"Generation Sex" opens with a great 'IT'S THE 90s!" sampled audio.

The most self-congratulatory decade!

Well, the cold war was over, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Western world was mostly at peace, there was a long economic boom after the early Nineties recession. When Agent Smith explained that the The Matrix simulated 1999 because that was the peak of our civilization, I suspect he was right.

So is this the 'teens now? Or does that not start until 2013?

I hope the same people do a montage of people saying "It's the '80s", because I suspect there are even more examples of that.

And these are not all self-congratulatory; about a third of the quotes seemed to be in the context of using the decade as a reason/excuse for something bad.

And the REAL reason The Matrix simulated 1999 was it was the year the movie was made, so no need to re-create the past or imaginatively create the future. Cheap production design so they could spend more on special effects.

Me, I was 14 in 1969, when I watched President Nixon bask in the glory of the First Man On The Moon, a project started by President Kennedy, and I thought "it's all downhill from here", and nobody has convinced me otherwise.

Well, the cold war was over, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Western world was mostly at peace, there was a long economic boom after the early Nineties recession. When Agent Smith explained that the The Matrix simulated 1999 because that was the peak of our civilization, I suspect he was right.
I'd never thought about it that way, but it sounds true in many ways.

I must admit, 1999 was the last time I felt truly hopeful for the future, because that was when I started my own blog and joined a Community Website called MetaFilter.