Licensed CC0-Public Domain.
(to Art Chantry, who dismissed the below with the above, and said everything now was “about the same” as everything twenty years ago)
Twenty years is 1994, yes? Honk if you remember:
* No cell phones. If you couldn’t find someone at home, or anywhere else, you had to look for them, wait, or give up. If someone failed to appear when s/he was supposed to be at a certain place at a certain time, you had to wait, or give up.
* “The Net” and “The Web,” not to mention “email,” were strange, foreign concepts to most people.
* “The Net” and “The Web” were strange enough that big business, was never going to be interested.
* Daily newspapers were alive, well-funded, and read on paper.
* No Facebook, no Twitter. If you wanted to praise someone or condemn someone, you had to shout it out loud on a street corner, print up flyers and staple them on telephone poles, or write a letter to the editor and hope that the editor published it. (And didn’t edit it to death.)
* Bill Clinton, peace, and prosperity. (Relatively speaking, but still!)
* No national health care. If you were an American and you got sick and couldn’t pay for treatment, you either rode it out, died, or rode it out and died.
* People listened to music on compact discs. No Napster, no YouTube. You had to steal music the old-fashioned way.
* Speaking of music, vinyl was not coming back, no way, no how. (See above.)
* Kurt Cobain died. Beyoncé was thirteen. Amy Winehouse was eleven. Lady Gaga was eight. Rihanna was six. Chris Brown was five. Miley Cyrus was two. Robin Thicke was seventeen.
* Plenty of local independent record stores.
* Plenty of local independent book stores.
* Tim Eyman would not start doing his shit for another four years.
* People believed in funding Metro.
Sorry, that doesn’t seem “about the same” to me…
