A Requiem for Techno-Optimism

Part 1: "I'll remember 1995"

Four or five years ago I went on a minimal synth binge. A YouTuber with the handle Cypress Čempr3s compiles excellent mixes, and I routinely put them on when I was at work, opening boxes and updating inventory figures. On one of my favorites is a track by Molly Nilsson that immediately stood out from the rest, even in a mix with a high killer-to-filler ratio. It was enough to make me drop what I was doing and walk across the room to get an artist name and song title.

I’ve already said it was by Molly Nilsson. Its title was “1995.” I have no idea what anyone else listens to anymore; for all I know, everyone reading this has it on their favorite Spotify playlist. I can’t even guess.

But maybe the algorithm hasn’t ever served you “1995,” and I’m obliged to say a few words about it. I don’t have the specialized vocabulary of a musician or a music critic, so the best I can do is try to describe its mood.

The word “nostalgia” comes directly to mind—“nostalgia” in the sense of homesickness. I get a sense of happiness tinged with longing, or sorrow tinged with fondness, although the emotional import is attenuated and distant, as though the intensity of the feeling underwent a significant redshift as the memories which inspired it receded far into the past.

If there was an image the song put in my mind the first few times I heard it, it might have been of motes of dust drifting across the rays of the midmorning sunlight entering through window on a Saturday in the winter months. By dint of suggestion, the “1995” refrain in the lyrics placed the window in the house I grew up in, and I saw a rug and a sofa and assorted articles of furniture as I remember them being arranged when I was in grade school, and as I sometimes glimpse them when I’m visiting my mother or father and an old photo album falls into one of our laps.

The verses I was able to parse—lines like Although I'm older now / There's still an emptiness / That's never letting go somehow—reminded me of the melancholic moods to which I was already prone to falling into when I was eleven or twelve, but at that age I could only be so sad for so long when everything seemed so simple and safe on the whole. The photos of Nilsson that Cypress put on display during her segment in the mix suggested she was about my age (and my instincts were right), so just on the face of it I could guess that in 1995 her eyes were about as far up from the ground as mine were, and the vibe and meaning song could be summed up as a thirtysomething’s remembrance of the years before complication and perplexity began creeping into things.

I assumed the year must have been a personal reference point rather than a historical one, because what world event of 1995 could have left an indelible mark on someone who must have been around ten or eleven years old at the time?¹

Imagine my surprise when I finally looked up the lyrics and discovered “1995” is an ode to a Microsoft operating system:

Windows 95, you're long gone but I'm still alive
I've gone so far, not even knowing how
I suppose the world is so much smaller now

The plans that you made,
When you still had the time
I've saved all the things
That you left behind
But by now I guess I'd consider them all mine

Windows 95,
Is only a metaphor for what I feel inside
Although I'm older now,
There's still an emptiness
That's never letting go somehow

Have you ever walked into what seemed,
To be somebody else's dream?
And though the time won't let you pass,
It keeps you looking through the glass

1995,
They call the year the future was to arrive
But back in '95
We thought we were standing on the threshold
To the end of time
(And we still do)
So what's wrong with living in the past?
It just happens to be the place I saw you last
And what's wrong with living in a dream?
That one day the echo answers,
Deep inside of me

I'll remember 1995
I'll remember 1995

For a while I felt that the Windows 95 angle rather took the piss out the whole thing. Nothing bleeds a song of the meaning you’ve invested in it as much as discovering that the lyrics don’t say quite what you believed, and are actually kind of dumb on closer analysis. Whether Nilsson was staging a kind of ironic prank or truly singing a wistful ode to an obsolete bit of software in earnest, I didn’t think I liked it.

Then I listened to it again and thought about it some more.

The release of Windows 95 was no trivial event. Its importance to computing is analogous to the impact of the Ford Model T on automotive culture. Neither was the first product of its kind, but each represented an inflection point in the mass-scale adoption of a new consumer technology.

Computers didn’t used to be easy. There was a time when it was hard not to feel like a bad-ass hacker whenever you successfully installed a new program or a piece of hardware, because it was seldom a simple or intuitive matter and the system had no interest in holding your hand and walking you through it. If something went wrong, all the guidance you’d receive were bleak error messages that might as well have been composed in a foreign language if you weren’t fluent in the jargon of I/O addresses, BIOS, and dip switches. Windows 95 aimed to make home computing more accessible to the layperson, and by and large it succeeded.²

My family got its first PC in 1991 or 1992, probably on the recommendation of my father’s tech-savvy brother. I don’t think anyone did much with it but play games and stare at After Dark screensavers in lieu of watching television, but it was there. Most other families I knew then didn’t have one.

