“FEW THINGS WILL RADICALIZE YOU MORE THAN SEEING WHAT THE WORLD LOOKED LIKE 30 YEARS AGO:”
It’s why younger gen’s are having “nostalgia” for the 90s despite not even being born then. They instinctively know something’s off, and things aren’t how they’re supposed to be, because there’s so much evidence of us having lived in a completely different society only a moment… https://t.co/TsvNtf4uFh
— TheFamousArtistBirdyRose (@TheFamousArtBR) July 11, 2026
Tweet concludes, “They instinctively know something’s off, and things aren’t how they’re supposed to be, because there’s so much evidence of us having lived in a completely different society only a moment before them.”
To be fair, the above commercial isn’t “what the world looked like 30 years ago,” it’s a series of tiny vignettes constructed to sell disposable razor blades to men, in much the same way that 1980s American car manufacturers lit and filmed cheaply-made disposable cars to look like they were tearing through nighttime scenes from Miami Vice:
In July of 2024, James Lileks wrote:
I seem to recall a story about a Pizza Hut that recently redid itself in the old style, and how people loved it. There’s a subreddit devoted to 80s fast food, and the commercials seem as if they’re from a different civilization. We made fun of them at the time — all that ridiculous cheer — and no one really believed that a trip to McDonald’s would be full of such ecstatic gustatory experiences, but now we would like to be there thank you very much and we promise we will be grateful, because we know it all had something, and we miss it. I mean, we’ll survive. But we miss it.
https://youtu.be/M8VquXFcMZw?si=yVR4v8Xx-zuNOT88
Similarly, at least that iteration of Gillette didn’t publicly look down on its customer base with a sneer. Or as Don Surber wrote in October of 2024: Gillette, Bud Light, Kamala: Calling an entire sex toxic is no way to sell blades, beer or candidates.