Welcome to Party Like It’s 1996, a six-week time-travel challenge to help you rediscover the lost art of hanging out. This is Challenge No. 5, but you can sign up here to get this series in your inbox from the beginning.
Whew! Hot enough for you? In 1996, the global surface temperature was roughly 1.6 degrees cooler than it is now!!!!!
Anyway, for more than a month we’ve been experimenting with ways to give our dystopian modern existences a little chilly 20th-century flair. Last week, you spent a quiet night in. I hope it was cozy as all get-out. I also hope that you ate some great popcorn. For your future popcorn needs, I recommend sprinkling it with Trader Joe’s Everything but the Elote seasoning—another post-1996 invention that makes me glad, despite everything, to live in the present.
I loved hearing about your thoughtful evenings spent on your own! You really did it all. You bonded with partners, kids, moms, and visitors. You made things with your hands: Bridgette P. sewed a dress! Jessie G. crafted a tiny first aid kit out of an Altoids tin! Marsha B. constructed cement garden decorations!
And boy, oh boy, did you watch some random-ass stuff on your televisions. Some of you tried Streaming Channel Roulette; others grabbed DVDs from the library or your own personal collections. Here is just a partial list of the movies and TV shows participants told me they viewed this week:
The Distinguished Gentleman
Bride and Prejudice
Some Like It Hot
The Sure Thing
The Bourne Identity
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors (aww)
9 to 5 (awwww!)
“A Belinda Carlisle concert, circa 1988” (OK!)
Extra credit goes to reader Hannah R., who in an attempt to replicate 1990s channel surfing scrolled through the real-time movie channels that come with the HBO app. That’s how she and her partner ended up joining Dune 40 minutes in—then discovered, to their joy, that after Dune came Dune 2. An incredible night in! Replace Dune and Dune 2 with Under Siege and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, and you could’ve been in 1996, watching HBO on your 105-pound cathode-ray television.
OK! You’ve gone out. You’ve stayed in. You’ve hung out. You’ve reached out. Now comes the moment we’re going to put it all together. Clear your calendar—it’s time for a 1996 road trip!
The road trip isn’t dead, of course. People do it all the time. But its character has changed dramatically. Once, the road trip was a fount of car games, sing-alongs, impassioned debates, and wistful dreaming-out-loud. I remember a journey to the Outer Banks in which we spent the entire five-hour drive playing Who Would You Do?, a game in which two celebrities are presented for consideration and all participants must declare who they’d do. (When the two choices were Dick Cheney and Ross Perot, my friend Claire declared she’d rather fuck a honey-baked ham than either of those guys—so we made a rule that once, and only once, per hour, you could get out of a terrible predicament by answering “Ham.”)
In the age of the smartphone, the podcast, and the AirPod, though, the road trip tends to divaricate into separate experiences for each participant, each with her own concerns, her own reading material, even her own soundtrack. And while everyone else sits buckled into their seats, enjoying their Instagram feeds, the poor driver is stuck with her thoughts and the GPS navigation voice. The driver is somehow companionless in a crowded room—surely the definition of loneliness.
The spontaneous communal travel experience was once the foundational building block of friendship. Lifelong bonds were forged, endangered, and bolstered on such trips, despite—or because of—the kinds of mini-catastrophes that tended to strike travelers before GPS.
I’m not saying you need to get lost. (Though if you do, don’t panic! It’ll be fine! Google Maps remains your get-out-of-jail-free card.) But as in past challenges, let serendipity be your guide, even if you have some destination in mind. And as in past challenges, make connection a priority over convenience: Let this road trip be a communal experience, one that takes your little group to unexpected places together.
CHALLENGE NO. 5: THE 1996 ROAD TRIP
Block out half a day, a full day, or even the whole weekend if you can. (I understand that this might not happen this exact week. But make plans to do it soon!)
Grab some friends—maybe the friends you’ve been doing this challenge with?—wince at the gas prices, and head out for the hinterlands.
You can choose a destination, but it’s also fun to just go where the wind takes you. Consider ordering a Rand McNally road atlas or a Thomas Guide and handing it to whoever is in the passenger seat. They’re in charge!
If that navigator can get you off the interstate, they should do it.
If you see something interesting on the side of the road, you should pull off and check it out.
