Prior to the rise of the Internet and the fall of the Towers, is it possible we were unwittingly living in a golden age? Maybe for a moment.

If the 1990s was a good time, it was only briefly so. In the United States, the decade began with liberal Bill Clinton, Nirvana and brick-and-mortar, which gave way before the bell tolled to conservative Bill Clinton, Marcy Playground and point-and-click. In his latest Financial Times column, Douglas Coupland has warm thoughts about the pre-Internet era, fondly recalling the shopping mall, its fabricated community and food courts and fake trees, before we shrunk it all down to fit inside our phones. The opening:

On August 11 1992 I was in Bloomington, Minnesota, close to Minneapolis. I was on a book tour and it was the grand opening day of Mall of America, the biggest mall in the US. The local radio affiliate had a booth set up in front of the indoor roller coaster that strafed the booth like an air strike every 75 seconds. I was up on the stage with them doing a live interview for half an hour while thousands of people were walking by with “country fair face” — goggle-eyed and feeding on ice cream. I felt like I was inside a Technicolor movie from the 1950s. The show’s host assumed I was going to be an ironic, slacker wise-ass and said: “I guess you must think this whole mall is kind of hokey and trashy,” and I said: “No such thing.”

He was surprised. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that I feel like I’m in another era that we thought had vanished, but it really hasn’t, not yet. I think we might one day look back on photos of today and think to ourselves, ‘You know, those people were living in golden times and they didn’t even know it. Communism was dead, the economy was good and the future with all of its accompanying technologies hadn’t crushed society’s mojo like a bug.’”

Silence.

And it’s true. Technology hadn’t hollowed out the middle class and turned us into laptop click junkies, and there were no new bogeymen hiding in the closet. We may well look back at the 1990s as the last good decade.•

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Mall of America, opening weekend, August 1992.