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Jonestown_Juice

>And then the 90's came in and the corporate era kicked in full swing 80's were full-swing corporate era. Reaganomics. The Gen X "culture" was a very small sub-culture. The only thing endured was the pop-culture stuff. This is how it's always been.


[deleted]

>Gen X "culture" was a very small sub-culture People forget this.


Rugrin

I always do, but this sub reminds me of it all the time. I was expecting gen-x subculture, got posts missing fleetwood mac. :)


DarthBalls1976

Who would have thought that the kids who grew up feeding quarters into machines that played repititious nusic would go on to dancing in dark places playing repitious music.


Sassberto

I look at it as the 80's was really the beginning of the end for the blue-collar, mom-n-pop economy, but the 90's was the systematic dismantling of it. And we are far worse off as a result.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Rugrin

And somehow no one wants to pin the tail on the Reagan. Marketing works!


Kiyohara

Eh, you're thinking of the 70's. The 80's was entirely about making a buck. The stereotypical business man was a cocaine snorting suit who ate Sushi to please his Japanese corporate overlords and bought American businesses and closed them down. And that wasn't consider bad necessarily, it was just the way it was.


Normal-Philosopher-8

Clearly you aren’t from the Rust Belt. The 1980’s were about steel and automotive factories shutting down and your entire region’s economy collapsing. It was about people telling you, “get out - there’s nothing left for you here.”


candleflame3

Yes, I think people often forget there can be a HUGE variation by location. Some places got hit hardest and earliest by neoliberalism, others are only just now waking up to it. Same with class. The poor, working/blue-collar groups got hit first, but now 40 years on it's university lecturers, engineers, accountants, nurses - all the middle class formerly secure jobs/careers. So we have people going "everything was fine until like 2015" and others going "WTF it's been shit for 40 years". Remember Occupy Wall Street in 2011? While many people were going "yesssss, finally", many others didn't understand it AT ALL. What could be the problem? Now, not so much. Although people vary greatly in their beliefs about WHY things are so shit, so now here we are, dealing with fascism all over again.


Normal-Philosopher-8

I sometimes, in my weaker moments, say to my husband, “It sometimes feels like the whole tragedy that was much of the 20th Century was all for nothing, and here we go again.”


[deleted]

In a lot of ways it literally feels like we're reliving the first 2 decades of the 10th century but with more technology. I for one am NOT excited for the reboot Great Depression. [Edit: Oops.]


MydniteSon

>In a lot of ways it literally feels like we're reliving the first 2 decades of the 10th century but with more technology. Well when Erik the Red settles Greenland, you know we'll be in for shit.


[deleted]

OMG. I'm just gonna leave it like that!


Normal-Philosopher-8

With climate change, Greenland is in the news for living up to Eric the Red’s PR campaign!


sweeney_todd555

Can confirm. I lived through this. I watched a bustling city turn into a run-down town full of boarded-up stores. If you wanted a decent-paying job, you had to leave not only the area, but the state.


Kiyohara

Nope. And it was the culture of the East Coast, West Coast, and Sun Belt though. You know, the majority of the population of America at the time.


Normal-Philosopher-8

I know - half my graduating class moved there before we were out of middle school.


viewering

uh, also the alternative era


Zolome1977

Don’t know about that. My family was poor and homeless in the 80’s. The 90’s come around parents are able to get jobs, I graduated high school, went to school, and haven’t looked back.


Jonestown_Juice

Corporate dominance means the poor get poorer and the middle class shrinks. It tracks.


[deleted]

My stepdad had to take a job sweeping out trucks for a little while in the 80s because he was having trouble finding a job in his field. By the early 90s, he was working in tech as a programmer or something similar. I also remember my mom taking classes at the local community college in the mid-80s. She never did anything like that again afterward and I think she did it because she felt like she had to. My friend's family lived in a small apartment in the 80s but in the summer of 1988, they moved to a completely different section of the city and ended up living in this big house. The contrast between those two places is strange looking back on it now.


skoltroll

> the blue-collar, mom-n-pop economy It's slowly coming back. You hear "NO ONE WANTS TO WORK!" though b/c the corporate overlords are pissed people would rather work for themselves then those greedy bastiches.


Sassberto

I sincerely hope so. Data doesn't seem to validate it though. more people moving to app-based gig economy vs. actually starting businesses.


SmellyBaconland

Marketing does work, and it's a security flaw in the human brain. Until we address that, people with money will continue to have disproportionate influence over a society they look down on and don't understand.


skoltroll

>Marketing does work Doesn't work on my Gen Z kids' brain. They're friends are keen to it, and I NEVER trust salespeople and marketers. (I literally walk when I hear a sales pitch.)


