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Nostalgia Ends Here: The 2000s Sucked, Actually (www.typebarmagazine.com)

submitted 3 days ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/humanities@beehaw.org

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Inexorably, nostalgia grinds on, ingesting and crushing everything in its path into an unrecognizable, homogeneous slurry. The ironclad law stating everyone in their 30s must get obsessed with resurrecting childhood media assures no decade can escape. But as said threshold creeps through the 80s and 90s and draws unavoidably closer to the 2000s, remembering the era fondly is requiring more and more ludicrous amounts of cognitive dissonance. Rife with war, fearmongering, and recession, and the 2000s were not a fun decade to live through, especially as a teenager.

Nostalgia culture’s defenders assert that we can just jettison the bad stuff. Forget the politics, wars, recession, and so on and just enjoy the Nu-Metal and clear plastic electronics. But is that really possible? Can you simply excise popular culture from the context in which it was created? I submit that you cannot, and while that’s true for every era, the politics of the post-9/11 era invaded our everyday lives so pervasively as to make it a particularly futile exercise in sophistry when you’re talking about the 2000s.

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[–] TehPers@beehaw.org 6 points 2 days ago

Nah, clear plastic electronics were just cool on their own. Same with beige.

Today's electronics are all boring colors. You find mostly black and white, and rarely some kind of brand-specific colors like the Switch's red and blue or Apple's, uh, very slightly off-white iPhone Air colors (they say those colors are gold and blue). For anything else, you pretty much need to buy a skin, which is cool of course, but you can't use a skin to get clear plastic.

The main reason we don't get fun colors anymore is because it's cheaper to manufacture the more popular options in larger quantities. Fun variants means lower order quantities, which means more expensive manufacturing. This is also why some PC cases are more expensive in white than in black.