The Aughts (The 2000s, 2000-2009)

Is it useful to think about decades as a thing anymore?

Did the oughts have characteristics that make it noteworthy as a decade? What's the difference between the '00s and the '90s? I have a pretty clear idea of what we've decided the '80s were, culturally speaking. I'm not really sure about the '00s, though. Of course there's our growing dependence on the internet. The Coalition of the Willing murdered a lot of people in the name of fighting terrorism. I'm sure 9/11 figures in to any portrait of the time.

But what does the first decade of the 21st century mean to you? What was unique about the world in that era? What are the cultural attributes that will be attached to it when we look back? Which people will stand in as symbols of the era? How will we differentiate between the 2000s and the 2010s?

At some point I guess I disengaged from most of the music and media I liked in that era. Nostalgia-free, but still out of date. I'm sure for others it was a golden age filled with timeless memories? What do you think?

terrorism, internet, total economic and ecological destruction

that about covers it

reality tv

in general terms it was the worst period I have lived through to-date. (on a personal level there were lots of great things but no one cares about me)

MP3s

The oughts were definitely a thing, but like most musical/cultural ers they didn't properly start and end 2000-2009. Musically speaking, and on a personal level, my milestones tend to start around 2001/2002 with the rise of electroclash and things like 2Many DJs and DFA ushering in a new phase of music that appealed to dance music and rock fans alike, but somehow didn't try in quite the same way to hybridise these as say big beat did. The oughts end some time around mid-2012 with the eventual demise of dubstep.

i have read on the internet there is a device that stores cheese sandwiches in a warmed state

The normalization of:
1) Debt
2) The digital self and the physical self as overlapping identities.

In a big way 9/11 and its aftermath seemed to loom over and define the decade in nearly every way. That and the economic crash, in retrospect, were responsible for a hell of a lot.

But also, yeah, I started university in 1999. I was seeing a girl who wanted a mobile phone for her birthday and I just couldn't fathom why anyone who wasn't a business exec would need one. Within a year, everyone seemed to have a mobile and a year after that, not having one seemed unimaginable. Same with broadband internet - my uni halls were the first to have a T3 line installed and it was revolutionary for me. By the time I'd left uni in 2002 broadband was a thing, as were iPods and DVDs - all those things were brand new or not really on the market when I started university 3 years earlier. So that short moment felt pivotal when it came to home technology in a way that I can't really remember any other time being in living memory.

I found this thread helpful: http://personalitycafe.com/generation-z-forum/451930-3-types-2000s-kids-one-you.html

I have a theory that if you're British and you want to work out if you're Gen X or Y, just describe what mental image flashes up when you hear the word 'terrorist'.

i don't really associate ecological destruction specifically with the 00s, it's a default 20th century and beyond thing.
like we're not just indiscriminately dumping garbage and toxins into bodies of water anymore.

uh yes we are

was gonna say

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/21/313157701/why-those-tiny-microbeads-in-soap-may-pose-problem-for-great-lakes

But what does the first decade of the 21st century mean to you? What was unique about the world in that era? What are the cultural attributes that will be attached to it when we look back? Which people will stand in as symbols of the era? How will we differentiate between the 2000s and the 2010s?

These questions are so much harder to answer for the 00s than any other decade. Hell, I can't believe we're already halfway through the next decade. Anyway, grime and crunk and reggaeton.

It'll get clearer as, say, Coldplay tropes and the Obama HOPE font and skinny jeans become outdated.

beginning of the end, in earnest

Omg i love this thread

uh yes we are

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, April 22, 2015 2:24 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

was gonna say

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/21/313157701/why-those-tiny-microbeads-in-soap-may-pose-problem-for-great-lakes

― sleeve, Wednesday, April 22, 2015 2:56 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol you're right, i'm wrong, absolutely nothing's changed, certainly no new laws or anything *dumps several tons of chemicals into the missouri river with impunity*

like, there's a difference between a) not giving a fuck about where shit goes and b) tiny microbeads in soap

again, i apologize, i guess the word "indiscriminately" has too many syllables

and regardless, environmental destruction is anything but a distinctly 00s problem. though i remember hearing some science guy on npr say how the bush43 years were our "last chance" to save the earth or something

*hops back on high horse, rides off into cloud of smog*

http://prblog.typepad.com/strategic_public_relation/images/time_person_of_year_2006.jpg

there is something really kind of poetic to how accurately decades are delineated, i think - like obviously by definition the divisions are arbitrary, are mathematical, but they're also just not; there are so many instances of almost-perfectly-synchronous arcs coinciding with decades. like thatcher & reagan are '79 & '81 & they just are the eighties, they're the punctuation. 9/11. people talking about whatever ended the sixties. really interesting to think about.

anyway i checked &
oughts (2000 - 2009): the birth of podcasts
teens: (2010 - 2019)"the podcast renaissance"

89 with the Berlin Wall / end of communism.

ha, i was going to pick the "You" cover.

