Does anyone else genuinely miss the 2000s?

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I just miss a time when my fucking phone didn’t listen to what I was saying so it could push related advertising.
 
It seems like it was way more pure and family driven and I don't think that's just nostalgia. I re-watched some of the cartoons from the early 2000s over the years and they were so much better, early Pokemon for example used to have holiday specials where the Pokemon celebrated Christmas and stuff, it was cute and in general it showed that the characters loved each other, I've watched some of the later seasons and it just seems mostly safe and commercial.
 
To me the '00s seemed to go by somewhat "normal". The '10s went by pretty quick somehow (like I still think of the Wii U as a short-lived and recent system). Once 2020 hit, time seems to have hit the brakes. Early coronapanic with the TP shortage seems like quite a while ago, and 2019 almost seems exotic and ancient now.
 
To me the '00s seemed to go by somewhat "normal". The '10s went by pretty quick somehow (like I still think of the Wii U as a short-lived and recent system). Once 2020 hit, time seems to have hit the brakes. Early coronapanic with the TP shortage seems like quite a while ago, and 2019 almost seems exotic and ancient now.
The 2010s were kind of a haze because nothing really seemed to happen. All throughout the 2010s you had a forever war in the middle east which got super boring after ISIS got wiped, the 2016 election which nobody got over, and all sorts of shit which ended up being very low impact by comparison to the 2020 typhoon of events which came out.
For the best look at how slow the 2010s really were, just look at the pop culture of the era. It was all sequels, threequels and failed cinematic universes. The most notable thing we got from the decade was the MCU which was the most formula thing ever made. Creativity, innovation and general cultural kineticism was absent the whole time through with our technology becoming drab, our science losing its luster and politics becoming a grind to behold. 2020 is a blessing in disguise.
 
I'm probably looking back at 00's through rose-tinted glasses because i was in my teens during the first half of that decade, but i think it was the superior decade.

For starters, the world was less political (or at least, most normal people avoided the topic).

We had cellphones, but they had little to no internet connection. The internet at the time was more free and a lot more fun (4chan, newgrounds, ytmnd, homestar runner, etc).

The music back then was a lot better when you compare it to Current Year.
 
The 2010s were kind of a haze because nothing really seemed to happen. All throughout the 2010s you had a forever war in the middle east which got super boring after ISIS got wiped, the 2016 election which nobody got over, and all sorts of shit which ended up being very low impact by comparison to the 2020 typhoon of events which came out.
For the best look at how slow the 2010s really were, just look at the pop culture of the era. It was all sequels, threequels and failed cinematic universes. The most notable thing we got from the decade was the MCU which was the most formula thing ever made. Creativity, innovation and general cultural kineticism was absent the whole time through with our technology becoming drab, our science losing its luster and politics becoming a grind to behold. 2020 is a blessing in disguise.

It's weird, because the early 2010's seemed kind of hopeful at first. 2010 was fairly quiet with the only real major event in the US news cycle being the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the two big earthquakes in Haiti and Chile at the start of the year. 2011 was a year full of the weird and totally unexpected like the Osama Bin Laden raid, the Higgs Boson discoveries, the demise of Kim Jong Il, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street.

Really, 2010-2012 had this weird vibe where everyone had this sort of unwarranted optimism and an urge to try and make things better, which crashed and burned badly with the rise of the Woke Left.

Tellingly, all the really good elements of 2010's pop culture that weren't imported tended to be at the very start of the 2010's (Fallout: New Vegas, The Wolf of Wall Street, Mafia II, Breaking Bad's peak years) or near the very end (Joker, The Irishman, 1917)

I really do get this weird feeling that 2020 is not just the big game changer but could very well be the darkness before dawn. Give me all the rainbows you want for that, but I just have this weird hunch
 
I sure as fuck do, and I'm not entirely sure that it's purely nostalgia. Before social media became the norm and forum culture was a thing, it seemed liked people on the internet actually had novel thoughts and generally just wanted to have a good time and escape from real life. My perception of the internet back then was that it was inhabited more by introverted, thoughtful people than it is today. "Normies ruined the internet" probably is true, as cringy as it sound. Once social media became commonplace hierarchies inevitably started to form and people turned their online presence into an opportunity to gain clout through pseudo-moralistic circlejerking.

