Of course there's a heavy dose of childhood nostalgia driving this, but I do love everything about this design style and outlook. It ties into the "early" days of the internet and web, when the vibe was around having a "Library of Alexandria" in your family home, the computer as a bicycle for your mind and just a general feeling of "abundance" that permeated the environment. I would come home from school and watch Star Trek TNG and get a utopian view of the future, flip over to PBS and watch Carmen Sandiego or Square 1, have dinner, then crack open Microsoft Encarta on the family PC and browse through random topics. The world of technology felt like it held infinite promise.
Utopian Scholastic, Frutiger Aero, and Global Village Coffeehouse are all aesthetics finding new popularity on TikTok. Our era of grayeige may be coming to an end.
> Time spent at the computer can be meaningful. The user just needs agency in that interaction.
Sums up the core spirit really well. I've recently been using plugins like Unhook to hide YouTube recommendations by default, and can turn them back on when desired.
I think people often forget that the act of exploration itself is an important part of healthy learning.
It's not exactly the same aesthetic, but this reminds me of one of my all-time favorite ads from the period: Packard Bell's "Home" (1996):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiZcy86_L74
Kind of an "I Spy" meets "Tim Burton Batman" fever dream, ending in the kind of colorful fantasia you'd see on the cover of some Utopian Scholastic PC package.
I’m curious to know whether the people who wax nostalgic over this aesthetic and ones like it are the same people who condemn the reactionary politics that aim to restore the climate that allowed these aesthetics to blossom.
> reactionary politics that aim to restore the climate that allowed these aesthetics to blossom
Which policies, specifically, will result in a return to this aesthetic, in your opinion?
I've been around the vaporwave scene (of which these other nostalgic aesthetics are adjacent) for years and let me tell you... for an art movement which seems to celebrate the consumerist childhood of millennials exploring shopping malls, the early(ish) HTML web, cable TV and 8 to 32 bit video gaming, there are a lot of vocal leftists who seem to abhor all of the things which made the aesthetic what it is.
Even in educational games you have to go through a waterfall :)
\ \ \ V A P O R W A V E / / / meets education