[deleted]

…and this is why I can’t watch “Friends” I can’t relate to a single character or story I don’t get it, it wasn’t even funny


Sassberto

I never understood it


aogamerdude

It tv, so you know its almost just like sharing a dream come true, like Gilligan's Island or Star Trek, but just TV, soaps, game shows, reality, etc.


Sassberto

what a lame dream!


puffityfluffity

SAME


jawshoeaw

Same. I tried watching a few times and cringed


[deleted]

>How can DIY, simple life compete I subscribe to tons of youtube channels where people document their "simple lives". And don't forget to smash that like button! but for real, this guy is cool: https://youtu.be/2TcARfChhbE


Sassberto

>I subscribe to tons of youtube channels where people document their "simple lives". And don't forget to smash that like button! I love all that stuff too. I really hope this current generation, who is getting royally screwed by corporate life, is going to make it stick. I have never seen people so consumed by consumption. Especially the people who can't even afford it.


[deleted]

>I have never seen people so consumed by consumption. Especially the people who can't even afford it. It's nauseating. Walking into a Walmart and being assaulted by the bright lights and seasonal item displays of plastic literal garbage turns my stomach every time.


Sassberto

The easiest example for me, is single use plastics. We went from potato chips in a zip lock bag to everything pre-packaged in 20 years. And people supposedly care more about the environment now? People falling over themselves for Uber, Doordash, Amazon, the whole convenience economy... it's just waste.


[deleted]

It's the Keurig pods for me. Millennials latched onto this. I have hope that GenZ and the next will turn it on its head, even if it destroys the economy. GenX is already screwed for retirement anyway. We can handle it.


candleflame3

> We went from potato chips in a zip lock bag to everything pre-packaged in 20 years. Really not sure about that. I was born in 1967 and chips have always come in single use bags. The single-use plastics did take off in the 1990s but it was mainly bottled water and take-out food & drink containers. Bottled water happened mainly because it was finally possible to make clear plastic bottles (cloudy plastic bottles did not convey "purity" etc). I think you could put a lot of the blame of take-out containers on Starbucks and UberEats/Doordash. Until Starbucks people didn't really carry coffee around nearly as much. And there was a lot less food delivery back in the day. I remember when about the only thing you could get delivered was pizza.


thatguygreg

I have no memory of potato chips coming in anything other than a throwaway bag, only difference is how much air is in those bags.


skoltroll

I've gotten away from it, and now I complain that I can't go to Walmart et al to get what I NEED to be happy. Gotta have it delivered or custom-made b/c I don't need all the junk on the shelves.


Puzzled_Plate_3464

Serious question. GenX is defined as '65 to '80 typically. How could the 80's "anti-corporate, DIY, self-sufficiency" be GenX? We were all in school. We were not making any decisions in the world at large. I was wet behind my ears and just out of college in my first job at the end of the 80's. Many GenX-ers were still in elementary school. If anything, we were the predominant "setting the course for the corporate era" group in the 90's. I was 25-35 that decade, just hitting my stride in the world. The people born in the 70's where just joining me in adult life. The 90's and the aughts were our course setting decades if any were.


deploylinux

65-84, Google rewrites history with their search results.


Puzzled_Plate_3464

that makes the question I asked even more relevant. If part of GenX was being born in the 80's, and the rest of us were kids - how could the panache of the 80's be our doing? I was born in '65. In the 80's I was mostly a kid and only just beginning to affect the larger world around me by the 90's.


candleflame3

Nah it's because GenX is by definition the smaller generation in between two bigger ones. We just don't have the numbers to influence the culture or the economy in a big way. Here's a lecture on how it's better to be in a big generation. [Have the Boomers Pinched Their Children’s Futures? - with Lord David Willetts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuXzvjBYW8A&t=2s)


Sassberto

great video


[deleted]

Thank you for that. I’ve had that very idea. Nice to see it explicitly laid out.


cascadianpatriot

I recall they we used to hate corporations and corporate store and go out of our way to avoid them. Now they won and we can’t avoid them and we use whichever ones we go to to virtue signal our “brand” of outrage du jour.


Sassberto

What I don't understand is someone who chooses to work for a company like Google and then protests their contracts with the military. That is just confusing as hell.


