A Boring Dystopia

I mean, if your measure of modernity is just how good home computers were back then, rather than that any substantial number of people had home computers at all, then of course 1994 is going to seem non-modern.

I guess I have a skewed perception of how long ago 1994 was, though, because 1995 was when my parents first came into contact with each other from opposite sides of the globe, through the ol' information superhighway. For me that makes 1994 seem incredibly recent, even if it was nearly 30 years ago and a lot has changed since then. The '90s were this whole decade of pop culture, technology, and political and social change whose shadow I grew up in, basically the beginning of what I would consider in most contexts to be the "modern day". But if I had actually been alive and conscious at the time, then maybe I would be more practically aware of the differences between then and now, and hesitate to call it "modern".

But modernity always is relative. If I were talking specifically about computers, then obviously even a computer from as recently as 2008 would really be stretching the definition of "modern". But then in another context I might even say that something that happened in 1898 would've been "recent", though I wouldn't necessarily refer to that as "modern" per se.

Put another way, an apparent slim majority of the world's population (but not of South Africa's population) was alive when Nelson Mandela took office. Probably a lot of them were infants or small children at the time, but still: even for the people who weren't alive at that time, or who were too young to really remember it personally, there are so many people who were very alive and very conscious at the time, that everyone's bound to know a good few. My mom attended anti-apartheid protests when she was in college, for instance. Mandela himself was president until 1999, and only died in 2013, which it's hard to believe was already ten years ago.