2000s for me as an American is so fundamentally "the Bush administration" in all its horrible and grindingly depressing aspects - it's the War on Terror, the Iraq War, the Fox News era, Katrina, this sense that everybody but my little leftie liberal arts bubble had gone completely insane and nobody was listening. This sort of misses the opening years of the decade (which I think are more 90s in pop-cultural flavor anyway - we've discussed a 99-01ish "interzone" on some threads before, pop-music-wise), and the closing ones of the economic crash, which I'm happy to consign to the 2010s. So the 2000s could be a kinda "short" decade versus the "long" 70s and 90s.

Pop-culture-wise, it's way too soon to evaluate because a lot of the stuff that seems least consequential right now is hiding in front of our noses and will be what's ABSOLUTELY parodied and Halloween-costumed in a few short years' time. I really don't think we can identify it yet. Still, a few reference points:

Survivor and its long 'reality' aftermath,
the rise of Youtube, the rise of social networking generally, the demise of the web-as-novelty replaced with the internet-as-continuous-plaque-filling-in-all-gaps-in-daily-life
return of the big, epic-type film, thanks to cheaper and better CGI and the phenomenal success of the LOTR films (and to a lesser extent the Star Wars prequels) - we will look back at this like Star Wars heralding the blockbuster
high-concept HBO type TV (Sopranos, Six Feet Under, etc., etc.)
Atkins diets?
Harry Potter (spanning back into the 90s but this got HUGE in the USA right around 1999/2000)
Ashton Kutcher
Rihanna
maybe other things

* Henry Darger, Anish Kapoor
* dominance of Pixar and Dreamworks, with Disney way out in the margins
* publications' dot-coms become more important than print versions
* "blogger" as profession; personal blogs retreat to Facebook updates and topic-based blogspots and wordpresses replace personal diarylands and livejournals
* superhero movies as a 'thing,' from X-Men through Spider-Man to Dark Knight
* bad pirate/ninja humor (maybe not yet bacon?)
* installation art comprised of a million little self-similar doodads, especially if they have sensors and tiny motors to respond in Deleuzian waves to presence of visitors
* architecture of taut-skinned patterns over solid forms seemingly cut from blue foam in the studio (OMA, later work of Herzog & de Meuron)
* earnest and poppy side of indie goes mainstream - "Float On," the Shins
* Johnny Depp schtick films
* the DVD, the iPod, new ubiquity of laptops
* pre-Youtube, post-broadband internet multimedia humor, viewed around someone's desk rather than shared over social media: Homestarrunner at the apex, then those GI Joe videos, YTMND, Arnold prank call soundboards, and at the lowest, College Humor
* Project Runway, Top Chef
* video games: Halo, GTAs, the Sims, intensely realistic sports series, and Big Buck Hunter machines. pixel-art indie stuff is more 2000s I think

https://remembertheaughts.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/craft_final_cover.jpg

What's a good name for the current decade? The 2010s? (Don't say "shit," too easy.)

2000s was when we finally tipped into post-Orwellian nihilism. By the time it was revealed that Big Brother is always watching the surveillance state had become commonplace and banal. Culturally it was copies of copies (at it always is) but the filters and methods are getting more and more accurate while being more and more superficial. If I listen to a 90s band that is trying for a 60s sound it will sound like a 90s band, even with those style markers, the recording quality will sound a certain way, maybe the drum beat will have some slack swing to it, etc. I think retro acts in the 2000s started to really sound like they were recorded back in the day. Maybe the right digital filters were invented or ppl just got better at faking the approach. This goes for video as well, where our ability to mimic the past (desaturation, RGB offsetting, noise, etc.) has gotten so good that Instagram Filters are a mainstream in-joke.

reissue labels

By the time it was revealed that Big Brother is always watching the surveillance state had become commonplace and banal

the mistake that stands out the most in 1984 is the idea that the state would find it necessary to actually prevent you from turning off your telescreen: what a clumsy, inelegant approach to totalitarianism

on further reflection I think I'd go ahead and run the Oughts right from 9/11 through the end of 2010. might as well get the economic disaster, Deepwater Horizon, the health care fight and the Tea Party in there, basically just one big bummer of a decade. the more time passes, the more the period when i was genuinely hopeful that obama's election actually meant something, anything was changing (in the culture at large, if not administratively) seems to collapse to maybe twelve to eighteen hours, max.

the upshot was that i really tuned out on the world at large (while resenting myself for doing so) after the iraq war began, and back in my little bubble, had an alternately really groovy time (undergrad and afterwards, hangin' around) and pretty blah wasteland time (grad school years, wasted youth, waiting tables). come to think of it i think a lot of this bummer attitude finally crystallized while waiting said tables, clearing the remains of holiday inn skillets and glancing up at the news at 7:30, oh look, they still haven't plugged the leaking oil. maybe they never will. at least they left me a dollar.

