#19a0

Evidence is mounting that points to a "lost decade" between what we now remember as the 1970s and 1980s, a time whose full cultural trauma and resulting suppression from memory was so complete as to effect itself even on the living. [...] The space: do we not all feel it? The space. It may be said that the consumer cultures of the 1980s and 1990s, successively exhorting us to embrace artifice and then soul-crushing blandess, were manufactured to "cure" the residual confusion and cultural inconsistency that resulted from the methods used to effect mankind's collective psychic displacement. The hidden "space," however, manifests itself in curious ways -- the obsession with youth and physical condition in those born in the 1960s and 1970s; oddities in climate change data; the apparently freakish pace of economic change in what we believe now to be the 1980s; and so forth. [...] Likewise, no-one familiar with the Lost Decade hypothesis can fail to grasp the religious significance of shutter shades.