When you stop to eat, you should bring some playing cards into the restaurant to while away the time.
When you get tired, you should check into the most haunted hotel in town.
What should you listen to in the car? Music, not podcasts or audiobooks. Such media are great, of course, I love them, but on a road trip they make interaction more difficult: No one wants to interrupt the story. I’d love it if you listened to the radio—and not one of those algorithmically programmed Jack FM robot stations, but an actual local station with a human DJ who says stuff like “Here in Cleveland, it’s always cooler by the lake!” But really all I care about is that you are all listening to the same thing out loud. I’d even approve a Spotify Jam with travelin’ songs contributed by everyone in turn. No headphones! Live in the communal world—not in your own private one.
In our final newsletter next week, I’ll talk about ways I’ve found to cultivate some of these practices in my everyday life. But I fail to live in the moment (1996) all the time, so I really want to hear from you on this subject! Email me at 1996@slate.com and tell me what you’ve done in the past month that seems replicable, useful, inspiring, or revolutionary to the way you live. And if your schedule allowed you to go on a road trip this week, tell me about it! Did anyone see the World’s Largest Ball of Twine?
See you down the highway a spell,
Dan
Facts Only
* Dan is the author of the "Party Like It’s 1996" challenge.
* The challenge consists of a six-week series.
* Global surface temperatures in 1996 were approximately 1.6 degrees cooler than current temperatures.
* Challenge No. 4 involved spending a night in.
* Participants in Challenge No. 4 watched titles including The Distinguished Gentleman, Bride and Prejudice, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
* Challenge No. 5 is a 1996-themed road trip.
* Recommended tools for the trip include Rand McNally road atlases or Thomas Guides.
* Recommended audio includes local radio stations or shared Spotify Jams.
* The author's email for feedback is 1996@slate.com.
* The challenge prohibits the use of headphones during the road trip.
Executive Summary
A six-week challenge titled "Party Like It’s 1996" encourages participants to adopt social habits from the mid-1990s to counter the isolation of modern digital existence. The current phase, Challenge No. 5, focuses on the "1996 road trip," emphasizing communal experiences over individual digital consumption. Participants are urged to prioritize shared activities—such as using paper maps, listening to local radio or shared playlists, and visiting roadside attractions—rather than utilizing smartphones, podcasts, or headphones.
The initiative posits that modern travel has diverged into separate, isolated experiences for each passenger, leaving the driver particularly lonely. By intentionally removing digital distractions and embracing serendipity and "mini-catastrophes," the challenge aims to rebuild the foundational bonds of friendship. While the use of modern tools like Google Maps is permitted for safety, the overarching goal is to replace convenience with connection.
Full Take
The strongest version of this narrative argues that the "friction" of the pre-digital era—getting lost, sharing a single audio source, and relying on physical maps—served as a social catalyst that fostered deeper human connection and resilience. By intentionally reintroducing this friction, individuals can reclaim agency from algorithms that curate isolated, "optimized" experiences.
The underlying paradigm is one of technological nostalgia, assuming a causal link between the absence of smartphones and the presence of authentic friendship. It frames the modern era as "dystopian" and "lonely," contrasting it with a curated memory of the 1990s. This creates a romanticized binary: the "communal world" of 1996 versus the "private world" of the present. While the tone is whimsical, it rests on the assumption that convenience is the primary enemy of intimacy.
For human agency, this suggests that liberation is found in the voluntary adoption of obsolescence. The benefit is a potential increase in mindfulness and interpersonal bonding; the cost is the loss of efficiency and the safety net of instant information.
Patterns detected: none
If this were an influence campaign, the playbook would use "nostalgia-baiting" to create a sense of loss, then offer a low-stakes "lifestyle hack" to build trust and community around a specific brand or identity. The actual content is a personal experiment in social behavior and does not align with a coordinated psychological operation.
Bridge Questions:
1. Does the removal of digital distractions inherently create connection, or does it merely expose the absence of shared interests?
2. In what ways has the definition of "hanging out" evolved beyond the 1996 model to include new, valid forms of communal experience?
3. Is the perceived loneliness of the modern driver a result of the technology itself, or a symptom of broader societal shifts in how we value presence?
Sentinel — Human
The text exhibits the distinct voice, emotional layering, and conversational structure of a human writer sharing personal experiences and reflections rather than objective reporting.