Inexorably, nostalgia grinds on, ingesting and crushing everything in its path into an unrecognizable, homogeneous slurry. The ironclad law stating everyone in their 30s must get obsessed with resurrecting childhood media assures no decade can escape. But as said threshold creeps through the 80s and 90s and draws unavoidably closer to the 2000s, remembering the era fondly is requiring more and more ludicrous amounts of cognitive dissonance. Rife with war, fearmongering, and recession, and the 2000s were not a fun decade to live through, especially as a teenager.
Nostalgia culture’s defenders assert that we can just jettison the bad stuff. Forget the politics, wars, recession, and so on and just enjoy the Nu-Metal and clear plastic electronics. But is that really possible? Can you simply excise popular culture from the context in which it was created? I submit that you cannot, and while that’s true for every era, the politics of the post-9/11 era invaded our everyday lives so pervasively as to make it a particularly futile exercise in sophistry when you’re talking about the 2000s.
You know what’s funny about the clear plastic electronics? They were the result of a unique and new market demand, that of mass incarceration. The point of them was to be easily inspected by guards. To make sure nothing was getting hidden inside them.
Them ending up in normal distribution and getting picked up by teens who thought they were cool was simply a fluke. Kind of emblematic of the era in a way, to have the effects of something so criminal seep out in to the wider world, stripped of it’s context, and resold as trend to teens.
They were the result of a unique and new market demand, that of mass incarceration. The point of them was to be easily inspected by guards. To make sure nothing was getting hidden inside them.
I find this hard to believe given the devices most Millennials tend to wax nostalgic about, vis a vis the clear cases. I don’t think Apple was designing their 1st gen iMacs or Macintosh SE’s for prison (that article says these were made clear in order to do airflow studies).
Likewise, I know Nintendo wasn’t making gameboys clear for that reason. 1990s Japanese teenagers would have had 0 exposure to US prison devices in order to gain the perception of them as being cool, to in turn drive that demand within Nintendo.
Translucent plastic has been around since long before mass consumer electronics. Parkesine was around in the 1850s, and there were translucent products made with it.
I think this is a case of different groups using the same thing for different reasons, independently of each other.
Nah, clear plastic electronics were just cool on their own. Same with beige.
Today’s electronics are all boring colors. You find mostly black and white, and rarely some kind of brand-specific colors like the Switch’s red and blue or Apple’s, uh, very slightly off-white iPhone Air colors (they say those colors are gold and blue). For anything else, you pretty much need to buy a skin, which is cool of course, but you can’t use a skin to get clear plastic.
The main reason we don’t get fun colors anymore is because it’s cheaper to manufacture the more popular options in larger quantities. Fun variants means lower order quantities, which means more expensive manufacturing. This is also why some PC cases are more expensive in white than in black.