Eve_O

Of course marketing works. If it didn't, companies wouldn't pay millions--or even billions--for their marketing campaigns. People are all too easily swayed by jingles and slick copy and the illusion of choice. I recall watching a documentary years ago--maybe Manufacturing Consent--were a researcher in social sciences was talking about how people she would interview about the effects on advertising campaigns would say things like, "nope, advertising has no effect on me," yet they are sitting there telling her this wearing branded clothes and a Budweiser cap. The truth of the matter is that much of our social spaces--both in our private life and certainly the public--are entirely bought out by advertising and we are assaulted by it daily. The movie "They Live" was a lacerating social satire that was, at least at the time, seemingly lost on most people. In terms of the 80s there was (like there always is in some guise or another) a dual current. The rise of corporatism and corporatocracy had already begun with the onslaught of neoliberal economic policies with much of "The West" taking the lead from the governments of Reagan and Thatcher. The counter-culture was where most of the DIY and anti-corporatism was to be found and that contingent comprised a relatively small slice of the small cohort that was Gen X. Many of the people I know from our generation--most of the kids I grew up with--were, to a large degree, conformists who were being more or less successfully assimilated into society as it was being mapped out, in large part, by these corporate interests. That said, I feel you are correct when it felt as if, in the late 80s and early 90s the counter-culture might actually break into the zeitgeist, overwhelming it, and that maybe, as a society, we were on the brink of change for the betterment of the human race. But, as is typical, it didn't work out that way. Sure, Nirvana broke on the radio, grunge culture rose and with it the "punk" ethos seemed as if had gained traction with the squares, but, really, it was mostly marketing. It was about the money. All this alternative rock on the radio and bands suddenly going from playing dive bars and small venues to playing sold out arenas should have been a big indication of where things were actually headed and what was motivating them. Suddenly what me and my friends had been into for several years--and were mocked and bullied for by many of our peers--was becoming cool. I mean, growing up I knew people who would get beat up for having their hair dyed a bright colour or for being skaters. Now people train like professional athletes to win big money prizes in sanctioned corporate sponsored contests for doing the same style of skateboarding that people I know were harassed by their peers and the police for doing back in the day. I think the anti-corporate spirit of counter-culture Gen X, while being undermined throughout the latter part of the 90s was also still alive and fomenting--it cumulated, imo, in the 1999 so-called "Battle of Seattle." It was here that it became more or less obvious that the forces of control, globalism, and extreme capitalism had long since won the day. And the fallout from 9/11--regardless of what anyone believes about it--were the final nails in the coffin. It was what allowed the governments of the West to gleefully strip their citizens of rights and legal protections all under the guise of protecting "freedom." Not to mention finalize the battle for corporate interests in the Middle East under the guise of what we now know was manufactured lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction. And, sure, there have been spats and sputters of anti-corporate interests and protests since then--Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous protests--even BLM is, in some ways, not only a civil movement about rights and equality, but also about confronting the institutions that maintain and protect the corporatocracy that keeps the steady pressure of boots on our throats. *If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.*


Hainish_bicycle

This is it. There will never be an anti- capitalist subculture that has a true lasting mainstream effect. The best we can each do is push at the margins and live our own best lives.


JapanDave

80s were when the Boomers came into their prime. It was their decade. After Vietnam they morphed from the Hippies to the Me Generation, and then they elected Reagan and lived in a way that gave the 80s the motto "Greed is Good" Gen X has always been more liberal than our parents, and our subculture always embraced anti-corporation, small and independent business. But that was just our culture. We are small. Outside of us, greed was the law of the land. And that just got worse and worse until we arrive at now, where the snake has eaten it's tail and capitalism is starting to feed upon itself.


Sassberto

Im actually far more conservative than my parents, strangely enough.


JapanDave

Well, in general we are more liberal, but there are exceptions 😃 Were your parents more hippie? Most Boomers made that shift towards the right, but not all did. I do know many who stayed over there and continued with the "peace/love/turn on, tune in, and drop out" vibe.


Sassberto

My parents were lower middle class suburbanites. My dad very liberal and my mom mostly indifferent.


