We may have entered a new simulation in 1999

By PhiWeaver

At any given time we are being influenced by some point in the 20th century. Usually from the 20s to the mid 90s. Or from Picasso to the dissolving of the USSR, which would be finalized circa 93/94. This manifests as fashion trends. The Edwardian Period and the late 90s are more like Bookends, but the late 90s also serve as the stasis point for the nostalgia.

We experience the Stasis point of 1999. The illusion of something 'new' is a slight of hand by Mad Men. All these 'new things' have derivative threads that reveal them as old.

Massive ’70s Trend September 2015: http://stylecaster.com/70s-fashion-trend/

93 Movie Remakes and Reboots Currently in the Works:
http://www.denofgeek.us/movies/movies/248590/93-movie-remakes-and-reboots-currently-in-the-works 

Time Out of Joint

I think that in 1999 we entered some kind of simulation reality based on the world as it was in 1999. Yes, this is the plot of The Matrix, but let me elaborate...

I believe that 1999 represents the true 'Present', it is outside the formal run of 'History', but it is also the tipping point before the manifested 'future'. By future I don't mean a specific date, I mean 'Future' as an aesthetic. The future is really only an idea formulated by 20th century sci-fi. Tight white jump-suits, jet packs, glass buildings etc, so you only really arrive in the future when it looks like the future. So the future is a fashion or style, not a particular date. The film The Thirteenth Floor illustrates all this.

Now... How would such a Matrix function? It would need to provide the illusion of forward progress without really moving forward. We have the miniaturization of technology which has the effect of emperor's new clothes in terms of 'progress'. Notice that there is never quantum leaps in progress in the really important areas, such as energy and biotech.  We still have AIDS and Cancer, and we still rely on fossil fuels. In  order to truly be progressing we would have to be advancing in those sorts of 'big picture' domains, and not just 'new iphones' every year.

What I think this Matrix is doing is rotating like a Kaleidoscope, this provides the illusion of 'difference' or progress, but is really more akin to re-arranging furniture in the room. When this rotation to a new  position happens it causes minor glitches in reality, it has to create small changes, but never really take us outside of the venn of the 1999 period. We certainly won't have the 2015 future as projected in BTTF II.

Follow this, the clothing and fashion from the first season of the Brady Bunch to the last is very different. It ran from the late 60s to the  mid 70s. However if we saw someone from 2003 or even 1999 walking around  today, we wouldn't be taken aback by their appearance or clothing  style. Cars from 2004 don't look that different from cars from 2014...  etc. If a pop music song from today was released in 2004 it wouldn't  feel 'out of place', this is in contrast to past decades, for example by  1994 the 80s were already a nostalgic encapsulated idea, an era that  had come to a close, there wasn't this leakage of it into the mid 90s  with music and fashion, it was retro. You could throw an ironic 80s  themed party for example... But how would you throw an ironic retro  party based on 2004? It wouldn't feel retro at all.

I do believe that this is a temporary Matrix however, and will probably  end in the next couple years or so, because the illusion is wearing  thin. Take the idea of a 'hipster' for example. their fashion sense is already an eclectic nostalgia of past decades all boiled down into a 'look'. Therefore there cannot really be a post-hipster, you can't  parody a parody. We've reached some sharp end of an asymptotic curve,  and are ready to break through the membrane into something else.

You see it all really began with Picasso, and the introduction of the modern aesthetic, which broke down the world of the Edwardian gentleman  and his white man's burden. Certain end-points already occurred within the 20th century itself, the art and literature of the 20s and 30s for example has never been surpassed. As for modern art it peaked with  Pollock. The 60s and the Moon landing represented the peak of modernism, after all what were the 1970s but a whining reprisal of the 60s? We  were past post-modernism by the early 90s.

How can the 21st century be anything more than a digital parody of the 20th?

There is the pre-Ironic era ending somewhere towards the late 90s, and then the post-Ironic era after the millennium. This is an important point because notice that you can only remake/reboot pre-ironic art and styles, that is why all the big Film reboots are things like GhostBusters, Ninja Turtles and so forth. You can’t really reboot post-irony, say something from 2005 because it would be like a hipster  parodying another hipster, it would be redundant. So there is this pre-irony innocence up until about the late 90s.

The phenomenon of 'Synchronicity' began with the death of Kurt Cobain. But I still think it's positive.

Sync has a quality of concrescence. It's pulling back the curtain of  'real', and showing us that things are in fact surreal. I think it ties  into time feeling out-of-joint etc. I would suggest that Sync as a  personal and meta phenomenon only became real from 1993/1994 onwards. I  am now very convinced that with Kurt Cobain's death both the formal run  of 'history' ended, and the phenomenon of Sync began. 1999 was a key  stage too, but it did begin around 93, and the key thing being Cobain in  94.

Why? because from 95 onwards we have been in a post-post-modern, ironic hipster culture, always looking for nostalgia, always recycling what has  been done before, with every other film being a re-make and whatnot. A 2013 fashion show had 60s Mod inspired coats, that sort of thing... Pre 94 people were still living in their own time, they weren't hipster and nostalgia freaks like today with our playlist for every decade, not in  the same way as today at any rate, which iPhones allow for. I see Sync as teleological scintillations of the transcendental object at the end  of time. Like the Aleph/Bet relationship. What this transcendental object really is Apotheosis.

Religious symbols, heaven, Gods, space ships etc etc are all just a symbol-set or placeholders for this personal Apotheosis/Joy/Excitement. It's sort of a mixture of Mckenna and Bashar.

Rambling Thoughts

1999 - The Matrix

Enslaved humans are kept docile within the "Matrix", a simulation of the world as it was in 1999.

