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41 " The two most durable joke constructions were (a) casually dismissing something new that would later become extremely common, and (b) referring to some forgotten triviality as if it were destined to be timeless. "
― Chuck Klosterman , The Nineties
42 " It was not nostalgia for a time that was more wholesome. It was nostalgia for a time when you could relax and care less. "
43 " What Tarantino could express, more explicitly than any of his peers, was the intensity of his own perspective. "
44 " What you find out fairly quickly in Hollywood,” Tarantino told the BBC in 1994, “is that this is a community where hardly anybody trusts their own opinion. People want people to tell them what is good. What to like, what not to like. But here I come. I’m a film geek. My opinion is everything. You can all disagree with me. I don’t care. "
45 " Pessimists thought this shutdown would kill baseball entirely. It did not. But it does represent the point where baseball’s past became more desirable than baseball’s future, an inversion that would never really reverse itself. "
46 " What seemed enticing about the seventies was that life experiences were still unscripted, and that no one had figured out how to give the people what they wanted before the people even knew what that was. "
47 " But hipsters of the nineties added one more psychosomatic layer to the conundrum: There was, in real time, an awareness that the whole idea of criticizing people for selling out was ridiculous, even as it was actively happening. It was understood to be a teenage mentality that ignored the realities of adulthood. It punished innovation and ambition, and it was so infused with hypocrisy that the thesis barely hung together. It was a loser’s game and everybody knew it. But it was a loser’s game you still had to play. Perceiving the concept as preposterous did not make it any less pervasive. "
48 " But of course, this limitation was not something people worried about, because caring that much about any TV show was not a normal thing to do. "
49 " People watch cable news as a form of entertainment, and they don’t want to learn anything that contradicts what they already believe. What they want is information that confirms their preexisting biases, falsely presented through the structure of traditional broadcasting. It had to look like objective journalism, but only if the volume was muted. Moreover, the bias expressed cannot be subtle or unpredictable; partisan audiences want to know what they’re getting before they actually get it. Unless cataclysmic events are actively breaking, the purpose of cable news is emotional reassurance. "
50 " Hardcore Gen X-tacy was a fringe concern. Things regularly cited as generationally totemistic were almost always less popular than things devoid of cultural timeliness. Bridget Jones’s Diary was more widely read than Jesus’ Son. For every album sold by Courtney Love, Shania Twain sold fourteen. Over and over, the gap between what’s most associated with Generation X dogma and the behavior of Generation X consumers is illogically vast. "
51 " It was, in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive. There were still nuclear weapons, but there was not going to be a nuclear war. The internet was coming, but reluctantly, and there was no reason to believe it would be anything but awesome. The United States experienced a prolonged period of economic growth without the protracted complications of a hot or cold war, making it possible to focus on one’s own subsistence as if the rest of society were barely there. "
52 " It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again. "
53 " What happens to my generation is, we don’t just watch The Breakfast Club[*] two times while it’s in movie theaters. We watch The Breakfast Club sixty-nine times between the ages of twelve and twenty-five and convince ourselves that The Breakfast Club is a genius movie. You have this wrapped-up nostalgia and regurgitation and overcompensation of mediocre shit . . . and I directly tie that to the video store. "
54 " Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed. It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems. "
55 " disaster that never occurred. In 2000, the emotional relationship to the internet was reversed from the way it is now: Those who viewed the internet as positive were the people using it the most, while those who hated the internet tended to be people using it the least. "
56 " His demeanor was condescending, his body language was inelegant, and it was (apparently) better to be uninformed than annoying. "
57 " Over time,[*] the Google algorithm created something that had never previously existed: a consensus about the shared understanding of everything. "
58 " Among the generations that have yet to go extinct, Generation X remains the least annoying. "
59 " If you did not really care, any experience could be entertaining. "
60 " Within our aforementioned analogy, the wheel represents the internet and the axle represents the human relationship to computerized technology. "