Finding a Lost Generation

Can they be found, or is it already too late?

Welcome back to the wasteland!

I’m a bit sidelined physically this week, so I wanted to have something to chew on a bit. That said, it’s also more of a trip down memory lane. It’s still summer, after all! This is the time for that. It’s also the 20th anniversary of YouTube, which ended up changing the entertainment landscape more than anyone thought possible.

When the internet first started taking off among the general public in the 1990s, the monoculture was not only still intact but was also the default assumption for the populace on how the world, universe, and everything, worked and would progress going forward. Message boards and chat rooms were full of what you might call “trolling” and silly behavior, but it was all on the assumption that it was for relaxing between life itself and that it was just a fun side thing. It wasn’t yet life itself, and would not become a new home for millions.

That changed slowly through the 2000s as not only were kids born in the ‘90s growing up (usually completely unsupervised) on the internet, so too did Gen Y end up turning towards cyberspace more and more as an outlet for dealing with the post-9/11 world to find some stability where it once existed. Then of course there was the rise of social media from Myspace to Facebook to Twitter/X, but that was more of a gamechanger for the older generations. Before that happened, Gen Y was carving out its own ecosystem on message boards and comment sections based on cynicism, sneering contempt of once happy nostalgia while also depending on it at the same time. Pop culture also mutated for this crowd as a way to sustain identity in an era where corporate Geek Culture was concocted by corporations to siphon what little money they would have left by 2008.

I bring this up to show the epitome of what this era was like with a site that was called Channel Awesome. Back before websites became little more than content farms and the internet became flooded with bots, YouTube was just one site that was primarily used for a few things, all of which changed radically over time. The key development in its growth from illy home videos and pranks was the attempt to create a new ecosystem to forge an identity by people who largely didn’t have any in a world that didn’t want them to discover one.

Channel Awesome was (technically still is) a pop culture review site that focuses on nostalgia. They were not the first or second, but the one that first tried making it into an industry. Whether it succeeded or not is for you to judge.

In the ‘00s, the popular thing to do was to review the childhood’s of Gen Y (and younger Gen X and older Millennials: remember, it’s all a spectrum) kids to mock and skewer it and show how ridiculous a lot of what the audience grew up with was. Isn’t it all just silly and meaningless? But somehow it’s important to us, even though it’s quite obviously terrible!

There were a few hallmarks of this upcoming genre of video review: snark, sarcasm, irony, and the obsession with “logic” and accepted opinions from Respected Professionals above all. Honestly, looking back at the era now, it’s incredible how lock-step a lot of this was. You would not really find much in the way of dissenting opinions, because everyone was expected to think the same thing about everything. Contrarianism existed, because of course it did, but adherence to the monoculture (in this case, the accepted corporate “Geek” monoculture out of a paid Kevin Butler speech) mattered more than anything else. This was your “community” and you needed to belong there, which meant that you needed to be a Real Geek.

The above video does a very good job at highlighting the majority of the members that existed on the site two decades ago, even talking about where they ended up in the time since they started. It’s a fascinating look at a time and place long since gone, and how and also why it would all eventually go away. Of course, the video is long, so be aware of that, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting as a historical document on internet history that has faded away.

As for why it all went away, the answer is simple: it wasn’t enough. The people involved, the audience, and the wider culture, was fracturing as the monoculture was dying in the 2000s, and as it was doing so, new priorities emerged and new identities formed. Those priorities and identities were manyfold, but they all sum up with the fact that those involved realized, at least, subconsciously, that none of this stuff was an identity. That’s when it all shifted.

For myself, I bailed on the scene fairly early on when I realized the majority involved where content stewing in bitterness for the old days while also profiting (socially, at least) on those same old days, which made me question exactly what this was all for. No one wanted to create anything, they wanted to live in this weird bubble of pop cult aesthetics and slang divorced from not only the real world but any meaning that childhood might have actually had. The ‘00s were the hangover for Culture Ground Zero, where it was told products were all you needed to have an identity, the greatest lie Geek Culture told, and by the end of it, especially with the crash of 2008, that wannabe Gen X aloofness cracked and turned into a desperate bitterness over reality.