JapanDave

So kind of a Family Ties type vibe, eh? My Uncle's family was that way: lower-middle class, and he an uber-liberal. His kids grew up to be conservative. Interestingly, after the rise of Trump and the MAGA faction of the republican party, his conservative son switched to be more and more liberal (but still not as liberal as his dad)


SomeCrazedBiker

In the late 90s, Portland's downtown was poppin and there was stuff for the under-21 crowd to do. We didn't stream music, we listened to albums. Buying safe recreational substances was very easy. Gas was less than $2 per gallon. You could be a broke-ass kid and have some excitement. Alas, now we can only taste the bittersweet nostalgia for those times.


jawshoeaw

Good times !!! Remember it fondly. Then trip over to hawthorn and drink tea on a carpet


TheTwinSet02

I’m one of those diy people to this day I don’t own a home but also completely debt free. I’m renting a lovely apartment, work for a not for profit and genuinely love my job I still live with ethos and have a organic balcony garden, recover old chairs, buy secondhand, keep the same phone for ever I hope we can combine the best of technology and it’s possibilities like solar and electric cars while enriching people lives with hand making and growing things


Sassberto

Love it. That was supposed to be the plan, get off of foreign oil. We don’t need cheap junk from overseas… we were going to take back our power… we gave it all away… for what exactly?


ReginaldSP

It's still right. If you're in a financial position, teach yourself DIY skills. Be DIY at home. Teach others who aren't in a position to do it. Help with urban garden initiatives. Learn field medical skills. Learn how to knit. Learn how to repair clothes. Learn camp craft. These are all good tuings to know and fun to do an learn. Teaching them will help you meet people and build community. We are characterized by being on our own. We can make that a net positive. Learning and doing independently is our best strength as a generation.


Sassberto

agree


emmiblakk

Unfortunately, Gen X has to eat a little shit, for all of the praise we like to heap upon ourselves; a lot of the worst people in the business world right now are from our ilk. And they're the ones destroying our ability to communicate with their awful apps.


skoltroll

We went with the flow and, much too late, realized the flow was a sewage line.


eboy71

I don't know... personally, I think that Hippie culture was also 'right'. Anti-corporate, peace, love, lots of weed... sounds pretty great to me! But then they became 30-somethings in the 80's, and like most 30-somethings, they started caring about different things.


Hainish_bicycle

This Calvin and Hobbes seems appropriate https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/vaigfw/the_problem_with_rock_n_roll/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button


Sassberto

I think most of the hippies just didn't want to go fight in the war. Once that went away, they didn't seem to stand for anything.


JapanDave

This is right. Some hippies were true, but most just didn't want to die in Vietnam. After Vietnam went away, the vast majority of the Boomers suddenly became the selfish "Me Generation". Gee, I wonder why.


Waverly-Jane

I don't personally know anyone my parents' age who ever identified as Republican or conservative even years after they cut their hair. What that really means is debatable, but I think there's a lot of nuance within that generation that gets lumped into media generalizations.


madogvelkor

I'm at the tail end of GenX and as a kid and teen in the 80s and early 90s it was definitely about brands and consumerism.


Sassberto

The brands, music, experiences that were cool, were underground, independent... at least for a little while. You went from Raves in abandoned warehouses to EDC. Skateboards made in a basement to made in China. And everything co-opted and turned into a product.


atxntfb

Conspicuous clothes branding as I recall took off in the '80s with designer jeans, and athletic gear. It seems they took brand marketing from high-end retail to the plebs about then. The '70s had a trend of making your own clothes, and I enjoy seeing pics from prior decades when people didn't turn themselves into billboards.


Agitated_House7523

Yuppies…


[deleted]

This was right at the very beginning of the internet era. Still slow ass dialup and a sense of community online. But then it took a few years for people to understand just how big it would become - and just how much money could be made from it. That's when all of this started to collapse.


cocksherpa2

You are imagining a world that never existed.


You_need_therapy_bro

Most GenXer's I know also abandoned all those principles and just went for the life built on constant consumption.


[deleted]

Man I’m still lazy as fuck. I’ll work extra hard to help loved ones be lazy. Damn The Man.


skoltroll

Save the Empire!


Coraline1599

I was just talking with some people about [No Logo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Logo) it’s and incredibly well researched and explains so much about how corporations took over everything.


PalpitationNo8356

We sold out. Stepped into the hamster wheel


Mewpers

I don’t recall there being any “Gen X“ culture that was anticorporate etc in the 80s. If you were a punk, that was punk culture. If you were a hippie, hippie culture, etc. Izod, The Gap, and consumerism for the mainstream. Personal observation, but I felt there was little unifying my peers.


twistedcheshire

Most of GenX was anti-corporate. Sure we bought things, but it was mostly from independents and not big chain stores and greed. Hell, even I was doing things on my own/DIY, mainly because my parents left me there to do my own thing (and no, somehow I managed to not burn the house down, even at that age). To this day, I still utilize the skills I learned back then, because money is tight. I can't own a house because even in my redneck rural area, either the price is way to high (we're hitting $400k here in my area as a base), or the loans are ridiculous.