There was a feeling of freedom in life too from what I remember that was distinct from the usual "the world is your oyster" bs people feed their kids. You had a certain freedom to self-expression and felt like you had a right to piss people off if it meant standing up for you values, without fear of persecution for wrongthink.

Video games were at their peak in my opinion, and channels like Disney, Nick, and Cartoon Network were way better than they are now.

The only thing I disagree with here is music, but it might be because I was too young to really pay attention. A lot of 2000's music seemed pretty blase to me. The only thing I really miss from that period that I don't hear anymore is punk rock (thanks, PS2).
 
Really, 2010-2012 had this weird vibe where everyone had this sort of unwarranted optimism and an urge to try and make things better, which crashed and burned badly with the rise of the Woke Left.

I've mentioned this before in different threads (so forgive me for being redundant) but the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman thing under Obama was the Pandora's Box for woke culture and the downfall of race relations. I also distinctly remember the early 2010's and how people still had kind of a 90's/2000's vibe to them, and things didn't become all woke until the middle of the decade, right around the dawn of GamerGate. I used to follow Tumblr in 2010 or so just for porn and animated Gifs: back then, what we'd currently refer to as SJWs were completely nonexistent. The whole stereotype of feminists, furfags, and pan-demisexual genderfluid transracial otherkin making up the bulk of Tumblr wasn't a thing until some time after 2012, especially with the election kicking it into gear. I remember after Romney lost, Tumblr did this radical shift into posting almost exclusively pro-SJW shit ranging from hatred towards straight white men to circle jerking over Mitt Romney and normie conservatives being banished to the nether realms. Then in 2013 was when I personally remember woke culture spreading exponentially. It was all over Tumblr and Twitter by then, with everyone being increasingly pozzed.

Again, early Tumblr was just a stream of random pop culture shit including funny Family Guy Gifs, Doctor Who fanart, cool geeky Lego builds, and whatnot. This was kind of around the time of the early 2010's obsession with geek fandom and the whole "I fucking love science!" crowd being dominant in the media. Tumblr certainly reshaped into a cesspool of leftard culture warriors in late 2012/early 2013, which coincides with the rise of woke culture.

Aside from Trayvon's death and Romney's loss, a couple of other things events happened in 2012 which led to the rise of the woke left: The Aurora shooting and Sandy Hook. These two events saw a H U G E surge in anti-gun rhetoric in the media, with people all over the cancerous Twitters ranting about banning all guns and labeling the NRA as a white supremacist hate group. The latter shooting happened at an elementary school of all places, which gave fuel into the left's "muh children!" argument.

From a personal anecdote, at the job where I worked in 2012-2013 almost every coworker was a Democrat, an MSNBC viewer, and extremely anti-gun. I got the look of death when I confessed that I didn't vote for Obama and that I'm pro-gun. Around the dawn of woke culture it was trendy and chic to idolize Obama and to passionately advocate the total ban of guns. Seeing a black thug getting killed by a Latino white guy and having the president politicize it, followed by two mass shootings involving minors more than made leftists of all flavors feel like kings among men, as it seemed as if everyone was on their side. The Tea Party (and any conservative) in general was seen as fringe and laughable, and just the mere notion of questioning Obama, disagreeing with gun bans, or defending Zimmerman was tantamount to being a cartoon villain, thus it was an uphill battle against the left.
 
My nostalgia for the 2000s gets pretty overwhelming sometimes, I try to be more optimistic about the future, but sometimes some things from the 2000s seem downright magical to me today, you know what I mean?

I was watching an episode of James May's Toy Stories from 2009 (the first one about the model airplane) and looking back at England circa 2009, knowing what a horror show it is for the country today, it was genuinely painful.


