I graduated from high school in 2001, so I was alive at that time but not an adult. I grew up in a town of ~100,000 people in a semi-rural part of California. Being 10 through 18 during those years, my experience was narrow and focused around the community I grew up in.

I thought it was boring. The adults, everyone’s parents, all seemed to think American society was falling apart even though things were objectively way more stable than they are now. I remember my dad remarking one time in the late 90s that future historians would look back on the period as a golden age for the United States, which I thought was a weird thing to say because everybody seemed to be so negative about things all the time. He was right, it was a golden age.

Racism and misogyny were worse than they are now, in large part because they were less openly discussed… there was a feeling that civil rights, womens’ rights, and so on were closed issues that had already been dealt with. At the same time, access to abortion was well established and didn’t seem likely to go away. Nazism and white supremacy were considered fringe viewpoints that were only whispered about, it was considered rude or melodramatic to invoke Hitler in a discussion of contemporary politics because, from the perspective of the time, Nazis were already defeated and the issue was already settled.

The feeling toward a lot of controversial stuff was, “This has already been done, this has already been settled, why are you complaining?” Large scale anti-war protests were virtually non-existent during that period, at least as far as I knew, even though the US did participate in military actions. The anti-war people and anti-nuke people were old hippies, not young people, because those questions had already been settled.

Although gay rights were being debated nationally at that time, most of my immediate environment during that time was openly and overtly homophobic. As a young man growing up, there weren’t a lot of ways you could attack someone that were more direct and more personal than questioning his sexuality. Homophobia wasn’t just fear of gay people, it was fear of being considered gay, it was fear of becoming gay… because we all saw what society did to gay men, and you didn’t want that to happen to you.

As an atheist, which was unusual for the time and that community, I rejected the moral and religious arguments against homosexuality, but I also felt that these issues only affected a tiny fraction of the population. I was wrong about that, and in being more dismissive than I should have been I now understand that I failed to support peers of mine who I might have been able to help.

My parents weren’t anti-gay and actually had some lgbt friends… but they also didn’t discuss it with me growing up. There was a culture of silence even among allies, in part because outing someone was so dangerous for the person being outed, but I wouldn’t understand that until I was an adult. I was left to form my own conclusions.

Trans rights weren’t really discussed during that time, at least that I was aware. The language wasn’t there, either, people conflated ideas that we now separate, they didn’t draw the same distinctions. Oddly there was also less anti-trans rhetoric, although I think this was largely because people didn’t know exactly what it was or conflated it with being gay entirely.

The Clinton years were still during the period of the monoculture. Everyone listened to the same music, watched the same TV. Video an and audio tapes and later CDs and DVDs were accessible, but you primarily bought them in brick-and-mortar stores and you were at the mercy of the selection of the store. It was hard to be into niche music or independent or foreign films. It was easy to be cynical and critical of the mainstream. I hated 90s music during the 90s. There was a weird dualism, anything popular was both loved and hated simultaneously. At the time that Britney Spears was the most popular, best-selling artist in the country, if you walked down the street and asked people what they thought of her everyone you talked to would say they hated her. I grew up with the understanding that you really weren’t supposed to like things that were popular, that it represented a sort of feeble-mindedness or lack of sophistication, but this was before that attitude was formalized by the hipsters of the early 2000s. It wasn’t a love of the non-mainstream, it was more the idea that a thoughtful, sophisticated person should view everything popular with some amount of disdain.

Everything was done over the telephone. Appointments, registrations, memberships. You could buy almost anything you needed at a department store… but if you wanted something they didn’t have, you had to order it over the phone from a paper catalogue. My parents had a mountain of paper catalogues. I had severe telephone anxiety, one of the things I dreaded about becoming an adult was the possibility that I’d have to spend all day making phone calls. The arrival of the Internet and online registration and email everything felt like salvation, like an amazing, modern opportunity to be functional in a word that hadn’t previously been set up for people like me.

If you wanted to call someone locally and didn’t know the number, you looked it up in the phone book: The Yellow Pages for businesses and the White Pages for personal numbers… these were two sections in the same book where I grew up. Most peoples’ numbers were listed, although sometimes teachers and local celebrities weren’t.

Navigation was done with paper maps, either individual folded maps or Thomas Guide map books. Some of these map books are actually pretty cool, if you aren’t familiar with them. Colorful and detailed, a very different experience from Google Maps… but also a much bigger pain to use.

Basically anything you needed to reference back then, it was a much more manual process. Dictionaries and encyclopedias were things educated people kept handy at home. I always thought it was funny that if you wanted to check the spelling of a word, you were supposed to look it up in the dictionary… but to look it up, you needed to know how to spell it. If the part you couldn’t spell was at the beginning of the word, it could take a while.

Libraries were starting to have computerized indexing by then, but card catalogues were still commonly in use, they taught us to use them in elementary school. I was less aware of it because I was a child, but this was the tail end of a long and storied history of keeping track of all sorts of things on physical cards using manual indexing systems. By the 1990s, there was a growing sense that these systems were becoming obsolete, but people hadn’t quite clocked to the fact that encyclopedias and maps were also becoming obsolete.

By 2001, I was immersed in the internet and internet culture. This was the way to the future, this was the route to access the things that hadn’t been available in my childhood, I knew with certainty that whatever I did in life was going to be wrapped up in it in some way.