Accelerate!: A History of the 1990s - Hardcover

Brooke-Smith, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0750996838 ISBN 13: 9780750996839

Publisher: The History Press, 2022

Synopsis

The 1990s was the decade in which the Soviet Union collapsed and Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘end of history’. Nelson Mandela was released from prison, Google was launched and scientists in Edinburgh cloned a sheep from a single cell. It was also a time in which the president of the United States discussed fellatio on network television and the world’s most photographed woman died in a car crash in Paris. Radical pop band The KLF burned a million quid on a Scottish island, while the most-watched programme on TV was Baywatch. Anti-globalisation protestors in France attacked McDonald’s restaurants and American survivalists stockpiled guns and tinned food in preparation for Y2K.

For those who lived through it, the 1990s glow in the memory with a mixture of proximity and distance, familiarity and strangeness. It is the decade about which we know so much yet understand too little. Taking a kaleidoscopic view of the politics, social history, arts and popular culture of the era, James Brooke-Smith asks – what was the 1990s? A lost golden age of liberal optimism? A time of fin-de-siècle decadence? Or the seedbed for the discontents we face today?

About this title

About the Author

JAMES BROOKE-SMITH teaches English and Film Studies at the University of Ottawa. His first book, Gilded Youth: Privilege, Rebellion and the British Public School, was published by Reaktion Books to excellent reviews in 2019.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Pre-Post-Everything WRITING HISTORY by the decade is like trying to put a hairnet on an octo- pus. The more you try to squeeze the recalcitrant stuff of history into a neat ten-year slice, the more it oozes through the gaps. The forces that shape our lives run deeper and longer than any ten-year perspective can grasp. Dig deep enough into the causes of any historical event, and you find yourself slipping backwards through time in search of stable ground. The decade is an arbitrary product of calendrical time, which stems from the accident of our having ten fingers and ten toes, the source of our deci- mal number system. Had our bodies evolved differently, bookshops might be stocked with volumes that divide the chaos of history into neat seven-, twelve- or fifteen-year chunks – all essentially arbitrary units. Our penchant for histories of single decades is a relatively recent phenom- enon, a product of the historical short-sightedness of the modern age and our desire to chop reality into bite-sized pieces. If you cast your mind back and try to remember the great decades of history, the further you go, the harder it becomes. The twentieth century is full of good, chunky decades. The ‘greed is good’ eighties, the anxious seventies, the swinging sixties, even the ‘low, dishonest’ thirties and the ‘roaring’ twenties. But once you get beyond, say, the 1890s – the era of the Oscar Wilde trial and the crumbling of the not-so- timeless Victorian verities – easily recognisable decades are hard to find. No one outside the academic conference circuit talks about the 1870s, let alone the 1470s. And yet there’s no getting past the fact that we have ten fingers and ten toes. As a historical unit, the decade has a pleasing weight to it. It fits nicely in the palm of your hand. A single decade usually contains at least one or two changes of government, one or two transformative technological break- throughs, some major new social trends, a few significant cultural movements and a handful of deaths of major historical figures. The decade may be an arbitrary construct, but it is, as the anthropologists say, good to think with. This is particularly true of the 1990s, the subject of this book. The 1990s come ready packaged as a decade – not quite a ten-year slice, but near enough. The 1990s began in the autumn of 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rapid, almost entirely bloodless collapse of the Soviet Union. And they ended on 11 September 2001 with the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, a spectacular assault launched by a millenarian Islamic sect seeking to end the hegemony of America and the Christian West and replace it with a global caliphate. On the one hand, a tumbling wall and the end of the Cold War; on the other, collapsing towers and the beginning of the ‘global war on terror’. My aim is to explore what happened in between these two epoch-making events. For many in the affluent West, the 1990s were a time of relative politi- cal stability and cultural optimism, perhaps the last such epoch in recent memory. This was the decade in which the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared that history had ended with the fall of communism and that liberal democracy would inevitably spread throughout the world. The election victories of Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK signalled the triumph of ‘third-way’ politics, which sought to replace the ideological divisions of the past with an inclusive vision of modernisation and progress. Political parties of both the left and right sought to occupy the political centre ground. This was a much-touted ‘post-ideological’ age, in which politics fused ever more intimately with the public relations and media industries. Class consciousness was passé; turnout at elections declined across much of the Western world. And yet Harold Macmillan’s famous statement about the role of the unex- pected in history still held true. In 1963, when the British prime minister was asked by a journalist what could possibly knock his reforming government’s plans off course, he replied, ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ Over the course of the 1990s, the events piled up as usual. Presidents Bush and Clinton deployed US forces overseas on no fewer than seven separate occasions, from the First Gulf War in 1991 via Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq again in 1998, Sudan, Kosovo, and then the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11. The 1990s saw the fall of dicta- tors, from Pinochet in Chile