1994: the year the modern world began

Well, the church bells are calling. Police cars on fire

Being born in the mid-1970s sometimes felt very much like drug-dealer Danny’s speech in Withnail and I:

The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.

Of course there’s huge amounts of nostalgia about the 1960s, and some of that spills over into the early 1970s. Some people have argued that 1971 was the greatest year in the history of music, and you can maybe even claim that the long 1960s lasted at least until Zeppelin released Achilles Last Stand in 1976.

But actually, I want to argue that there’s a more recent year which in retrospect feels just as epoch-making. In fact it’s probably time to put 1994 up on the same kind of pedestal, both culturally and politically, and rejoice in the fact that the 1970s babies were in pole position for that one.

Is it my imagination, or have I finally found something worth living for?

Of course, being young is great, and it’s well known that every generation thinks the best music was released in its teenage years. I had a great night watching Echobelly at King Tut’s while doing a month’s summer research placement in the Glasgow Maths Department, but even I would have to admit there’s an element of personal nostalgia going on there and it might not be a universal experience.

But actually, overall 1994 was a great year for music by any standards. Of course, everyone will talk about Blur and Oasis and about the end of Nirvana, but there was a lot more good stuff than that. Suede released the astonishing Dog Man Star, despite the departure of Bernard Butler. The Manics’ bleak masterpiece The Holy Bible came out. In the Bristol area alone, Massive Attack put out Protection and Portishead released Dummy. It wasn’t just Britpop either: over in the US 1994 was the year of Regulate, Grace, Loser, Sabotage and The Downward Spiral.

You can make a similar claim for movies. We’ve just had the Pulp Fiction 30th anniversary, but in the same year we also had Clerks, The Shawshank Redemption, Natural Born Killers, Shallow Grave, The Hudsucker Proxy, Forrest Gump, Four Weddings, Heavenly Creatures, Ed Wood and Il Postino. Maybe I have rose-tinted spectacles, but it’s hard to argue that isn’t a better crop than our current batch of sequels and reboots, arising from a time when independent film companies emerged to take on the big studios.

Maybe you can say the same about lots of years though. There might be peaks and troughs in popular culture, but every year there will be someone happy because their team won the league, their favourite batsman broke a record or a great book was published, or sad because a sportsman or comedian died far too young.

From this time, unchained, we're all looking at a different picture

However, I think 1994 stands out in other respects, and its events fundamentally shaped the modern world. In particular, it is easy to argue that this was the year the Internet really began.

Of course, at this point the nerds will be telling me that I’ve got it wrong. Tim Berners-Lee proposed his hypertext distribution system in 1989. Various people had been wiring together switches and routers since 1973 or so. Doug Engelbart had showed off hypertext and links in 1968. There are probably things that go back even further than that. However, for better or worse, 1994 was the year that the Internet took off.

Again there’s a personal element here for me. I sent my first email early that year, on the now long-defunct Phoenix system in Cambridge. But at that stage, it was really a niche interest. You had to apply by post to get a University email address, rather than getting one by default. You had to walk down to the college computer room and wait for a machine to become free to check your messages. Wireless was what your Grandma used to listen to The Archers.

But a couple of developments meant that 1994 was really the year when being online started to move from a minority pursuit for hobbyists and academics to be (for better or worse!) the default way of living that it is today.

First, Netscape. As JWZ reminds us, the Mosaic Netscape 0.9 browser was released on 13th October 1994, soon followed by Netscape Navigator. This was the point at which web browsers really became widely available, but there was more to it than that. Because this was software for free, anyone anywhere could get it, and the bars to entry were drastically lowered overnight. Once you could get online for the price of a phone call, you could start to search (Yahoo was founded in January 1994), to join communities on Usenet or bulletin boards, to blog, and so on. By the end of the year, AOL had 1.5 million subscribers, even if they weren’t offering a true web experience yet.

As a result, 1994 was a year of crazy growth of the Internet: at the start of it there were a total of 623 websites in the entire world (!), by the end there were more than 10,000. For the first time, organisations like the BBC, the Economist and the White House began to have an online presence. You can draw a fairly straight line from this to ideas like social media, and even to mathematicians sending out newsletters about whatever tickles their fancy this week.

But at that stage, it wasn’t clear how anyone would make money out of this. In fact, maybe it still isn’t! But the second big development is that 1994 was really the start of e-commerce as a meaningful thing: the very first thing sold online was a pizza, in that year. And while it didn’t go online until the next year, 5th July 1994 was the day that Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos. Of course it wasn’t the behemoth that it would become, but without Amazon book sales, there’d be no Amazon Web Services now, and perhaps no cloud computing, maybe even no AI revolution.

When your baby's grown, she'll be the one to catch you when you fall

But I think 1994 also marks political developments which set the next thirty years or more in motion. Of course, I’m based in the UK and so biased towards events here: but it would be hard to argue that the Rwanda Genocide and Nelson Mandela’s election as President of South Africa weren’t epochal world events.

Similarly, it seems clear that Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution in the US midterms marked the beginning of the polarisation of American politics, without which there’d be no Tea Party and no Trump. And in retrospect, there were rumblings of the events that would define the early 21st century when the Saudis decided to strip the son of one of their construction magnates of his citizenship.

But in UK politics alone, there were two hugely significant changes. First, in May 1994, then Leader of the Opposition John Smith died. Of course, we’ll never know how things would have played out if he had lived. It’s extremely likely that he would have been the next Prime Minister: he was fighting a worn-out Conservative party already tarnished by Black Wednesday, and presumably the same sleaze scandals would have benefitted him.

In the event though, as we know, Smith’s death led to the election of Tony Blair and the creation of New Labour as an electoral force. Would Smith have been as popular? Would he have won a landslide? What economic policies would he have been able to bring in? How would he have handled the War on Terror and the Iraq invasion?

All of these questions are impossible to answer, and people will doubtless continue to argue over them. It might seem clear though that Smith’s death in 1994 heralded a move towards centrist politics, continuing into the 2010 coalition and David Cameron’s election as a relatively left-wing Conservative, and at least in part a blueprint for Starmer in 2024.

However, in the same year, there were also extremely significant developments away from the centre ground of politics. On November 27th 1994, James Goldsmith announced the formation of the Referendum Party, to campaign against British membership of the EU. While it may not have had much of an immediate effect (it perhaps cost the Conservatives a few seats in the 1997 election, but certainly nothing like enough to change the overall result), in retrospect it’s hard not to see this as the start of a major swing.

While the names have changed, and it would probably take Pete Frame to plot the entire history, you can see a clear evolution of Eurosceptism from Goldsmith’s party, through UKIP’s success in European elections, the 2016 Referendum and the Brexit Party, right through to Reform winning 14% of the vote in 2024, and making a bad situation very much worse for the Conservatives.

Perhaps it’s better then to think of 1994 as the year that the traditional two-party system, with voters choosing parties along class lines, started to break down in the UK. But however you slice it, 1994 feels like a year that shaped history, and that’s even without mentioning the waking nightmare that was Cotton Eye Joe, a trauma from which the world is only just recovering.

Have a good week, and as the young people say, please don’t forget to like, subscribe and forward this newsletter!