Is the World Getting Worse?

A couple of days ago, Carl Benjamin quote posted (or whatever the heck we have to call a quote Tweet now) an Alien Ant Farm video from 2001. At the time of writing the post has 8.6 million views, 16 thousand likes, and a slew of people both agreeing with Carl and attacking him.

Sounds like the internet, you say. But what should have been a fairly innocuous post seems to have struck a nerve. 

Granted, Carl did mention ‘mass immigration’, and ‘racial and gendered guilt activism’ (he may have mellowed but is still pretty savage, probably much like Alien Ant Farm when they get together). But still, the reaction was quite strange.

The premise of Carl’s post is that before the culture wars, and the 2008 crash, the world was better. The Alien Ant Farm video is a mere light-hearted reminder of this inalienable truth.

One of the many weirdly vehement attacks on Carl has been that he is simply displaying textbook ‘in my day’ style moaning.

It is true that getting older sucks, and that one always has nostalgia for one’s youth. So how to tell if the world has actually also become objectively worse? 

It’s tricky, but having been there at the time, it is clear to me that the 1990s and early 2000s were a period of far greater freedom. We had free speech, shared assumptions that let us celebrate the same things, and mock the same things, and the culture was broadly aligned on the big questions. 

Now all that has been dismantled, denigrated as simply white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, or whatever that week’s demented buzz term may be.

The West has turned in on itself, and now everything—from a relatively minor government bill on immigration to the existence of biological sex—devolves into a potentially existential issue for our society.

We agree on nothing, and we’re not even allowed to talk about it without getting attacked, cancelled, or potentially arrested. 

To someone of my generation (very much the same as Carl’s) the 90s and roughly adjacent years appear vastly superior by all metrics. Obviously in politics and general culture, but perhaps even more strikingly in the arts. 

Films were better. The 90s will surely go down as one of the all-time great movie decades. Goodfellas, Fight Club, Heat, Carlito’s Way, The Shawshank Redemption, Good Will Hunting, Fargo, Boogie Nights, American Beauty, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Rushmore, The Thin Red Line, Saving Private Ryan, Unforgiven, The Usual Suspects, Shadowlands, Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, L.A. Confidential, Apollo 13, Terminator 2, The Matrix. One could go on and on. And believe me I do.

Music was clearly better. Do we even need a list to confirm that music involving songwriting, passion, meaning, and actual instruments is better than auto-tuned sludge mumbled by degenerates? I’ll stop before I sound like every YouTube comment on any good song.

Though the Alien Ant Farm cover of ‘Smooth Criminal’ that Carl cited isn’t even a particularly good song. At the time I was vaguely annoyed they’d covered Michael Jackson in a way that was obviously never going to get close to the original. And whether 1987, when Jackson’s Bad was released, was better than 2001 is something we could actually argue over. But that both are better than 2024 is not even a debate. 

The only plausible case for the superiority of the present day is that the technological advancement of the internet means one is never bored.

That is not nothing, when you’ve grown up with Sunday evening TV and only four channels. But would you trade it for the destruction of your entire culture? And how long can the internet even stay on, when the economy is in ruins, work doesn’t pay, and we have a zero trust society where no one has anything in common or wants to help each other?

As Carl points out, anyone not around, or very young, at the time of the video in question obviously cannot comment.

These people have never known freedom. It sounds strange to say, and of course it’s relative. But not that relative. When I was growing up, free speech was the norm, hate speech was not a thing, non-crime hate incidents were certainly not a thing. Nor was wokeness, or cancel culture. Feminism was vaguely annoying, but largely amounted to women being allowed to play the bass in an indie band.

Climate alarmism didn’t really exist, except for the occasional weird advert on MTV, followed by yet another clip of Nirvana Unplugged, or something by Green Day (in the 90s there oddly wasn’t enough content to go around, despite the lack of channels, or a functioning internet beyond a few text-based sites searched for via AltaVista). 

The West was winning and it was an unambiguously good thing. Memories of the Berlin Wall coming down were fresh (even if I was so young when it came down I didn’t understand why they couldn’t have just pulled it down at any time…and weirdly I was kind of right). 

Then all that changed.

I don’t know the exact month the Alien Ant Farm video was released, and I refuse to Google it for longer than I already have, but 2001 was arguably the beginning of the end. Although it took another decade or more for the woke madness of decolonisation, critical race theory and other disastrous ideas to kick in, 9/11 did feel like an end of innocence moment.

Paranoia entered our daily lives again, as it no doubt had during the Cold War era. We didn’t suffer to the same extent, perhaps, but suddenly terrorist attacks in the West were a reality. One would hear a loud plane overhead and wonder if it was the next 9/11. Then 7/7 happened, bringing the horror from our TV screens to our streets. Of course we’d had the IRA in the past, but this was something new. 

That aside, the 2000s were still largely a slightly less interesting imitation of the 90s. That is, up until the 2008 crash, as Carl references in his original post. One could certainly make a good argument that coming so close to economic collapse was where things really started to fall apart. Though how far wokeness and the culture war were a direct response to that is up for question.

What is not up for question is that 2001 was better than now. An Alien Ant Farm video would not be the first thing I’d reach for to make this point, but it is what the internet happened to throw up, and Carl, despite the haters, is not wrong. 

Michael Jackson is gone, fun Michael Jackson covers are gone, innocence is gone, freedom is gone…I stopped writing for a moment here to check Carl’s feed, only to find he had posted the following almost identical sentiment.

While I’d like to believe this is two men from the same generation and same country having a (slightly early) midlife crisis, I suspect it is something more universal. 

All we can do now is try to win our freedoms back, learn from our mistakes, and if in doubt simply ask ourselves: ‘What would Alien Ant Farm do?’