When the decade opens with Bush vs. Gore it's really setting the bar low.

It was pretty cool the Pixies and My Bloody Valentine got back together, never really saw that coming.

I would end the oughts with the Arab Spring, which was the first real massive demonstrations that used all the new tools of the aughts but also expressed anger at how inequality exploded in the past 3 decades.

Discussion of late 90s/early 00s musical interzone/"transitional period" was here: The song that represents the END of the 90s

There was lots in the 00s that was great and precious to me tbh, but I almost don't want to type it up. I remember, back in the Oughts, the VH1 series "I Love the 80s" and its ilk were big, and my roommate and I discussed the likelihood that at some point in the near future, "I Love the 00s" would be forced upon us, and it would get everything totally distorted and wrong just like always, and it would still be Dee Snider talking about stuff, and at some point he'd start rambling about how back in the Oughts everybody loved this show "I Love the 80s." So I sort of feel like if the people making that future show are reading this thread I don't want them to take my treasures and sully them.

What's a good name for the current decade? The 2010s? (Don't say "shit," too easy.)

― dow

The Teens

The roaring tenties

I was reading the wikipedia page for '2000s (decade)', and all the decades up to the 2090s already have their own wikipedia pages! mostly made up of stuff like this:

2096[edit]
Events in Leprechaun 4: In Space take place.

Ha

http://nme.assets.ipccdn.co.uk/images/84_SufjanStevens_L050406.gallery.jpg

* people having Gmail rather than "real" email addresses; SMTP and POP retreat to obscurity

* mix CDs

Decades aren't symmetrical, as it's been said many times, so my oughts begin in early '02 and probably ended in '11 or '12, after which I sensed a change in thinking about art and my relation to the world. Also, the sudden improvement in men's hair styling and clothing (hi, hair gel and skinny pants!) makes '11 a good signpost.

external hard drives

ffs it's "aughts"

it oughta be

things that feel 'decade-ey' about "the oh oh's" five years out to me:

pop music of the first half of the decade: its already happening but 00's themed dance parties will be a thing just as 80's or 90's one are
emo, screamo & associated haircuts, hot topic: everyone's forgotten about it but it was a huge part of youth culture
myspace.com
idk why but iced lattes? lol. did those exist in the 90's
the partic indie aesthetic spanned by like wes anderson, the decemberists

that one run of MF Doom albums

It's all about DFA records.

mf doom is a good call

sorry flopson

my first decade on my own away from my parents, lots and lots and lots of partying, the end of MTV ever showing any music videos, LOST, new Dr. Who, 30 Rock, It's Always Sunny, the Star Wars prequels (and subsequent penultimate expression of George Lucas's solitary vision for Star Wars (meaning in 35 years they will study The Phantom Menace as a new Plan 9 From Outer Space)), pointless wars and wiretapping and torturing and basically the US doing everything it can to destroy any shred of integrity in line w what i was taught our country was about as an impressionable youth, playing in a bunch of bands, getting on david letterman, going to egypt, going inside the great pyramid at giza and hearing that endless reverb, living in an apartment with a rooftop pool for a while, having two cars totaled by wreckless drivers on the same road, lots of failed relationships, building up a pretty rad occult book collection, continuing my vinyl collection (mostly thrift stores, $1 or less(i have like 500 records now i think)), living in a dozen different places, playing in 30+ bands, working a late-night shift at The Majestic Diner in East Atlanta the day after some crazy guy smashed a guitar over someone's head just outside the restaurant, playing the High Museum with a telephone i modded with my dad to have a 1/4" jack that could go through a guitar amp, playing a bunch of shows with a TV doing Nam June Paik-style feedback in an act called NTSC, seeing first-hand the pyramids of the black ufo cult in South Georgia, blacking out halfway through a show where i played drums for an hour, playing theremin next to a guy with a chainsaw and King Khan holding a pig's heart, etc.

alice the snorg tees girl in an i "love lamp" tee shirt is as good a summation as anything

j. OTM

great post AB; feel like you used the 2000s a little better than i did tbh

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/01/04/what-do-you-call-it

we were all really upset about the Bush administration in the aughts, now endless war is just not even worth arguing about

feel like we're trying to come up with another verse for "Positive Jam"

I spent the aughts going from age 10 to 21 so that's like my entire adolescence, upon which I tend to reflect "man I was depressed for a lot of that"

