The feel of the 2010's

linebaugh

linebaugh

Well-known member
Was it an ambiguous decade? Or does does it not have the privlege of being so old that its comftorabley categorized like the aughts?

People might say its the trump decade but that doesnt feel right. The 2020's feel like the trump decade and it feels like the 2020's started sometime around 2016, the same way 'the long sixities' started in 1955.
 
linebaugh

linebaugh

Well-known member
When i think of the 10s i think first of indie music. That comes immediately and most strongly. I also think of facebook, instagram and twitter.
 
maxi

maxi

Well-known member
Eric andre/nathan fielder/louis ck in comedy, block letter memes, avocado, death of the book and attention spans, nitrous oxide balloons
 
maxi

maxi

Well-known member
me too, austerity, nicki minaj, miley cyrus, 'sex positive', mindfulness, emergence of cancel culture, 50 shades of grey, pre-sober gucci mane, young thug, smart joggers, deep tech
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Photographing your food before you eat it. Conspiracy theories going mainstream. Cold War 2.0. Brexit. Everyone except a few nutters accepting the inevitability of catastrophic climate change.
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
It was a decade without "a feel"

Interesting topic, because to some degree the tangible feeling of distinct "decades" seemed to disintegrate after the millennium, but maybe it didn't.

Looking back on the noughties now there is a distinction to it which was not that obvious at the time. In the 90s, everything was defined by not being the 1980s, it was obvious, you could feel it very clearly. Also, it was obvious, on 9/11, that all of that was over. But still, even then culturally nothing really seemed that different from before. There was no tangible shift from the late 90s to the early 00s, everything was just a glossier or more brutal continuation. Only later on could you distinguish the atmospheres and parameters that marked the noughties off from the 90s and the 2010s.

I think that the 2010s symbolically started on Sept 15 2008, when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. If that's the case, when did the 2020s begin? In 2016, with the twin ruptures of Brexit and Trump, or with the Year Zero of the Pandemic and George Floyd? Like @linebaugh, I would go for 2016. This means that the 2010s actually run from 2008 to 2016, a slender, brittle interregnum.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Mr. Tea said:
Mumford/Sheeran as the Blur/Oasis of austerity Britain. Food banks the new norm. Entire permanent tribes of homeless on every high street.

A student bar in Oxford called 'Big Society' (no, really).

Bullingdon Club revelations. Burning fifty quid in front of a tramp. Squeal, piggy!

Empire nostalgia. The ubiquity of Victoriana in branding. Nothing is allowed to be British without being Great British.

Steampunk tweeness. The Wallace and Gromitification of the industrial revolution. Brunel's cigar photoshopped out so as not to give the kiddiwinks any ideas. Young teens used as smack couriers while Rory Stewart parties like it's 1899.

Peaky Blinders. Flat caps, neckerchiefs, plus-fours, waistcoats. Full beards and curly moustaches. Royal Navy tats on nice soft lads with Russell Group degrees. Thirty types of gin in Wetherspoons. Plans for post-Brexit economy based on cheese, biscuits, jam. The word 'provender' dusted off after centuries of disuse. Bath chaps on pub menus. CAMRA, the WI and Soil Association each acquire a paramilitary wing.

Injury: Windrush immigrants told to go "home".
Insult: Jamie's "jerk rice".
Click to expand...
 
maxi

maxi

Well-known member
Yeah there are a lot of things that straddle the late 2000s and first half of 2010s that make that feel like more of a distinct era. facebook, pre-puritanical twitter, rihanna, dubstep, judd apatow movies, robopop, breaking bad, political apathy

2007-08 is also when smartphones emerged and the internet became fully ubiquitous day-to-day, setting up the next decade
 
pattycakes_

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
The marriage of tech and lifestyle.

By the end of the 00s smart phones and Facebook had really blown up. They came out closer to mid 00s, but they didn't take off right away. First iPhone in 2007 flopped.

Maxi just beat me as I was typing, but these are key developments. Everyone being online is when the serpent really started swallowing it's tail and widespread narcissism became normalized. Also marks the end of decade long eras having a vibe. Everything started to congeal and dematerialize.

Can only imagine a net/tech backlash getting us out of this.
 
pattycakes_

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Lots of mask off stuff thanks to the net. Whistleblowing, Wikileaks, Snowden, Assange. General corruption and skullduggery getting exposed more than ever and then all too often not much coming of it. Adam Curtis' international events never resolving themselves the way they used to in the good old days.
 
maxi

maxi

Well-known member
2020 onwards also has kind of a distinct feel though and by the end of the decade the 2020s may seem like much more of a thing.

of course covid, work-from-home era and entrenched atomisation, gen Z on tik tok & onlyfans and their overall emergence and weirdness, corporate D&I, teeth reshaping, twitter as "X", death of clubbing, extreme heat waves, an end to the hope that was symbolised in the late 2010s by bernie sanders/corbyn/greta thunberg, a return to apathy in class politics
 
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