a lot of people cite the late 90s or early 00s as the/a last era where people had hope for the future with their retrofuturisic influences and full force and unabashed sincerity but i think that never really stopped and the latest definable evidence of that is 2010s xillennial web brutalism.
i dont think it is exactly the same in becoming as the "y2k" aesthetic as there is definitely some self-awareness but their designs but they seem very honest. it feels like a lot of stuff that the average joe (of the small down that i live in) wouldn't really get but it was able to catch on enough that people like it and replicate it (including me) (this is my only point of reference in life (i am leaving for college in a bigger city the coming august))
the 2020s is really where i see this die off. of course, people were doing similar things in the 90s 00s and 10s, but, at least from my perspective, it *feels* like (i *think* that) there isn't a lot of new stuff going on and design at the front of popularity is all based on nostalgia. its obviously because the terror of the coronavirus pandemic and linked lockdown made people want something other than this, and the only thing we (we as in me too) could think of is something in the past, and we latched on to those nostalgic feelings. it very well could be that i am just not in the right circles, but it feels like the millennial epidemic of the 2010s.
the "millennial epidemic of the 2010s" was (and still kind of is, just with a new generation) the phenomenon of people only relying nostalgia from their childhood to make new media. see: retro "8-bit" style games, the wave of indie horror games being all "ps1/psx/n64" style, and video game channels only talking about games from 10+ years ago. Really what i mean by "millennial epidemic of the 2010s" is just a symbol for the nostalgia-obsessed framework of enjoying and creating media that *feels* (that i *think* is) most popular nowadays (i know this is provably untrue, but unfortunately most of my being was in the 2010s).
what do i really want? something new. something different. even something like the 2010s web brutalism feels fresh in a day and age that *feels* dominated by 90s and y2k aesthetic. everything i see (and do! i will admit, as i have before, that i am a perpetrator! i myself am trying to better myself in this department!) seems like it is all nostalgia ridden. I know that new things come from riffs on old ideas, but is it really new when it is designed to be like it was from a certain era? i think we should stop the nostalgia circlejerk and try and think of something outside a box in which we must categorize everything. take my hand, and together we can be part of the revolution
ADDITIONAL READING: https://brutalistwebsites.com/, http://muumuuhouse.com/mc.fiction1.html, https://wiki.openmpt.org/Manual:_Effect_Reference#MPTM_Effect_Commands, etc/