* the Daily Show with John Stewart being seen as key and relevant
* comics for bohemians and grownups, much-heralded in the 90s but generally confined to underground status, become ubiquitous - Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes at Borders, Fun Home, Scott Pilgrim, cool kids with broader non-nerd hobbies reading and recommending lengthy manga series, etc.
* being a "foodie," being into design/typefaces, being into high-quality and/or microbrewery beer. all things that obviously have long existed for some subset of those with money, but i feel like in the 2000s these got big with people who in other decades would have given more attention to hi-fis, cars, and other things on which you might spend money or read articles
* Sacha Baron Cohen
* non-bubble (i.e. what will actually make the "decade" shows and halloween costumes): American Idol

oxys

Brooklyn, writers named Jonathan, Brooklyn writers named Jonathan.

delineation between 2000s and 2010s might be that at some point in the last few years, a basic understanding of the current events of today, whether trivial or important, somehow became expected of all of us. at least it feels that way. so many of the headlines on information outlets, large and small, are self-referential or assume a familiarity with the topic at hand.

almost as if the plea to just "google it" that used to proliferate more widely have finally been internalized (at least by most of us)

I have no idea what the aughts were to me (outside of depressing political stuff). I feel like expanses of time have been more difficult to delinneate or sum up as shared culture (or 'culture') has slowly fizzled away. There hasn't been a Thrillers or a final episode of M*A*S*H to unite us for some time now.

The last episodes of Friends, Frasier, and Everybody Loves Raymond were all pretty big.

American Idol dominated the overall '00s tv ratings.

in the UK: going to university because you want to learn vs going to university so you can get a job.

decent into plutocracy
mainstreaming of indie

digitisation of any/all content for personal consumption / globalisation of everything would be the two defining/most interesting characteristics impo. the earnest fashion for declaiming that your generation invented/perfected cruelty/war/environmental destruction/idiocy/poverty/corruption/discrimination is the least interesting characteristic that ppl seem to think was emblematic but rly wasnt

American Idol OTM

* the Bourne films
* Fight Club and V For Vendetta take over as signifiers of iconoclastic cool among high school seniors, et al.

Who were the most bankable stars in the 2000? I was thinking Russell Crowe but then I looked over his filmography and apparently I imagined that. Maybe the peak of Clooney as movie star but obviously he has a strong 90s presence.

Pitt at start, Damon/clooney axis, depp at end, Downey Jr since, maybe?

jolie throughout, maybe?

Emma Watson's films averaged 900mil in box office :)

Ornaldo Bloomps' aughts films grossed $6.5 billion

- Social interactions fully transactional - whether it's likes, RTs, whatever.
- Economy(ies) at event horizon where 100% of financial movements occur in One Percenter land. In terms of economic significance, the rest of us are as important and tolerated as picnic ants.

Oh man, Will Ferrell will be in there for sure - Old School, Elf, Anchorman, Talladega Nights - none of those have gone away at all. Ben Stiller also did shockingly well for himself, with Zoolander, Dodgeball, Along Came Polly... and both of the first two Meet the Parents films - inexplicably - were top ten for their years, as was Night at the Museum (!).

I guess it was nice that comedies could still even make the list back then - that's actually a big shift in the 2000s that might go unmarked by history. Now it's all big epics, superheroes, and animated things, and so far in the 2010s the only essentially comic top ten grossers are Men in Black III, which is borderline action/scifi, and The Hangover II. From 2001 to 2010 there's My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Men In Black II, Bruce Almighty, Meet the Fockers, Hitch, Night at the Museum, The Simpsons Movie, Mamma Mia!, Hancock (really?), The Hangover... plus non-CGI-blockbuster-style action and adventure pictures like Ocean's Eleven and Twelve, Mr. and Mrs Smith, Bad Boys II, I Am Legend, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and Minority Report, and odd things like Signs and Passion of the Christ... none of which I can imagine making the top list today. Not saying any of those are precious underdog gems crushed by the blockbuster onslaught - - - just that what kind of thing makes a blockbuster has shifted, though this also has to do with the growing Asian market, etc.

Brokeback Mountain, Avatar, and Passion of the Christ for "event" films, btw.

nolan killed light cinema the bastard

Jackson and Gore Verbinski, as much or moreso.

Thing that sticks out as most different to me was the existence of Borders. I used to spend a lot of time there, amazed by the variety of magazines and wondering who on earth read them all (I can't help but think the magazine selection killed them more than books, cafe, films and music). I remember a point where there must have been like 6 or 7 magazines about vintage monster movies on the go. Shitloads of arty fashion magazines. Also remember seeing a fascinating magazine about cutting edge theatre set design.
Remember in the early 00s looking in the classics section and most of them were £1.50, this truly shocked me but it wasn't long before most of them were raised to regular book prices.

MySpace definitely.

2010s will be noted for the atomization of culture fostered by the internet

orange and teal

Although Fellowship of the Ring felt like the first true 21st century blockbuster. Maybe a case for Gladiator, but it feels more like a late-90s film by comparison.

Radiohead and globalisation [Started by Billy Dods in September 2001