Was slow and expensive. Having to pay by the minute or use it only for a couple of hours in the evening.
Was expensive and usually a family had 1. It was to be used for emergencies only, like if you had a car accident. It wasn't until the 2000s everyone had their own one and then text messages were expensive. And you had to beg your parents to buy you a top up card because you spent all night texting some random chick you met online.
people wearing neon colors
Didn't really happen outside of kids wearing track suits. People didn't walk around wearing neon colours as a normal thing. And you can wear them today if you want.
fanny packs (no idea why something so practical is seen as lame now),
Bum bags were always considered lame. It was a very short lived fad because you looked like an idiot wearing one. They're still useful and you can buy them today if you need one.
no people making being gay or an APOC (fucking kill me) as their whole identity
90s was the rise of the fag movement. Sorry to disappoint you but racial grifting and homo grifting was well on the way in the 80s and cemented in the 90s. You had gay men pretending to be women hosting family quiz shows making sexual jokes the entire time.
reality TV being non existent
Reality TV is as old as television is but specifically in the 90s you had MTV's The Real World which put a bunch of people in a house and followed their stories. It was pretty big at the time. Big brother started in the 90s and there's other examples.
Radio still exists. You can turn one on now if you want. Can even find 90's stations if you want to.
politics being about petty shit with no president that actually fucked everyone for decades
There were so many politicians fucking people over back then. Politics hasn't changed.
the birth of youtube being for people just fucking around and having fun without trying to make a career of it.
Most people didn't know about youtube or care. The bandwidth needed to watch a video was expensive and hard to come by. You were on dial up and you weren't spending 5 hours downloading a vlog of someone eating instant pasta pots. Thumb nail sized movie trailers you downloaded directly from the website and gifs/midi combos of hamsters dancing.
Infomercials still exist. Many channels show them overnight now. QVC exists and probably had a stream. If you want that then you can still have it.
Back when Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the UK, the US and Canada all seemed like futuristic beacons of prosperity.
It was in the early to mid 2000s that the technology boom could be felt. Despite 9/11 and the wars American dragged everyone else into technology had hit the point where it was in the hands of the working class. Phones were becoming more than expensive bricks, data was getting cheaper. The advent of 24/7 internet you paid a single bill for. Gaming consoles connecting to the internet and the huge leaps in tech every 5 years. Despite issues like the Patriot act and the wider global issues, it felt like we would have the technology to solve any problem. We would cure cancer and have world peace within our life time. Then the 2010s hit and it all falls apart for one reason or another.
90's nostalgia fans never lived in the era. They think today's technology is the same as back then. None of the real perks of the 90s (being able to switch off most of these things) are ever on their nostalgia wank list. It's always just technology and then they don't know what it was like to use that technology in that era. None of them ever had to find a way to shorten a message to get it under 1 message to send to the "girl" you met on AOL chat. Having been kicked off the internet and now using your nokia phone to send messages to her until your credit ran out.
