This has nothing to do with politics at all, just casual thoughts, I had to vent somewhere. Maybe it’s just me being a bit doomer or something, but my siblings, almost all of my friends and most of the people I know usually agree. You know how older people say that they miss 1980s for example, that’s basically how I view first half of 2010s for newer generation.
Everything was so much better then: internet, movies, TV shows, games, popular stuff, as for the internet, most of popular trash today was non existent including cringe ‘‘trends’’ etc, reddit wasn’t as popular and as talked about as today, there was Google+ and YouTube was best with Markiplier playing horror games being mainstream, Balkan YouTube being at it’s peak(anyone who is from countries of ex-Yugoslavia will know about what I’m talking about), Minecraft, GTA V, ARK Survival Evolved, Creepypastas, indie games, Pokemons everywhere, you name it. Movies were better and better every year (props to Cocaine Bear and few more recent movies which are actually good ofc), while today most of the movies are either boring sequels, ruining originals or terrible remakes, with newer games also doing the same thing.
It was 2017 when everything started going to shit on the internet, very early 2017 started good, but then in about mid 2017 everything changed: dramas and cringe trends started on internet, open racism on social media started becoming more frequent, people complaining about everything etc, reddit and TikTok becoming more popular, good social media getting shut down or ruined with updates, cringe games becoming popular while old ones including literal Minecraft went into irrelevancy(it came back later thankfully) etc.
And life was so much better then in general, not everyone was complaining and depressed irl, I remember every day after school going with siblings and friends on sports center across the street from school and spending whole day there. Today, it wouldn’t be even possible since almost everyone I know is depressed and very closed in, including new people I meet, everyone is basically just looking after themselves closed and not giving a shit about anyone or anything if you know what I mean. People are just becoming depressed shells more and more, what is up with that? Not so long ago before a few years, this would be unimaginable and here we are. I’m saying 2012-2016 since that was the best time imo. As I said, my siblings agree with me, most of my friends also but they just kind of don’t know why is that.
Does anyone else feel the same or similar about that time?
I definitely get what you mean.
I’ve been interested in politics since I was like 14—to the point of being an open communist and actually reading about fascism from a young age. I saw the occasional Nazi or racist crap here and there, but I put it all down to trolling or an extremely small number of crazies. By 2015 I had heard of sites such as Iron March (fascist website) but I just put that down to, again, a very small number of people.
Then 2016 hit.
I remember one film in particular, starring Daniel Radcliffe called Imperium, released a trailer by then. I decided to check it out on YouTube and, for some reason, I decided to read the comments. Aside from a fair few jokes like ‘You’re a Grand Wizard, Harry!’ which were pretty amusing, the comments were absolutely filled with white nationalist apologia with hundreds of upvotes.
Seeing that really shocked me, as I was so accustomed to seeing Nazis/racists/fascists getting shat on. I figured it was simply a joke, but some of the people engaging with the Nazis received entire essays full of racist bile, yet they were written by people who had a decent command of the English language—it blew the idea that Neo-Nazis were this tiny group of uneducated extremists out of my head.
In 2016 I heard about the dregs of the internet such as /pol/ as well as the rise of the ‘alt right’. Antifa getting condemned for punching Nazis. I genuinely couldn’t believe that people were defending the latter group, to the extent it had penetrated the mainstream. I remember even watching a video called ‘What is Fascism’ and the top comment, with thousands of votes, was saying ‘Fascism is coming back? Hell yeah!’ It became very difficult for me to enjoy some of the media I consumed. Extreme Metal is filled with Nazis, YouTube was recommending me far-right shit, fandoms I was in were riddled with them. And yet all everyone wanted to talk about was, at the time, the evil ‘SJWs’.
Of course this all coincided with some seminal events that have set a precedent for today’s even more divided politics. Migration crisis, Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, Hofer, you name it. Every country seemed to be experiencing a sharp rise in far-right rhetoric and every news article I read was filled with comments that would make Hitler blush. Every language-learning Discord server I joined had been infiltrated by mods who banned you over the slightest left-wing sentiment.
Things probably got to their worst point by 2017 as that was when the alt right was in full swing, the online left presence (even if it is shit now) was non-existent then, and even some prominent (I guess you could call them this) internet ‘celebrities’ such as JonTron and PewDiePie echoed far-right sentiments. Since then there’s been a lot more pushback, but far-right content was permitted for so long that it’s now become an incontrovertible part of every social media platform.
On a less political note, I do agree that 2017 was a massive cultural change for me. There is so much music I didn’t like from the early-2010s that sounds bittersweet to me now, because even though I never went out of my way to listen to them, those melodies are fresh in my head and I can even name who wrote them (most of the time) and say where I was when I heard these songs. After 2017, I could barely name a single song; nothing has ever stood out to me since then. I don’t want to sound like a gatekeeper, but all music today genuinely sounds the same to me with trap beats and mumble rap.
Not just music either, but take for example games, cartoons, anime and TV shows. Every game that gets released these days receives massive hate, massive controversy after taking ages to develop. When I think of games from the early 2010s and before, there seemed to be a wider variety of new ideas; a lot of what’s coming out now consists of sequels, remasters/remakes because they’re trying to hook on to that golden era. Quite a few shows I watched ended around 2017-19, and since then, there’s never really been anything to supplant them.
