2023 to 1990, Baby!: How Far We’ve Come, How Far We Haven’t
We’ve come a long way. But it’s important to note the areas in which we, as a society, fall short.
By Maddie Roth, Alessandra Benitez, and Joshua Kloss
The 1990s, baby! A time ripe with bucket hats, biker shots, and baggy jeans. Sound familiar? Probably because it’s everything we see today, since the decade began. I don’t know about you, but I tend to see fashion trends from the 90s creeping into our world today. Oftentimes, obsession with these trends goes as far as hearing people say they were born in the wrong decade and wish they would’ve been born in the 90s. To most undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota today, we just barely made the cutoff (my condolences to you). Despite being born two or three years after, I think it’s fair for us to claim some of these trends as our own and let the 90s happily live on. I am all for that, especially because I am a huge fan of baggy jeans.
Taking the fashion trends from the 1990s is the best part we could take, but why does it seem like we’ve taken the worst parts as well? The 90s saw the death of Rodney King and the race riots along with the Columbine shooting. The 2020s saw the death of George Floyd along with the Uvalde shooting — not to mention the countless mass shootings in between Columbine and Uvalde. At what point does history stop repeating itself? Likely, not until we learn from the past. After over three decades, there seems to be too many eerie similarities between the two time periods.
But that means we have to hold on to the good that has happened, too. Hold on to the scrunchies and the overalls, but also hold on to the scientific progress our country has made in the past three years and the helpful policies lawmakers have signed. Hold onto the fact that we are here today, breathing and fighting on to see the next day. Who knows, maybe in the 2050s we’ll have college students carrying around Stanley water bottles and wearing Air Forces. And not having to worry about gun safety, either.
Maybe in the 2050s, too, slavery will be something that has been long abolished. Since the 90s consumerism has been steadily rising, especially when it comes to technology. Smartphones and electric cars are cool and all but, but are you aware of what it takes to manufacture them?
Since colonial times, if you were a country rich with natural resources you were kind of screwed. And believe it or not, the laws regarding importing goods from such countries have not gotten much better. Again, technology is cool and useful, and imagining life without it in 2023 is virtually impossible. Yet most of these technological items need cobalt to function and the way that this element is mined is extremely dangerous, and currently uses slavery to be achieved. Cobalt is used in a number of fields, but most importantly it is used to make batteries that go in electronics. The problem is that mining this element is sometimes life threatening, and those who do the work rarely get compensated properly for it. The Congo is one of the poorest countries in the world despite the fact that copper and cobalt (both abundant in the nation) are in high demand. It is one of the wealthiest nations in terms of its natural resources, yet still one of the poorest monetarily. For comparison, Saudi Arabia produced 13% of the world’s oil in 2022 while almost 70% of the cobalt output at the same time was mined in Congo, yet the compensations to each country were wildly different. A combination of corruption in the Congo government and foreign buyers wanting cheap supplies make it so that little profits from mining go back to the actual workers.
Apart from the economic injustices, working conditions in Congo’s “artisanal mines” are abysmal. Child labor, exposure to poisonous chemicals, sexual harassment, and wage slavery are all parts of the job. Unfortunately, no one who financially benefits from the mines is advocating for changing the working conditions. In fact, this issue has been going on for years and it has just recently gotten attention from the west. It’s 2023, and some trends do not need to come back. Unlike in the past, we now live in an enormously interconnected world and information is power, so let's utilize it to help those who need it.
Speaking of information, it is worth discussing how and where we obtain our knowledge from. Does this issue look a bit bizarre to you? That’s because it’s a zine, baby!
The very first zine — recorded in history, at least — dates back to the 1930s, published by the Science Correspondence Club in Chicago. Since then, zines have come a long way since that very first one, titled The Comet, and contemporary zines like the one you’re reading right now. You can find tons of authentic zines at local Twin Cities bookshops as well, two of which are worth checking out and close to campus are The Bookhouse in Dinkytown and Mayday Books on West Bank, each of which have a section dedicated to locally-organized zines. The zines you’ll find there are reminiscent of zines of the 90s, which were spearheaded by groups such as Riot Grrrl, an underground, feminist-punk movement. With them, the United States saw zines come out at a rate never seen before, and thus, zines became trendy and more widespread. Furthermore, the zines at this time dealt with pressing issues, such as spreading the feminist manifesto, which is a great reminder as to what zines’ purposes were in the first place.
Zines are, in one sense, a form of alternative media. Compared to ‘mainstream’ media outlets, alternative forms of media, according to Chris Atton, a Professor of Media, tend to focus on “non-commercial projects that advocate the interests of those excluded from the mainstream.” And zines do just that, exemplified not only by their historical ties to progressive ideologies such as feminism, but also in their current attempts at advocating for and representing lesser-acknowledged groups of people, such as the impoverished, those who are political and/or ethnic minorities, labor groups, and LGBTQ+ identities, to list a few examples.
One could argue that The Wake is an alternative media outlet; it’s a belief I hold dearly, and one such reason that I so wholeheartedly love writing for The Wake. Of course, it’s always important to be critical of any information you receive from anywhere, whether that be an alternative, lesser known, independent news outlet such as this one, or a well-known, popular reporting source such as Fox or CNN. After all, we live in a century where identifying misinformation should be easier than it once was. We have access to an internet of endless, accessible information. But maybe we’ve gone back in time, in a sense, for the fact that we keep seeing innovations —AI renderings, to list one example— wherein spotting a real image from a fake one is becoming ever harder. We also live in a time where media sources can powerfully craft certain narratives and adjust public opinion accordingly; though, that type of journalism has been with us since before the 90s, and even before zines existed.
In light of this, I urge all of our readers to be skeptical and critical. Note how the media can influence what you think and hold dearly: there is a reason there exists a vacuum of reporting about the Congo. There is also a reason that headlines deem Palestine deaths as, well, ‘deaths,’ whereas Israeli deaths are reported as ‘killings.’
There are moments where it seems like there is no hope for society to turn itself around. Despite these moments, our generation has the chance to be the change so that we don’t see these patterns continue within the next thirty years. We are the new wave of journalists, politicians, and scientists. Our voices will be the ones who potentially prevent the tragedies of today from happening again. It starts with us.
Sources:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/12/07/in-congos-cobalt-mines-cobalt-red-siddharth-kara/
https://bookriot.com/history-of-zines/
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/88911/brief-history-zines
Atton, Chris. (2002). Alternative Media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.