To me the '00s seemed to go by somewhat "normal". The '10s went by pretty quick somehow (like I still think of the Wii U as a short-lived and recent system). Once 2020 hit, time seems to have hit the brakes. Early coronapanic with the TP shortage seems like quite a while ago, and 2019 almost seems exotic and ancient now.

2020 has been bizarre, I was reminded of something that happened just when the corona thing was taking off and it felt like a long time ago, like I can't believe it was just earlier this year.

Meanwhile there are now memories I have from 2019 that 100% feel genuinely nostalgic, including a music concert I went to in December of 2019, where dozens of people were sitting side by side and no one was wearing a mask.
 
I've mentioned this before in different threads (so forgive me for being redundant) but the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman thing under Obama was the Pandora's Box for woke culture and the downfall of race relations. I also distinctly remember the early 2010's and how people still had kind of a 90's/2000's vibe to them, and things didn't become all woke until the middle of the decade, right around the dawn of GamerGate. I used to follow Tumblr in 2010 or so just for porn and animated Gifs: back then, what we'd currently refer to as SJWs were completely nonexistent. The whole stereotype of feminists, furfags, and pan-demisexual genderfluid transracial otherkin making up the bulk of Tumblr wasn't a thing until some time after 2012, especially with the election kicking it into gear. I remember after Romney lost, Tumblr did this radical shift into posting almost exclusively pro-SJW shit ranging from hatred towards straight white men to circle jerking over Mitt Romney and normie conservatives being banished to the nether realms. Then in 2013 was when I personally remember woke culture spreading exponentially. It was all over Tumblr and Twitter by then, with everyone being increasingly pozzed.

Again, early Tumblr was just a stream of random pop culture shit including funny Family Guy Gifs, Doctor Who fanart, cool geeky Lego builds, and whatnot. This was kind of around the time of the early 2010's obsession with geek fandom and the whole "I fucking love science!" crowd being dominant in the media. Tumblr certainly reshaped into a cesspool of leftard culture warriors in late 2012/early 2013, which coincides with the rise of woke culture.

Aside from Trayvon's death and Romney's loss, a couple of other things events happened in 2012 which led to the rise of the woke left: The Aurora shooting and Sandy Hook. These two events saw a H U G E surge in anti-gun rhetoric in the media, with people all over the cancerous Twitters ranting about banning all guns and labeling the NRA as a white supremacist hate group. The latter shooting happened at an elementary school of all places, which gave fuel into the left's "muh children!" argument.

From a personal anecdote, at the job where I worked in 2012-2013 almost every coworker was a Democrat, an MSNBC viewer, and extremely anti-gun. I got the look of death when I confessed that I didn't vote for Obama and that I'm pro-gun. Around the dawn of woke culture it was trendy and chic to idolize Obama and to passionately advocate the total ban of guns. Seeing a black thug getting killed by a Latino white guy and having the president politicize it, followed by two mass shootings involving minors more than made leftists of all flavors feel like kings among men, as it seemed as if everyone was on their side. The Tea Party (and any conservative) in general was seen as fringe and laughable, and just the mere notion of questioning Obama, disagreeing with gun bans, or defending Zimmerman was tantamount to being a cartoon villain, thus it was an uphill battle against the left.

Rhetoric aside, gun ownership has actually increased massively over the last few years. Before Heller in 2008 the Supreme Court hadn't even ruled that banning handguns was against the constitution yet, and now we have tens of millions of guns sold every year.

https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/e...rs-after-august-record-gun-sales-remain-calm/

To contrast, there were more guns sold in the first 4 months of this year than the whole of 2001. There's never been a better time to be in that business.

I get the impression you probably spent a lot of time around upper middle class people, though, so you wouldn't have seen it as much.