That changed pretty rapidly during and after 1995.

When you get down to it, most of our common cultural touchstones are media events. Consider someone who was born in the United States in 1945. What are the defining moments of his cohort’s seminal years? When it’s 1980 and he’s moved away from his hometown and is out at a bar with other men his age one evening, which memories of his are common currency? What can they all reminisce about when the mood grows nostalgic? Watching Rocky & Bullwinkle and The Twilight Zone? The Colts versus Giants game of 1958? The Beatles’ appearance on the The Ed Sullivan Show? Walter Cronkite announcing that Kennedy had been shot? The moon landing?

I mean, sure, they might discuss records, movies, popular books, and generational experiences that occurred independently of mass media, like “duck and cover” drills—but if these are people who didn’t grow up together and didn’t know each other before they passed thirty, a whole lot of their shared memories are going to be of television content. And being born in 1945 or thereabouts, the members of this group might yet have some recollection of what life was like before they and everyone they knew had a television set.

That would be getting right to the meat of the tomato: each of them going down the line and recalling the day their father walked through the front door lugging a crate marked with the letters RCA. The more thoughtful (or drunk) of them might observe that they hadn’t understood and couldn’t have understood at the time that they were witnesses to and participants in a truly monumental event: the transformation of their society’s very modus vivendi.

And this is precisely what Nilsson is doing in “1995.” For someone like me it’s deeply relatable because 1995 wasn’t just the year my household got a new PC with Windows 95 preinstalled, but it was also when we got an America Online subscription. From then on, the home computer was no longer just an ancillary gaming console, a word processor, or a means of wasting a rainy Sunday trying to produce something resembling art by clicking & dragging objects in MS Paint. The internet beckoned.

If I were asked to rattle off some of my own memories of my teenage years (and don’t get me started; I’ve become shamefully prone to maudlin reminiscence in my old age), it wouldn’t be very long before I mentioned message boards, late-night AIM conversations, fansites, LiveJournal, webcomics, Napster, and so on and so forth—but none of these individual happenings are as critical as the event from which all of them followed.

It’s unsettling to come to terms with the idea that the true anthems of my youth weren’t any tracks by Nirvana or Tool or Marilyn Manson, but the Windows 95 startup chime, the whistle and hiss of a dial-up modem, and the glissando BLOOP of an instant message notification.

Stolen from The Interface Experience

It can be hard to get past the popular tropes and enduring clichés transmitted by its cultural artifacts and speak substantively about the “vibe” of a given decade. So much of anyone’s experience of it depended on the sounds, images, and narratives proliferating through the mass media apparatus, and how we reacted and what we reacted to depended on one’s situation and social allegiances—and if you were a child at the time, as I was, there were a lot of factors from which you were insulated or had only a partial understanding. And there is always more to the situation than what the representations of it coming in through the airwaves and through the wires denote or suggest. What I’m saying is that we’re as incapable of truly knowing the past as anticipating the future. Iconography and adumbration are the best we can do.

That said…

A Pew poll released in early 1997 found a striking “optimism gap” in the United States. When asked about how they were doing personally, respondents’ answers were downright rosy: “Americans’ optimism about their own present and future is at near record levels,” the report states. On the other hand, they were deeply pessimistic about the world. “Just once in four decades of polling has the public rated the current state of the union substantially lower than today — in 1974, when the Watergate scandal demoralized the country.”

The opening line of A Tale of Two Cities comes to mind here. Maybe the poll sheds some insight on why the 1990s are remembered so fondly in spite of the barometer reading given by the grittiness, angst, and irony pervading so much of its pop culture—but, again, it’s exceedingly difficult to sift out the actual contingencies from the retrospectives and the reconstructed nostalgia.

If you were a conservative of any stripe, you saw a nation purulent with moral and social decay. If you were on the left, you may have been concerned about the aggressive social agenda of the religious right and the growing and increasingly unchecked power of multinational corporations. If you were politically indifferent, late-night talk shows impressed on you the idea of a nation given to dysfunction and ridiculousness, while media like the X-Files signal-boosted a popular current of conspiratorial belief in a federal government pursuing a malevolent secret agenda with frightful discipline and ruthlessness. This was the decade where Superman died (and everyone was talking about it, everyone was actually and truly shocked) and the moral compass of even Star Trek began to wobble.

In late 1999, another Pew report testified to a stark mood shift:

A substantial 70% majority of Americans are also optimistic about the future of the United States over the next 50 years. Again, college graduates and those with family incomes of at least $75,000 are among the most optimistic — 75% and 77%, respectively, express optimism about the nation’s future. In comparison, 60% of those without high school degrees and 64% of those with incomes under $20,000 are optimistic about the nation. Also, Easterners are particularly optimistic at 78%.

