enye-word:

kontextmaschine:

also me: ok but *working class* 90s-2000s SF was tie-in novels and Stargate tv

me: I’m not disputing you

also me: aw

oh did the working class read tie-in novels

oh absolutely

this is where I sputter something about the midcentury American suburban decentralization and the issues with getting books through non-specialty retailers before Amazon or B&N/Borders (which gets at something broader w/r/t the ‘90s-2000s development of exurban “category killer”/”anchor”/”big box” retail)

also where I handwave at the ‘90s figures of Wolf/Dragon Shirt Boy and Dolphin Shirt Girl

but there is something under there, that perhaps tracks with “we had a computer/the internet because we were comfortable class and that was the enriching future” vs. “because my parent raised their class status by becoming an electronic artisan“

reference the User Friendly era where “geek jobs” were as much “network administration/running the ISP/repair service in Buttfuck, Ohio” as “coding in SF”

BUT, the interesting follow-up is how Babylon 5/neo-Battlestar Galactica BOTH counted as “working class” remakes of Star Trek (DS9/TNG), even though the first departed on “let’s take the tedious geopolitics seriously” and the latter “let’s take the fact they’re all Navy enlistees seriously” because in each case it was an abandonment of the easy “broad middle class” New Frontier optimism we’d carried since the early ‘60s