Malcolm McDowell was in a movie called Class of 1999. Where the students discover that their teachers are actually robots. This fits the Matrix  theme.

There's been a really strange theory rattling in the back of my head  about 1999. The theory is that at some point in 1999 we entered a  simulation, or pocket dimension. This is a synthetic reality that we  entered into.

I think our clue was the Cher song believe, with the auto tune, and Britney Spears who brought about the second death of music.

Also, everyone who talks about 1999 always say that it feels like yesterday, I hear this over and over.

Of course the world wasn't perfect before we entered the simulation either, but it definitely had a different vibe to it.

Also whoever is running this simulation seems to love corporate rock,  and synthetic pop, they'll have another fembot dance show for the  Superbowl this year. By corporate rock, I mean that alternative and punk  music died in 1999, and we saw nu-metal, and new rock come in, reprises of corporate rock was brought in.

They got rid of the Khakis, and got everyone back into Blue Jeans.

Everything since 1999 is derivative, and has a synthetic/plastic quality to it.

But you say, what about Indie Music? Well there was plenty of Indie in the 90s already, including Ben Gibbard.

There are certain caretakers of the simulation now, Simon Cowell for example, creating the new pop stars.

I think that the plans for the simulation originally came out of WWII.  Then the Americans got the data and laid the groundwork for the  simulation in the 50s. By the 70s everything had been planned out.

Especially since the 70s there has been synthetic food, medicine etc  etc. In other words a fake version of something, branded as the 'real  thing'.

Try to find a 'real' version of anything nowadays, it's damn hard. They don't even let GMOS be labelled.

Waiting for the next iPhone is sort of a symbol of the linear future.  However what people aren't seeing is that all the component improvements  on the iPhone are now on a sharp curve towards 'good enough'.

For a screen that small how much more resolution can the human eye use, for consumers how much better does the camera need to be etc. In other words beyond a couple more generations the iPhone will be good enough and the consumer fetish spin-doctors won't be able to convince you that there is something worth buying anymore. This is a metaphor for all other things too.

Mckenna mentioned that he felt that the formal run of history ended sometime in the early-mid 90s, and then moved into the post modern malaise. (paraphrasing)

He talked about going into Art galleries and seeing an eclectic mish-mash of decades, and post modern artist not having their own original point of view.

This is also the time that the Recycling campaigns got introduced to us in Elementary schools.

Now the regurgitation can no longer be hidden by the ad agencies, it's apparent for all to see, Soylent Green isn't people, it's history and old ideas being served up and eaten.

Cars from 2013 look like cars from 2003 The fashion industry recycles the 20s-90s in shorter and shorter cycles. Almost all films nowadays are re-makes, or reboots. Hipsters wear flannel shirts, buy vinyl, dress in eclectic clothing from past decades, they are basically recycling old ideas in shorter and shorter cycles.

What we call art nowadays is nothing more than eclectic nostalgia boiled  down into a product. History is being packaged and sold to us in  streets of gentrified 'urban regeneration'. Starbucks is like the borg implant that assimilates the body of the cities and paves the way for other cold glass shrines to the cult of consumerism.

That is what we are left with now, old ideas packaged as new products, not hoverboards or Jetpacks, just cycles of waiting for the next iphone.  The iPhone is like a nostalgia singularity, from sharing childhood memes to your 80s playlists.

The illusion of a linear march into the future is a sleight of hand by the advertisers, trying to convince you that there is something new under the sun.

However what is this technology actually doing for us, it's the carrier or medium for memes to be shared, it is the surrogate for the meme to be born. The meme is yourself made manifest, the human apotheosis. Not a technological singularity, but a human one.

Whatever the Apotheosis is I don't see it as something baroque or byzantine. It's not being an angel sitting on a cloud, flying a starship to Alpha Centauri, or walking around in white robes and sandals on the  fifth dimension. No those things are just limited symbols of the true Apotheosis which is living your bliss. 

A personal-sync filled solipsistic journey towards living your bliss. This man to god transition is essentially about turning inside out, bringing the interior landscape and making it manifest into the external world. That has been the collective human experience, bringing out the inventions from the human imagination and laying them onto the 'exterior' world of rocks water and trees, all of which happen to be fractal in structure which lend themselves to the workings of a holographic model.

It is a personal timewave though, the tone of the past 15 years has been that of an eclectic personal journey, and a move away from the collective imagination. We no longer all watch the same music on MTV at the same time, instead we have personal playlists. So this turning inside out process has moved away from the collective and towards the personal.

The other shift that people have noticed is that primary colors have gone from Red Yellow Blue to Red Green Blue. They remember Red Yellow Blue from Art Class. This one is explainable and isn’t too mysterious,  computers use RGB and painters use RYB.

However the RGB primary colors didn’t really enter the public consciousness until about the mid 90s as most people were not familiar with computers yet. What is interesting is that this is about the same time period that people noticed the Sun getting whiter, and commenting that the colors in nature seemed more saturated in the 70s and 80s. I do think that this time period is some kind of shift point in time. This early 90s period is also when a lot of people remember the alternate New Zealand location i.e East or North East of Australia from the  classroom. The so called (Mandela Effect), another example of  synchronicity.

I remember reading this book called 'Turnabout' by Margaret Peterson Haddix, and it featured two centennial women who aged backwards. They ended up in the year 2050 or something like that as teenagers. They went out to celebrate a birthday and the character narrating made a  statement very similar, at least in terms of fashion and art. Everything  that people were wearing was a new decked out version of previous decades, and the line I'll always remember was "just what was it about  those psychedelic daisies that kept coming back?" Apparently it was the 4th or so incarnation of flower power being in vogue.