1993

Inspired by an IRC exchange:

> Also, god, I just realized
> Debating the Iraq War in 2023 is like debating the Vietnam War in 1992
> Oh my god, we've turned into boomers

Projecting the current year back to 1993 and pushing all the previous events back similarly can get quite disorienting, especially if you are old enough to remember the actual 1993.

It is now 1993. The first Star Wars movie came out in 1947. The 1950s were the heyday of 8-bit computer games and many scifi and fantasy movies that would gain a lasting cult reputation. Having been declining into irrelevance since the 1930s, the Soviet Union quietly dissolved and the Cold War ended in 1961. The Eternal September caused by widespread consumer access to the Internet has been going on since 1963. The last time George R. R. Martin was able to manage a good pace for writing A Song of Ice and Fire was in the late 1960s.

The optimistic 60s turned into the paranoid 70s obsessed with national security after the 1971 World Trade Center attack. The 1950s pioneering spirit of small-scale computer game development is definitively over by the time the first Xbox is released in 1971. The 70s saw the founding of Reddit, Facebook and Twitter, and the first iPhone was published in 1977. By 1980, the social media era was well on its way.

The 1980s mostly passed in an indistinct haze. You don't remember any particularly memorable cultural touchstones or big developments, computers in 1990 are pretty similar to computers in 1980. There were some 1950s themed nostalgia pieces like Stranger Things, and Dungeons & Dragons has a resurgence with the new edition, but they feel kitschy and inauthentic compared from what you remember from the actual 50s. Mostly the 80s seem to have been a cavalcade of cultural decay, out-of-control commercialism and affronts to common decency. The ethos of DIY hobby computing and free and open-source software you remember from the 50s and 60s doesn't feel quite as lively anymore. Computers are a major consumer appliance sector in the 1980s, and locked-down curated computing for media consumption is handily outcompeting computers that empower users to program.

It is now 1993. A remake of a video game first published in 1978 just came out and looking at the trailer you can't tell how it's different from the original. There's some brand new computing thing out, building on theoretical work from the late 70s and the 80s. It feels confusing and unlike anything you've used before, and you suspect it will have a huge impact going forward. Sometimes you wonder what's going to be become of the zoomers who don't really know anything from before 1980.