That’s why you had so much anger in those days few remember to mention when waxing nostalgic over the “Old” Internet. The Nu Atheist/Skeptic movement was the first dividing line, deciding an entire segment of their former cohorts were now intellectually inferior and needed to be scrubbed off the internet with sneers that would make a middle-aged Karen politician in Current Year blush. You might think this unearned arrogance and hatred was a defining trait of that particular crowd, but no, it soon became the default way to operate online.

Through the 2010s, as that lack of identity failed, it also split up itself. Atheism +, progressivism, counterculture discourse, but one of the few things that refused to completely sever was that obsession with Pop Cult media. That obsession would even become a battleground in Culture War issues, because neither side could admit that the culture they grew up on not only no longer existed, but they were so focused on mindlessly clinging to their phony identity centered around it that they never considered passing it down to the generation just under them. A whole generation cut itself off from the wider world, because they had long since abandoned it.

Years later and they’re still be arguing over the Hollywood system that hates them even as mainstream audiences have lost all investment in the entire affair long before they have. In other words, that pop cult identity is already gone and irrelevant, but they can’t let it go. This is because it’s all they have, and they need to still have that connection, because there isn’t anything else for them left. Everything else is dead or problematic (which is just a euphemism for dead).

The above video that highlights all these many “content creators” (itself a demeaning term) and shows how just about all of them scattered away through all of the above madness that was the 2010s, is a good example as to lack of identity driving everything. Not to say they are fundamentally broken people or anything, but that what united them all together fractured as reality set in. There really wasn’t any glue in the first place aside from those old corporate products.

Some of them did right the ship in their own lives, which is commendable, but the loss of shared monoculture is even more obvious when seeing the change in a whole cohort right before you. At the end of the day, all of the above people on whatever side of the conflicts they were on desired one thing: a community to be a part of, and a place where they could belong, and an identity that defined them. That is the real story here.

We’ve discussed both the book “Bowling Alone” and the madness that the 2010s set forth on an entire generation that had just dealt with the miasma of despair that was the ‘00s in earlier pieces, but they both stem from the greater issue, which is the lack of any real shared culture beyond products, transactional relationships, and a recitation of a youth that was the last time that connection existed. We are a culture of isolated islands connected by a bridge that fell into the sea long ago, and all we can do is rage about it. However, that does not change that said bridge is gone and not coming back. That world is over.

I don’t want to be too hard on the people that do or like any of this stuff. It clearly has value. The wider point is not that it is bad that “geek” stuff exists, but that it’s not an identity or a personality. It doesn’t make you who you are. What you like to consume does not define who you are, and most of arguments around the subject of gatekeeping in regards to this always just amount to focusing on the phony identity aspect over the much more pertinent quality one, which shows exactly where the priorities truly lie in such discussions. It’s still primarily thought of as a desire for a club away from the plebs, not a thriving art or entertainment landscape to grow in.

Art is an ecosystem meant to present a window into what the culture not only finds important, but how they live and what they believe. Without any of that, it’s just product in a sea of other product, with no rhyme or reason or direction except to fill shelves. It’s just consuming slop to consume slop and possibly harm the outgroup in the process of doing it so one can still feel they belong to an ingroup that doesn’t care about you.

But what are they trying to belong to?

In fact, what are we belonging to right now? Are we any better than the young Geek Culture acolytes of the ‘00s, angling for an identity, or are we still the same lost sailors at sea? Are we still struggling to draw lines in the sand based on cliches, ingroup insults, and more Us vs Them rhetoric? How much more pared down do we need to get from the current state of things? Will it ever be enough? Will we ever be satisfied?

Right now, it’s hard to say, but it won’t always be that way. Enjoy the trip to the past and remember both the good and bad so we know what to take with us going forward. Because we’re going to need it for what’s coming up ahead.

Have a good weekend and I’ll see you again soon enough.

Check out the Cirsova Summer Special! Only one issue left before the end of their 10 year, 40 issue run! Check it out for more exciting stories of action and adventure!