It's weird, because the early 2010's seemed kind of hopeful at first. 2010 was fairly quiet with the only real major event in the US news cycle being the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the two big earthquakes in Haiti and Chile at the start of the year. 2011 was a year full of the weird and totally unexpected like the Osama Bin Laden raid, the Higgs Boson discoveries, the demise of Kim Jong Il, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street.

Really, 2010-2012 had this weird vibe where everyone had this sort of unwarranted optimism and an urge to try and make things better, which crashed and burned badly with the rise of the Woke Left.

Tellingly, all the really good elements of 2010's pop culture that weren't imported tended to be at the very start of the 2010's (Fallout: New Vegas, The Wolf of Wall Street, Mafia II, Breaking Bad's peak years) or near the very end (Joker, The Irishman, 1917)

I really do get this weird feeling that 2020 is not just the big game changer but could very well be the darkness before dawn. Give me all the rainbows you want for that, but I just have this weird hunch

Disagree on pop culture, some classic films like The Handmaiden and The Death of Stalin came out in the middle of the 2010s. Granted they weren't as massively commercially successful though.
 
I have from 2019 that 100% feel genuinely nostalgic, including a music concert I went to in December of 2019, where dozens of people were sitting side by side and no one was wearing a mask.
I think this coronapanic "GRANDMA-KILLING SUPERPLAGUE" - along with the endless riots "peaceful protests" - were likely man made (or escalated), coordinated by corrupt people in politics and positions of influence. They no doubt love that we're "muzzled" with face masks and can't assemble because "social distancing".

If this isn't just a conspiracy theory, then these jerks who forced the insanity that is Mega Clown World 2020 on us need to be voted out. And the commie regime of China needs to be removed.
 
I think this coronapanic "GRANDMA-KILLING SUPERPLAGUE" - along with the endless riots "peaceful protests" - were likely man made (or escalated), coordinated by corrupt people in politics and positions of influence. They no doubt love that we're "muzzled" with face masks and can't assemble because "social distancing".

If this isn't just a conspiracy theory, then these jerks who forced the insanity that is Mega Clown World 2020 on us need to be voted out. And the commie regime of China needs to be removed.

Imagine thinking governments are competent enough to do this without anyone realising.
 
2001 in fiction: Regular spaceflight by civilians, Moon colonization, and a manned mission to Jupiter. Followed by another manned mission in 2010, when Jupiter became a second sun which inspired world peace - and knowledge of life out there.

2001 in reality: The worst terrorist attack in history, leading to increasing paranoia and control. 10 years later during an endless recession (which is still ongoing), Occupy protests were thwarted by identity politics - leading to Clown World.

I think we're on the wrong timeline...

:thinking:
Yeah, it literally feels like this reality's one of those parallel universes they flick through in those sort of TV episodes.
Honestly a lot of fiction about the future in Sci-Fi was painfully naive so I am not surprised it fell apart in comparison with reality. They had a lot of "end-of-history" concepts like the UN unifying the earth into basically greater space USA, but the reality is such a union would lead to groups like the Chinese taking control so it is no surprise such concepts are starting to fade away now
 
I blame the internet being intertwined with real life, and social media giving everybody a place to develop the most retarded opinions and then spewing them all over the place.

Back in the year 2000, individual forums were just fringe groups, and you spent time doing things on the internet that were separated from real life.

In 2020, the internet is so ingrained with real life that most entertainment, networking, and communication takes place on it. People on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites tend to post extremely retarded shit and it bleeds into the real world.
 
Honestly a lot of fiction about the future in Sci-Fi was painfully naive so I am not surprised it fell apart in comparison with reality. They had a lot of "end-of-history" concepts like the UN unifying the earth into basically greater space USA, but the reality is such a union would lead to groups like the Chinese taking control so it is no surprise such concepts are starting to fade away now

One thing I actually liked about the early seasons of Futurama was that it parodied the trope of the UN unifying Earth under one government and the implication being that the United States more or less took control of the UN in the same way that China's been doing IRL or how Merkel's Germany more or less controls the EU.

