Get off my 8-bit lawn

[cmdr_zoom]

In theory I should be square in the target demographic for Ready Player One, but after reading about it... I dunno. I'm just not feeling it. And I think some of that is a feeling that it's trying too hard. It's a little too eager to please, to provide fanservice for geeks of a certain age. It's pandering.

The notion that one day the things you loved will come back into style and be genuinely, not ironically, appreciated by millions again... it's a seductive idea, but ultimately flawed. This generation, and those to come, aren't going to care about our pop culture; they've already got their own. It's theirs, they're into it, they know it inside and out, they love it, just as we did ours. When they look at ours, they see only the silly and outdated bits. At best, it's "quaint." They won't, and can't, appreciate them the way we did.

I wonder how much of this is Boomer-envy, growing up in their shadow as they made their pop culture into the pop culture for decades. Why can't we have a shot at cultural hegemony, some of my cohort may ask. Should we really want that, I reply.

And even we, who grew up with these things, cannot now look at them with the same unjaded, unjudging eyes. We're different people now. We have experience and context we didn't. We know where some trends will lead and how some things will fail. We know the promises that will be broken. We look at fresh smiling faces on magazine covers and see the sick, the old, the dead.

Don't tease me with the suggestion the things I loved will ever be loved, or even thought of, by another generation. Don't tease me with the idea that I can step into that river twice. Don't tease me by saying I can be young again.

Our time is done; the world, or at least the spotlight, belongs to others now. We should let them have it. (Eventually it won't be a choice, so we should try to be more graceful than the Boomers about it.)

Comments

[greenwick.livejournal.com]

I think that people are always going to get into retro stuff, but it's not going to be the same. I hear a lot of people say how they ought to have been a child/teen/adult in the 80s, and how awesome it would have been because they'd be able to see their favorite film on big screen for the first time, or they'd be able to go see their favorite singer live. But they completely ignore the politics going on back then, and all the other messy stuff that makes day to day life kind of suck. It especially boggles my mind when I hear fellow queer folk go on and on about how they'd love to be living in the 1980s, the first thing that always springs to mind is, "You want to be living at a time when a disease is killing hordes of people you know, and everyone blames you for the disease existing?"

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

And there's no cure. At all. If you get it, you won't know until six months later, and then you're under a death sentence.
Scared the hell out of me, and I was (putatively) straight.

So there was that, on top of the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over my head the whole decade. Fun times!