On the topic of memes, I find them pretty indigestible now. I can watch memes from early-2010s and before and still laugh, but a lot of them now don’t get much of a reaction from me.
I can’t tell whether the latter part is just me being an adult.
The thing is, the politics was non-existent for me and many people I know back then. me and my siblings literally only knew about Tito and SFRY when older people talk about it and that Putin is president of Russia, that’s it. So I don’t know for any of that.
You said it perfectly, massive cultural change, music is cringe today, literally not a single memorable song after Despacito, movies are worse, either shitty sequels, ruining originals or remakes, as for TV shows, we had Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones(before it turned to shit with season 8) back then, Pokemons being popular, animes such as Danganronpa, Yu-Gi-Oh, Naruto etc being popular and animes being wholesome as opposed to whatever it is today, not a single game worth playing since 2017, many indie horror games which were promising and hyping to be good, turned out trash and often marketed towards little kids, big games being hyped and then rushed, then complaining 24/7 about them, milking and shitting on OGs with countless pointless sequels and unnecessary updates, you name it. Social media becoming cancer and ruined, cringe stuff overtaking, people complaining about everything, cancel culture, Twitter…
That’s what I’m thinking about memes, I see early 2010s meme I saw countless times and still laugh, new memes are as funny as rock.
It’s a fact that 2017 onward everything went downhill.
I think part of this also has to do with your age. We all tend to have nostalgia for and perceive the cultural media of our formative years as having been somehow better at the time, and as we move into adulthood we have the impression of a decline having taken place. If you grew up in the 90s, especially in the West, you would have said that the late 90s, early 00s were the golden age of video games. I remember having the same thoughts in 2010 that you are having now, i was disappointed with the direction that video games were taking and wished they could go back to what they were earlier. In hindsight it is quite obvious that i was associating these games with a simpler time in my life when i had less to worry about and was more oblivious of what was going on in the world.
The same happens with other media like movies/tv. And the entertainment industry has figured out that they can capitalize for instance on 80s nostalgia with shows like Stranger Things. Those who grew up in the 80s absolutely idolize that time despite the fact that in many ways it was a total shitshow of a decade in which the lower classes were being ruined by Reaganite/Thatcherite neoliberalism while the rich were riding a high wave of enthusiasm at having succeeded in dismantling the postwar social democratic consensus. What is going on in society as a whole is always reflected in the culture and arts as well, in movies, tv shows, and later video games, these all strongly tend to match the Zeitgeist of the time.
Not quite since I was already missing that time only a year later after 2017, decline is 100% there. Some of us are still kids and we still miss it. Movies now mostly ruin originals or are boring, there. 1980 were good from what I hear until 1989 obviously, movies and media was best during that time, 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s were the golden age for most of the genres, that doesn’t make early 1990s good of course.
As I said a few times, this is all ignoring the politics since previous decade was shit from the beginning, why do we have to count politics in deciding whether or not internet, movies, TV shows and games were better then?
As i said, you cannot ignore politics in this discussion since politics infiltrates everything. Media is part of the superstructure of society and is influenced to an enormous degree by the material basis. Media reflects the general mood of the time and developments in the political and economic spheres. For instance have you noticed how the rise of the gig economy coincided with the general adoption of predatory monetization practices in video games like DLC and micro-transactions? Or the trend of relying more on established franchises, sequels, prequels, spinoffs, etc. rather than inventing original new material which is due to the tightening of profit margins forcing corporate producers of movies, shows and video games to take less risks and go with the “safe” option.
As Marxists we do not look at one element of society in isolation, we take a holistic view and look at the interactions of all the various parts of the system.
Yes but the thing is that I didn’t know shit back then about politics until like mid-late 2019 and still loved and missed that time as I still do now. And always hated exploiting the greatness of older movies to death with sequels, remakes etc.
You know what’s funny? I had the exact same in mind with regards to Despacito in 2017. I was never a real big fan of the song, but it’s probably the last real song that fits into the aforementioned bracket of ‘songs I heard and can remember where I was when I heard them’.
And even though there are games that have come out I really enjoy, I find it extremely difficult to get into games these days. I often find myself playing games pre-2017. The only real exception to that was Red Dead Redemption 2, but again, that was a sequel to a concept that already existed. That said, it did take that universe to whole new heights, and had a much different feel; it didn’t feel as Western as the first one, ironically, in spite of its earlier setting. Not a criticism by any means however.
I’ve definitely fallen behind on what’s ‘current’. I don’t even use TikTok at all, yet I know it’s probably the most popular social media now. For the longest time I was confined to just Facebook which appears to have gained status as popular amongst boomers now.
2017 was before my last year of actual ‘school’, so I was still within the same environment I had been until my last year. 2017 was the year of this massive cultural change for me, and it certainly hasn’t helped that my early 20s have been entirely dominated by the Covid pandemic.
Fr, I just play classics before 2017, in early 2017, there were many promising horror games which were coming out and all of them turned out to be disappointment when they came out, because they were marketed towards little kids instead of going with original plans, story etc. No memorable songs past 2017, just few dozen good movies and nothing new interesting.
Same with social media, it’s either shit or old ones got deleted or ruined with updates.