The first half of June 1998 is one of those strangely coincidental & pivotal moments that seem to embody the zeitgeist, in particular the public’s increasing awareness of its own manipulation by an ultimately empty mind control spectacle.
The NBA finals featured a rematch between the previous year’s teams: the Chicago bulls & the Utah Jazz. An aging, less explosive Jordan had developed a hypertechnical midrange fadeaway & was back to close out his second threepeat. The Bulls won in six (Game 6 ending with Jordan’s ‘The Shot’).
Meanwhile, Space Shuttle Discovery was on orbit for STS-91, the last space shuttle mission to dock with the Russian space station Mir. It was a short, 3 day resupply mission, & marked the successful end of a joint international project between a post-Soviet Russia & the U.S. the shuttle would start building the international space station five months later.
During this same period in June, during the finals & STS-91, Compaq closes the $9.6B acquisition of Digital Equipment Corporation. Dell is commodifying the PC & fighting a price war, & Compaq wants to move upmarket by buying into enterprise hardware, software & services. It was the biggest tech deal of the bubble so far.
On June 5, _Truman Show_ is released in theaters: the Jim Carrey dramedy is about a guy who doesn’t know his entire life is lived on a closed soundstage to be filmed for public entertainment. The film portrays American society as one that prefers a fully managed & continuously broadcast reality over any unmediated alternative.
The zeitgeist of this late 90s moment emerges as something like this:
a nascent yet self-conscious cybernetic society mythologizing itself for the purposes of mass hypnosis.
This aesthetic was fully formed by the conjunction of real-life events, but even wilder, _The Matrix_ (1999) itself was being filmed in Sydney in the first half of June 1998. _The Matrix_ overlaid a hero’s journey onto an aesthetic vocabulary of willing if not enthusiastic electronic hypnosis that had already been established by historical events.