Kurt Wurk has collected a number of images from the lost decade. [Pinterest]

  • http://profiles.google.com/marc.k.mielke Marc Mielke

    This 19a0s stuff disturbs me horribly. It would mean I was 52, and I can barely deal with being over 30. 

    • BDiamond

       I’m 57 and it’s twisting my giblets.

  • Jamal Kumar

    Microsoft Windows 96.

  • http://voidstar.com/ jbond

    Oh, my! This is rich in post-punk, retromania, hauntology, New Aesthetic. Simon Reynolds and James Bridle should be all over this. I’m not sure we give enough credit to the particular 5 years of change between 1978 and 1983. ISTM they were at least as significant as 1965- 1969. And like that period in the late 60s there was enough happening to fill 15 normal years.

    I can’t help thinking though that this is the thinking of a person of a certain age, born approximately 1955-58. 1978-1983 would have been when they were waking up and consuming large quantities of memetics before settling down into being a more responsible member of society. Ignore my first para, it just feels like that was a significant period because it was personally significant to people who were in their early 20s at that time.

    “The propagation of historical information through memetic artifacts”, indeed!
    Is this “A New Retro” or an Alternate “Retro-futurism”? Whatever it is, bring it back.

    • http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza

      “I can’t help thinking though that this is the thinking of a person of a certain age, born approximately 1955-58.”

      1978! Oddly enough. 

      • http://voidstar.com/ jbond

        Ah well. Talking about myself, innit.

  • ImmutableMichael

    It will always be the Omni decade to me.

  • http://cobramcgiantballs.tumblr.com/ Xploder

    Scratch ‘n Sniff Centerfolds? Guard Dogs you never feed? Count me in!

  • bzishi

    Am I the only one who initially thought that 19A0 was a very cruel and number breaking way* to refer to the year 2000?

    * Meaning that it will make a math professor cry

    • http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza

      You just made me happy. Next: check the tables.

    • AnthonyC

      No you are not the only one.

  • http://www.xradiograph.com/ OtherMichael

    If you’re an A0s kid you remember watching “King Kong and the Masters of the Universe” on Saturday mornings. As an adult, my appreciation for the collaboration between the Andersons, the Krofts, and Rankin-Bass knows no bounds. If they hadn’t been bought out and creatively gutted by Ward-Barberra who knows what kids shows would have been like today?

  • http://twitter.com/anderalert Pat Eisel

    Just read the lost decade blog post too. I was high school/college age in 19A0′s. A beautiful time forced out of cultural memory because of the plague that ended it. I romanticize every minute of it but can conjure up the daily battles with effort. Sex. Drugs. Rock & Roll. 

  • novaX

    I love the idea brought up in the lost decade, it has inspired many conversations and late night strolls through portland. Shortly after your article came out I read Murakami’s 1Q84 which compliments the 19AO’s hypothesis. I would also like to mention Chan Koonchung’s novel The Fat Year, though set in the future, offers an exapmle of collective memory loss in regards to a mass traumatic situation which effectively alters the world around it.