The public is more reserved when asked to evaluate whether children in the U.S. in general will grow up to be better or worse off than their parents are now. A 55% majority says better. Although this represents an increase of 17 percentage points over the past three years, more than one-third of parents (36%) say worse…

The importance the public places on scientific and technological inventions jumped significantly over the past three years. Today, 89% of the public says that science and technology will play major roles in making things better; in 1996, 77% said so. Notably, the increase is relatively uniform across all major demographic groups.

That tracks. The mood wasn’t exactly ecstatic, but people were generally pleased with the gangbusters economy and starting to feel pretty good about how the digital revolution was going.³ Sure, we had reservations about the Microsoft monopoly, the stacks of America Online trial disks piling up in our mailboxes, and the untenably swelling dot-com bubble, but our enthusiasm for the technological paradigm shift cut across the usual tribal boundary lines. The web was a space where the future was looking unambiguously bright, regardless of one’s vantage point. Once you got your PC, your dial-up modem, and an ISP subscription, you seemed to glimpse the sun rising over the horizon of a vast and undiscovered continent. Something brand new was coming into existence, and we were all of us witnesses to its—

…No, wait. I’m sorry. Scratch most of that last paragraph. That’s the reconstructed nostalgia talking. It wasn’t like that at all.

While I can’t speak for the tech futurists, I think that most of us didn’t seriously appreciate the momentousness of the 1990s consumer tech revolution before we were already browsing MySpace and running BitTorrent on a laptop connected to a cable modem via ethernet. Maybe it didn’t even sink in until we looked up from our smartphones one morning and reflected that we hadn’t read a magazine or listened to a CD in years, and realized we had to strain our imagination to picture what life might be like without Facebook, Wikipedia, or Amazon.

There was no collective “silent, upon a peak in Darien” moment in the 1990s. It was more like one, ten, or a hundred million people nodding their heads as they clicked through various menus, applications, and hypertext content, saying “hey, this is pretty neat,” and then thinking about dinner.

That’s how the world is changed. Those explosive moments of social upheaval which history calls “revolutions” or “movements” or sometimes “paradigm shifts” are so many cresting and breaking waves, the results of some holistic concatenation of events whose significance often goes unobserved until there’s a Parisian mob storming the Bastille or a psychologically aberrant reality TV star prevailing in a United States presidential contest against a former secretary of state. The digital revolution was a slight but sustained shifting of individual habits on a massive scale, and most people couldn’t conceive of the consequences’ full breadth until the next generation came of age in the society they’d quietly invested in building.

That’s why Nilsson’s “1995” pulls at my heartstrings. The naïve techno-optimism underlying the days of Windows 95 and the early consumer internet is intoxicating to recollect because none of it seemed like that big of a deal at the time, especially if you were between the ages of, say, ten and eighteen. It was all so innocuous. Underwhelming, even, and maybe a bit banal. It was something sort of new and kind of nice, low-key, and altogether pretty fun on the whole. What wasn’t to like?

It’s important to note that the overall mood and worldview into which this sense of a benign technological uplift entered was grounded in the decade’s (specious) end-of-history triumphalism. By 1992, liberal democracy had emerged victorious from the geopolitical crucible of the twentieth century. In spite of its accidental glitches and periodic blunders, our way of life had demonstrated once and for all its moral and structural superiority over Soviet communism; the outcome of the United States’ final victory in the Cold War wasn’t merely the opening up of the Eastern Bloc, but “the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.”

It was an ambiance. It was something in the air that even someone of my tender age couldn’t help but inhale. It subtended most of the misgivings about the direction in which America and/or the world might have been headed, and it beguiled a whole hell of a lot of people into assuming that the arc of history tended simply towards the intensification of certain aspects of the democratic capitalist present. We seemed to expect an indefinite series of minor but nontrivial and cumulative improvements, a march of agreeable novelties, and the perennial recurrence of problems that would at least be more easily managed by dint of both technological advancement and an increasingly enlightened public (made so by advances in information technology). Again—very benign and bland on the whole, neither dystopian nor utopian, not even that exciting, and all the more reassuring for it.

It’s a future that’s hard not to miss a little every now and then.

1. Molly Nilsson is from Sweden, so it was possible that something happened in that corner of the world that I didn’t know about. Of course, I only learned about her nationality later on.

2. Three words: plug and play. That was the game-changer.

3. A long time ago I wrote some words about the Marvel 2099 line, which launched in 1992, got cancelled in 1996, and had a one-shot epilogue published in 1999. I still think it’s telling that it began as a corporatocratic cyberpunk hellscape story and ended with a millenarian vision of utopia.