to Suharto in Indonesia; the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the end of apartheid in South Africa; the 1998 Good Friday agreement and end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Genocides in Rwanda and Kosovo signalled a grim return of the systematic mass slaugh- ter that had characterised mid-twentieth-century European history. While Europe and North America enjoyed the dubious pleasures of consumerist anomie and postmodern weightlessness, history still raged elsewhere. After an early period of recession, the 1990s witnessed one of the long- est cycles of economic growth in modern times, roughly from 1992 until the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and the shock of the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. The long boom was fuelled by technological change and productivity increases, but in many countries, especially the US and the UK, the Anglo-Saxon centres of free-market economics, it was also driven by the deregulation of vast swathes of the economy, in particular banking, telecommunications and energy. In many ways, the 1990s were a slicker, more tasteful version of the 1980s, a period of full-throated free-market economics, but this time overseen by centrist politicians who wanted to channel some of the proceeds of growth into social programmes such as education and health. The 1990s were also the great decade of globalisation, both as a geopo- litical and as a cultural process. The European Union (EU) came into being in 1993, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 and the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank advised governments in the developing world on how to reform their economies along neoliberal lines, often threatening to punish those who did not by withholding credit. At WTO meetings in Seattle, Prague and Genoa there were large demonstrations in opposition to the free- market model of globalisation. Loose coalitions of trade unionists, religious groups, anarchists and environmentalists protested the lack of democratic oversight, the erosion of workers’ rights and the heavy environmental cost of global capitalism. Nativist politicians in Europe and America started to make space in the public sphere for virulently anti-immigrant views, the likes of which had not been heard for decades. Islamic extremists used hyper-modern communication technologies to form decentralised networks and spread an anti-modern ideology of religious purity and violent jihad. In the 1990s the future seemed to arrive on an almost daily basis with the rise of the internet, the spread of mobile phones, the first cloned mammal, Dolly the Sheep, and the mapping of the human genome, a pioneering feat of human ingenuity that was achieved ahead of schedule due to the expo- nential growth of micro-processor speeds. Pundits and theorists thrilled to the progressive possibilities of the new digital age: Manuel Castells analysed the emerging forms of the ‘network society’, Nicholas Negroponte extolled the human potentials of ‘being digital’, and cyber-theorists took up Donna Harraway’s techno-feminist vision of ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’. Before the Big Five tech corporations (Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta (Facebook)) monopolised the internet, cyberspace represented a new frontier of human possibility. Wired magazine, Mondo 2000 and online communities like The WELL (The Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link) espoused a libertarian hacker ethos that cast personal identity as a malleable construct and human societies as problems to be fixed with smart technology. Many of the decade’s most exciting cultural forms emerged from the crea- tive use of new digital technologies, from hip hop’s culture of sampling to the futuristic sounds of rave and techno music to Hollywood movies such as Jurassic Park, Toy Story and The Matrix. Videogames became both a mass- market industry, which rivalled movies and recorded music for market dominance, and, in some quarters at least, a critically recognised art form with its own canons of value and taste. This was also the era in which the underground went mainstream. Grunge, hip hop, Brit Pop, the indie cinema of David Lynch, Danny Boyle and Jane Campion, the edgy conceptualism of the Young British Artists, extreme sports: what in previous decades were the preserves of alternative scenes and hipster elites rushed into the overground cultural spaces of MTV, broadsheet newspapers, multiplex cinemas and pub- licly funded art galleries. On the one hand, this produced a sense of cultural insurgency as avant-garde forms seeped into public consciousness and dis- rupted the status quo; on the other, it spurred debates about ‘selling out’ and the dangers of co-option by the corporate media. ??? The question that faces the historian of the recent past is this: does a pattern emerge? Is there a figure in the carpet, a discernible order to this otherwise chaotic selection of events and trends? Or, to use a more historically apt metaphor, does a clear image emerge from the Magic Eye picture that is the 1990s? These optical illusions could be found everywhere from high street malls to popular kids’ magazines for a brief moment in the early 1990s. If you stared for long enough at the dense, staticky mess of dots and scribbles that comprised the image, a second, three-dimensional image would reveal itself. What looked like an error message from an industrial printer became a shimmering hologram of a spaceship or a fantasy landscape. The craze was short lived and yet the Magic Eye poster serves as a neat metaphor for the era, not only because it mixed a vaguely hippy-ish, Op Art visual style with the technophilia of the early internet age – a characteristically 1990s combina- tion – but also because it was so difficult to see clearly. Often it took hours of cross-eyed staring before the holographic elves or sports car revealed them- selves. And sometimes, nothing happened at all. Sometimes, in spite of the promise that a hidden vision lurked within, the surface remained stubbornly flat and meaningless. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Romantic historians sought to encapsulate the vast, churning forces of history in the form of single resonant images or heroic individuals. William Hazlitt wrote a series of biographical sketches of luminaries such as Jeremy Bentham and William Wilberforce, who he thought embodied the ‘spirit of the age’. Today, we are rightly sceptical of such ‘great man’ theories of history; we are more attuned to the impersonal forces that shape historical experience – the social structures and environ- mental conditions that affect our behaviour and configure our identities. Not even the greatest of statesmen, nor the most famous of historical personages, are present at all of the key moments of their era. We might call this the Zelig paradox, after the Woody Allen character who is miraculously present at all the major events of early twentieth-century history, but only at the cost of having no personality himself, of always blending in with the time and place in which he finds himself. But distinct periods, even distinct decades, still have their own moods and atmospheres, their own local historical weather patterns. Whether or not they add up to a unitary ‘spirit of the age’, there are always shared points of refer- ence, common experiences that anchor us in the stream of time. The fall of the Berlin Wall; the last days of British rule in Hong Kong; the end of apartheid in South Africa; the experience of logging onto the internet for the first time; the first mobile phone in your pocket; the thrill of being swept up in the insur- gency of youth cultures like hip hop, grunge and rave – these are just the some of the things that shaped what it was like to be alive in the 1990s. The best way to capture this sense of history as both impersonal force and subjective experience is via culture. We can learn as much, if not more, about the 1990s from the history of the first-person shooter videogame or the beginnings of online pornography, as from yet another study of Bill Clinton’s presidency or the signing of the Maastricht Treaty. Or, better still, it is via the juxtaposition of these two kinds of things – world events and popular culture, CNN and MTV – that we can get a real feel for the age. Because this is how most of us live in the modern world, constantly jumping back and forth between news and entertain- ment, the serious and the silly, the high and the low. If the 1990s can be defined at all, then they are surely the ‘pre-post-everything decade’, the cusp between the analogue twentieth century and the fully digital twenty-first. This was an era in which we still read physical newspapers, called our friends on a landline and travelled to bricks-and-mortar stores to buy the latest CDs, books and videotapes. But it was also a time in which there was a growing awareness of the vast new technological system that was powering into life, the radically transformative effects of which we could barely fathom at the time. This was the last era before all that was solid melted into the digital air. Before online trolls and flame wars. Before the great siloisation of politics and culture into algorithmic filter bubbles. Before file sharing and streaming services turned music, film and television into an endless torrent of cheap content. And before the fragmentation of mass media eroded the very idea of a shared popular culture with a productive tension between mainstream and avant-garde, centre and margins. No doubt every modern era is fated to think it is undergoing a unique period of acceleration. As new technologies emerge and the forces of eco- nomic production advance, we feel as though everyday life itself is gathering pace. Nevertheless, in the 1990s the confluence of technological change, a prolonged economic boom, the rapid expansion and interconnection of the global economy and post-ideological ‘third-way’ politics sparked a sense that a new world was coming into being. Looking back from the present, it is impossible not to be struck by the sense of social and cultural effervescence that defined so much of the era. It was as though history’s source codes had been scrambled, the grand narratives of the twentieth century cast aside, but nothing of appropriate gravity put in their place. Into this vacuum rushed all manner of utopian dreams, millenarian fantasies, liberal triumphalisms and retro nostalgias. Today, we are older if not necessarily wiser. We live in a post-9/11 world. We have watched as the blithe statements of American politicians about clean and quick military interventions have turned into decades-long conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. We have lived through the greatest financial crisis since the 1920s and the subsequent years of economic austerity. We have witnessed the return of authoritarian populism and the emergence of China as a super- power to rival the US. We have seen the digital utopianism of the early days of the internet give way to fears about surveillance capitalism, social-media- driven anxiety and attention obliteration. We have heard the warnings about global climate catastrophe go unheeded again and again. One of the central historical debates about the 1990s hinges on whether we should regard the decade as a lost silver age (certainly not gold but better than the tin one we have now) of liberal tolerance and political consensus or as a seedbed for the civilisational discontents we face today. After much con- sideration and several years of diligent research, I can now finally reveal the answer: yes and no, both and neither. Yes, given the state of the world today, many of us would welcome a return to the rather bland political landscape of the 1990s. And yes again, it is possible to detect in that decade the emerging forms of some of our current discontents. But both of these positions are limited by their insistence on judging the 1990s solely in relation to where we are today. Perhaps it would be better to try to return to the 1990s some of their historical quiddity, to try to see the decade on its own terms. Even the very recent past is like a foreign country ... and yet it only seems like yesterday

Edition details

• Publisher: The History Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0750996838
• ISBN 13: 9780750996839
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304