But rather than a utopian "United Earth" common to sci-fi, everything's just as dysfunctional, corrupt, and moronic as it was before.

The 2000's prior to 2007 were honestly a good time compared to before, even with 9/11 and The War on Terror taken into account but then again a lot of that is probably just childhood nostalgia and rose-colored glasses.

I think with the Bush years specifically, a lot of people were convinced that we had to more or less wait out his presidency and the Democrats could return us back to a state of affairs closer to the 90's, at least on a certain level to a certain degree. The Great Recession more or less killed all hope of that and made the cynicism of the culture even worse, but in a different way.

The 2000's was cynical just like the 2010's were, but it was a different kind of cynicism. For the most part, 2000's cynicism was either nonchalant "whistling past the graveyard" nihilism or it was edgy "Sasuke Uchiha/Shadow the Hedgehog/Linkin Park AMV/let's break stuff!" angst and rage.

The cynicism of the 2010's was more of the pretentious "Mean Girls" mentality where you can't be sincere or "cool" and everything has to be cloaked in several layers of postmodern irony and snark. The Woke Left as a whole always has this pretentious aura to them, and the fact most of them are from an academic background doesn't help matters.

I've stated this before countless times, but I think the Religious Right has a lot to do with how the Woke Left came into existence and how they got so powerful by comparison. The fundies had been in play for so long (at least since Reagan's first term, probably since the late Carter years) and by 2000, were starting to decline. The rise of Bush and the surge of post-9/11 patriotism did help give them an unexpected shot in the arm to keep them going a few years but it also meant that they became increasingly tied to Bush and more hated by the rest of the country.

Really, the urbanist approach of the Woke Left and guys like MovieBob really comes across as the natural evolution of the Red States vs. Blue States/America vs. Dumbfuckistan mentality of the Bush years, especially after the 2004 election.

I also think a lot of the most rabid "true believer" SJW's that are White college kids tend to be the ones who grew up in the Bible Belt or in strict conservative families and envied the liberal blue states. Then they got to college, got indoctrinated and took to that like a duck to water because now they had their own cult to strike back. Hell, even the ones who don't get brainwashed in college will do what they can to move to a lefty city to get with the "in crowd" in the trendy deep blue coastal urban areas. MovieBob has this sentiment but never fully realized his dream, while ADF grew up in a conservative household and moved to the hipster part of Philadelphia as soon as he could before moving to the West Coast.

There's this eerie cultural revanchist mentality from White SJW's that makes me think a lot of them want to get back at their families and the areas they grew up in. Doubly so if they lived in a red state and triply so if it was a core region of the Bible Belt like Appalachia or the real deep South.

With black supremacist leftists, the revanchist mindset was always there but it's disturbing to see it from White SJW's and often they believe it with greater zeal and insanity than their black comrades. The whole thing feels like the newly converted Woke Leftist White kids are "born again" and want to get back at their parents and be vindicated by The Right Side of History.
 
Honestly a lot of fiction about the future in Sci-Fi was painfully naive so I am not surprised it fell apart in comparison with reality. They had a lot of "end-of-history" concepts like the UN unifying the earth into basically greater space USA, but the reality is such a union would lead to groups like the Chinese taking control so it is no surprise such concepts are starting to fade away now

So much of this thread is people who grew up in a delusional world of low quality genre fiction suddenly discovering reality and then wanting to un-invent half the modern world so they can regress into the womb. The idea of crewed missions to Jupiter in 2001 is not something that credible scientists would have seriously proposed at any point; the cost of access to space has gone down a lot over the past few years but I wouldn't expect anything like that until the 2030s or later. Return to the moon is planned for this decade with the Artemis programme, but anything that much further will take longer. Even just looking at a scale map of the solar system would suggest what a massive logistical feat that would be.

The same goes for politics. Super-UN world governments are not something that ever came close to happening in history.

Maybe if people read science and history books instead, or even actual literature (Pynchon captures the absurdity of modern politics in some ways), they would be more prepared for the way things are.
 
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