You’re shockingly close to the plot of The Matrix.
History Memes
A place to share history memes!
Rules:
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No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, assorted bigotry, etc.
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Tag NSFW pics as NSFW.
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Follow all Piefed.social rules.
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History referenced must be 20+ years old.
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Avoid posting AI-generated content whenever possible.
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OTHER COMMS IN THE HISTORYVERSE:
- !historyruins@piefed.social
- !historyart@piefed.social
- !historyartifacts@piefed.social
- !historyphotos@piefed.social
- !askhistorians@piefed.social
Me in 1999: Really? This is the peak of human civilization? Everything sucks though.
Me now: Maybe they were onto something
"I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization." - ChatGPT
OK, but we demand IRC instead of AOL-IM.
It’s period appropriate, should be fine
I want Pidgin or Trillian so I can talk to my friends on both MSN and Yahoo.
Also shoutouts to the brief period where everything was xmpp and Gmail could talk to Facebook and self-hosted.
uh oh
No, not ICQ
ICQ was pretty good. You could message offline people, which AOL/aim didn't support. Of course, this lead to a whole experience of waiting for your friend/crush to log on, but then not messaging them immediately... but then they log off and the opportunity passed.
It takes me a minute to remember my cell number, but I can rattle off my IQC number in a second. My ICQ fridge magnet was kept for decades through multiple moves
Can we keep the "no smoking inside commercial establishments" policy at least? Otherwise I'm down.
Also can we keep the progress (what little there has been) we made for LGBTQ folks?
I would like to add one exception to this: explicitly for smoking establishments. It'd be nice to have a weed'n'feed is all.
This is how you accidentally start a Gen-X commune.
Take me back to the time when I would finish before the bottom half of jenna jameson even manages to load
Honestly, the 90s was a shit time for many LGBTQ people and often PoCs as well. Can we have (at least) todays levels of wokeness? Oh and today levels of healthcare... and today levels of assistive technology for people needing assistance, oh and...
We don't need to recreate every aspect.
Treat it like a Ren Faire.
Wear the No Fear shirts and carry a Walkman, but do it for fun.
Sit back, watch some Reading Rainbow or Erie Indiana.
Maybe sing the Song that Never Ends.
It's all play acting, but it's nice. Especially if we focus on the nice parts of the 90s, the stuff that led to the wokeness of today.
Ya, and maybe we can have "Blockbuster's" and it'll be a co-op clone of the og.
I hope it doesn’t include 90’s racism, homophobia and transphobia. It was way worse than it is today.
Really, you have the opportunity to recreate the past and I’m stuck with AIM? I’ll stick to XMPP and IRC thanks.
IRC is the shit. I remember wasting so many hours as a teenager just shooting the shit with random people.
Or at least ICQ!
If someone is going to run with this idea, I very sincerely ask that you please do it in one of the locations marked on this map. Then my company will be able to operate a 1990s-technology cellular phone network in the proposed neo-Amish town, a network that will enable 1990s GSM cellphones to actually work! And I do mean it with full seriousness - the linked website is my actual company, with all attendant legal and contact info.
Out of the set of locations marked on the linked map, I strongly prefer the ones in Oregon. I and the rest of my founding team are based in California, and I am a trans woman - hence certain places are, quite sadly, simply unsafe for to me travel to, let alone the intricate tasks of building towers, installing equipment and then operating and maintaining it. There are no PCS spectrum vacancies in our home state of CA, but OR is close, has good spectrum available, and it is a lovely state with strong LGBTQ+ rights.
So um is this just millennial retirement? Boomers are getting their senior communities we need our own communities
That's basically the premise of The Matrix.
It's really fucking sad that Pizza hut is seen and remembered in any positive way in the US, it really shows how fucking bad you have it.
A pizze hut opened in my city here in Sweden about two decades ago and it immediately became "ooh, this american thing everyone has heard of through movies is so bad that everyone has to go to it just to experience the unimaginable shit quality and taste."
Even the cheapest street corner pizzerias we have are in a whole other universe comparably.
I think we can do better than Pizza Hut and block buster.
Nostalgia is a powerful drug, but the 90s was not so great. But sure, let’s take the good parts and leave behind the CRT screens and 20 mins to load a jpg.
IRC and newsgroups, too. Self hosted websites and forums.
I hate to be the regressive, but yeah…this was better.
This guy is doing it https://openpath.quest/2026/i-am-retiring-from-tech-to-live-offline
AI was the last straw. Have you heard of that island off India where the indiginous population kills any outsiders fool-hardy enough to land? They are doing the rest of us a favor by preserving a way of life we may need again someday, or at the very least should not want to see completely extinguished. A reminder. Never forget your roots. Here in Pennsylvania we have the Amish performing a similar function. Significantly less hostile, though still set apart, they bear witness to what was normal for all of us a couple short centuries ago: horse and buggy, wood stoves and lanterns. My intent is to be AI Amish, which means Internet Amish. Not 1780, but 1980. Neo-Amish. I'm fine driving a car and flipping a lightswitch, by which I mean that they don't make me into something I hate, which AI and doomscrolling do.
Instead of AIM, MeshCore. Cheap, off-net, encrypted, solar-powered, simple.
AIM? I think you meant to say "we use ICQ and everyone have a 5digit number"
Ooh can we have a IRC server too? We need a place to coordinate super soaker fights. Where did the humongous super soakers with backpacks go?
Lost me at allowing AOL. I was there as a teenager for the first AOL and looking back it was not a good thing.
Me watching the original Matrix "That filthy guy willing to betray humanity just to be a little happy" Me living in the post covid/trump ruins the world/Jewish people doing a genocide... "Hook me up, you don't even have to make me rich, but that Joey Pants was on to something"
I'm not. There were some awful parts of the 90s.
It'll never be the same anyway. Something that a lot of legacy gaming servers has taught me is that you can't replicate nostalgic memories.
Black Mirror's San Junipero.
It's interesting how so many virtual realities tend to offer the 80s-90s as the best world to be in.
And the Pizza Hut still serves legitimately good pizza, and they don’t fucking count cheese as a topping.
If you're pining for the 90's, i'm estimating you weren't there
plastic in the water, PFAS in our blood, a hole in the ozone layer, war in the middle east, israel doing genocide and occupying lebanon, the soviet union disintegrates and throws millions into poverty, genocide in Rwanda, Bosnian genocide, the president of the usa involved in what amounts to sex abuse, heroin epidemic, racism, racism racism this list n+1
I liked the music but there's some survivorship bias there, I just miss guitar bands, I miss having space for a drum kit, I don't miss the 90s
I am not down for this. There are modern non Ai audio tools I use. I like the media rich chat services we have too.. But, I understand.
We mustn't hide. We mustn't run. we must get into the damn robot. And eleminnate the rich religious nut heads who are disappointed God hasn't come to vist and constructed a false God.
If we still have IRC, I'm in. AOL was just a little too lame, sometimes you want to have a conversation that doesn't start with "A/S/L???"