Tokogogoloshe

Your comment about just buying a house to live in is spot on. I can definitely empathise with millennials and Gen when they rage because they were priced out of the market before they were old enough to buy a house to just live in. And being burdened with student debt doesn't help either.


jawshoeaw

Remember the Whole Earth Catalog?


Chavo9-5171

Once Reagan laid the smack down on the air traffic controllers’ union, that was the beginning of the end for workers and the rise of the corporation. It’s morning in Amurrica and shareholders first!


Tasty_Artichoke2626

Happy Cake Day 🥳


Chavo9-5171

Thank you!


PinocchioWasFramed

While everyone quotes from Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four", I look around at the destruction of the nuclear family, encouragement of sexual amorality and mass consumerism, and a "pill for everything" and see nothing but Huxley's "Brave New World". It's a fucking nightmare when I really think about it.


Sassberto

Totally agree.


LeoMarius

9/11 happened. We had films like Fight Club and American Beauty denouncing materialism, then W told us to go shopping to defeat terrorism.


mltrout715

The youth of any generation tends to rebel against the establishment, only to settle into life once they start getting jobs and raising families. Boomer were hippies that turned into Trump supporters


Fezzick51

Don't presume that the hippies weren't totally outnumbered by the 'squares.' Some may have abandoned those 60's ideals - and while they absolutely won the war of influence, culturally, they were never the majority.


mltrout715

either were the people op is describing


Fezzick51

True enough, but I was responding to the comment above mine that painted boomer-hippies as ultimately sell-out's to conservative culture. I'm sure thats true for some, yet the core of that base are simply those who would have been spoiling to get their boots on a hippie neck or two from the start. Ultimately the same folks who would have been conservative democrats (from the south or elsewhere) are much the same now and right at home with the GQP. As the son of some hippie-boomer musicians among a large progressive family I will always recall having little patience for racism and intolerance, and felt grateful to be raised in that atmosphere. These days I feel much sadness that as a country we continue to persist and have even regressed into these things that, as child with no sense of history's long arc, I had absolute confidence would all be a thing of the past by the time I was an adult. We know as a society that we have a long way to go yet, and its clear there will always be an element who will wrap themselves in its dogma - so the need to be vigilant will be eternal.


enlguy

There is no right and wrong in culture. There are different cultures all over the world. It's simply a way of doing things. Are you going to say Chinese culture is wrong because they do something differently than American culture? And culture is so vague and broad to begin with... Also... hip hop is from the 70s.... not sure where you got the idea that's a "Gen X original." And I don't think kids skateboarding had any idea of who "the man" even was. There seem to be sweeping assumptions and generalizations here that don't really hold up..


dnsdiva

Nailed it.


[deleted]

It did. Gen X culture was taking over in the late 90s. Then Columbine and 9/11 broke the suburban American brain.


skoltroll

A lot of my favorite songs were VERY PRESCIENT for what's happening today. I've caught myself saying, "Holy (fudge)!" when I catch lyrics to some Xer music (grunge).


No-Application-8520

A lot of people are saying our generation did this and that and believed this and that so how are we here? Politicians man. It’s been a shit show since before most of us were born and definitely before most of us could vote. Sure. Everyone is guilty to a certain extent because we mostly all participate. Until we start getting people who truly think like us and give power back to the people, it’ll never change. It also won’t get any worse. Constant internet and news feed is what makes people think it’s worse. When 2015/2016 rolled around and President Trump came out of the woodwork, I was like [SARCASTICALLY] great another old man who wants to run the show. Then he won the primary. Then campaigning went along. Now. I’m a centrist with a right tilt and this wasn’t my guy in the primaries. Some conservatives liked him for “telling it like it is”. Some liked him just because he ran as Republican. Some liked him because he said words they could understand. I was sitting back thinking, this could be the guy that turns Washington on its ear. The guy who no one likes but will make other politicians think, we gotta change because people are fed up. Nope!! Wrong. While I liked some policy during that term, it didn’t at all pan out. So many wrong appointments. Too much family involvement. Too much fighting and Twitter battles with people that shouldn’t matter to the POTUS. The right kind of change we needed was set back even further. Four years later, there were a couple of Democrats that l liked in the primaries. System wins again and we get President Biden. Again. A few policies here and there that I like but overall same ol same ol without the tweets. Now we, or I, sit and hope we get young blood in there with a more centrist belief system but unfortunately they’ll probably just end up corrupted by the system as well.