MISCmedia for 2/2/01
That '90s Show

YESTERDAY, we riffed on a vision of sexual liberation for a post-corporate era.

That, of course, presumes that such an era is imminent, or at least that one can imagine it to be imminent.

I know I'm far from the only observer who'd like the current socio-economic-political zeitgeist to change. And I can't think of a better way to help it happen than by making positive affirmations that it already has.

In that spirit, let's imagine the components of the '90s nostalgia craze, sure to hit just as soon as the rest of the nation realizes how over the era is.

• That boring ol' Helvetica typeface. Only a freak of nature (in the form of a once-hot piece of graphic-design software called Kai's Power Tools) could have rehabilitated a blase font designed for Swiss chemical-company annual reports (and made even further unhip by its use as the text face in the Penthouse magazines).

• Those ugg-ly clothes. I mean, paying $50 or more just to become a walking billboard? Overblown golf jackets repurposed as "casual Friday" office garb? And let's not even talk about male butt-cleavage.

• The commercial pop music. After a promising start early in the decade, things devolved into--well, I needn't tell you.

• Virtual reality, "morphing," hyperrealistic video games, et al.

• Not just ostentatious displays of wealth, but deliberately obscene such displays. As one loyal reader recently noted, "I still see a lot of '97 Porsches in downtown Seattle. I don't see any new Porsches."

• Techno-optimism. At the decade's start, certain rave-dance promoters liked to claim the would would be a better place if it became more "tribal." Then came Rwanda, Chechnya, Kosovo, East Timor, Nigeria, Congo, and the continuation of messes in the Mideast and Northern Ireland--all of which can be considered tribal wars of one sort or another.

  And as for that other form of techno-optimism, that John Perry Barlow-propagated idea that we should just let big businesses run everything (in the name of the Internet Revolution) took a rather substantial dip in credibility around late '99 and early '00.

• Silly-dilly financial speculation. It's as if all the boys who came of age in the late '80s hoarding comic books failed to learn from that bubble and invested real money on the same faulty premise.

• "X-treme" sports as a marketing tool. "Show the world you're an individual, a risk-taker, a devil-may-care stunt fool--drink our soda pop!"

Of course, my having listed these trends under the "nostalgia" rubric implies they're not just going away, but will roar back with a vengeance. And with the ever-shortening revival cycles, you can expect them back sooner rather than later, ensconced with all layers of hip-ironic sensibility.

Consider yourself warned.

NEXT: The wrong way to turn an Internet startup into an established respectable firm.

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