’s my headline of the day
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.
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.
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.
It honestly fits tho. It was an era of rising neoliberalism and technology, establishing the cyberpunk critique of the world we’re currently living.
If there is nothing to love and hope for, people start to cling to memories of better times, if only perceived better ones.
Every day, the future looks a little bit darker. But the past… even the grimy parts of it… keep on getting brighter.
yeah! let’s go back to a time when gas was $12 a gallon. where women had two jobs, making babies and making dinner. where teen pregnancy was at its highest ever. where the government fueled a drug and arms war in South America. where the constant threat of thermonuclear war was banging on the iron dome every single day.
yeah…sounds like a fuckin blast from the past. fuckin rad.
where the constant threat of thermonuclear war was banging on the iron dome every single day.
That’s good. Memento mori, carpe diem.
Dont forget the insane racism and misogyny and HOMOPHOBIA on another level. It made news when someone shook a gay guys hand. And the good ol death by AIDS sweeping the nation. The horrific parenting that led to PSA asking if they know where their kids are. The fucking unsolved kidnappings. The escalators that didn’t have emergency stops and would choke you to death on your own shoelace.
I can’t tell if the joke is that now is just back then, but again.
Still better than the current full steam ahead into fascism.
Reagan/Thatcher is the reason why “moderate left wing” nowadays means “liberalism” instead of “social democracy”, and even most so called social democrats nowadays act like liberals instead.
And now the christofascists want to have their “Blair Labour” moment on social issues, and I’m afraid they’ve mostly succeeded that with “Starmer Labour”. They want a world, where there’s no real alternatives to “hard conservatism” (fascism).
woosh
I think you might have been too young to remember the Regan years.
not nearly as tumultuous as today, but certainly similar in spirit.
I might be old, but I have not forgotten him. He is one of the root causes for what is currently happening in the US.
People tend to filter out the bad memories, like the fact that crackheads were breaking into cars constantly, making it nearly impossible to have a decent car stereo. They started making them that you could pull out, and take into the house. It was common to see cars parked on the street with a sign that said “No Valuables in car.”
The crime rates in America in the 80s were through the roof. It wasn’t until the earl/mid 90s that they dropped.
what confuses me the most about these videos is the call to action. go back? that’s not how time works!
Anyone who actually knew a damn thing would want to stop right at 2015 abd stay there forever
September 2016, so we’d have finished existance off with the summer of Pokemon GO
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.
You read like my poster^(And both are right)
My poster:
In 2015 I actually thought the world was going to get better. Haha what an idiot I was.
There’s a lot to be said for the late 90’s. Post Cold War, but pre 9/11.
It’s not perfect for everyone, especially if you’re LGBT+, but it’s got a lot going for it.
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.
Recently my parents showed me some stuff they saw on Facebook. It was all just AI slop, rage bait, advertisements. Seriously, there was barely anything useful on it. They were very avoidant of acknowledging it tho. “But there’s also fun stuff on it”. They were constantly wondering whether what they were reading was real, yet it did plant seeds in their brains. It’s even influencing their politics, I had to have a whole discussion with them (traditionally centre left voters) about how our left wing parties didn’t want to let an unstoppable horde of immigrants into our country. And why voting for a centre right guy because “he looks pretty competent” will also fuck with poor people and important topics like abortion.
All YouTube is nowadays is pretty much slop. AI voiceovers and horrible videos of “people” pretending to be normal and real.
AI slop often slips into your recommendations without you even knowing it until you watch the video and are aware of the tells. I’ve had to scrutinize so many channels and remind the algorithm to not recommend said channel to sway it in the right direction. It’s been so demanding sometimes but now I’m getting smaller niche channels that actually have a sole.
