I don’t quite feel that way. Seemed like the same mediocre quality of entertainment. People try to explain to me why Marvel sucks now, why Star Wars sucks now, why music sucks now but as far as I’m concerned if those things suck now they sucked in the first half of the 2010s too. (Interestingly enough I was just discussing with my partner how they think cocaine bear is an unwelcomed return to the last decade.)

I do not miss watching family guy or south park. I will admit that some music from that time is nostalgic in the way that any dad rock is. And many things like post-9/11 and post 2008 melancholy, black fishing, orientalism, white feminism, demobiliizing ideologies, and rape culture are still front in center as if the clock hasn’t ticked a second.

I remember being abused by restaurants and wearing a hazmat suit for $9 an hour throughout the whole decade and that sucked way waaay more for me then than going to school during Covid. I know that is not everyones experience however. I’m now aware of things that are making a positive impact on the world, I’m more educated, more grounded, and maybe a bit more self aware. I would not really enjoy reliving the 2010s because I’d just be waiting to get back to now. I’d feel like how I think the young people around me seel today feeling out what their lives will be like. I feel done with that and I don’t miss it.

GamerGirl incident and the explosion of alt-right with Sargon of Akkad, Tim Pool, Trump and the likes killed most of it around 2015-16. The effects started to be seen around 2017 correctly as you observe. Chans like 4chan, 8chan, 2ch and the likes were intact until then, and there was almost no obsession with destruction of internet history, or as much Twitter cancel culture as there is now.

I think this carefree-ness is celebrated so much because most of us who remember it, lived these times until we became adults, and as the last of millenials or the earliest zoomers, enjoyed arguably the best childhood to pre-adult spanning years in human history.

To add a little to this time span celebrated so much, I would say 2007-2012 was even better in this regard. However, as we now know, life is a lot more than the little fantasy world we lived in as kids or young adults, and we just did not see, feel and understand the horrors of western capitalist entities and infrastructure behind this fantasy world playground we enjoyed so much. It was our circus in the “bread and circus”.

To me this is all a symptom of the underlying disease which is the long crisis of capitalism that started in 2008 and has been kicked into overdrive since around 2016. When the material economic base of society starts to crumble sooner or later so does the cultural superstructure, the arts included. As profit margins shrink corporations, even the pseudo-monopolies, are forced to resort to ever more scummy means of making money. At the same time the worsening material conditions also result in an increase in the toxicity and polarization of the societal discourse as people seek to blame everything but the system itself.

Of course the early 2000s should not be romanticized as they were also not a time when things were exactly going great, there is a reason why the 2008 crash happened, and going back a bit further, the 90s weren’t all that the nostalgia would have you believe either, even in the West where there was a massive infusion of cheap goods from the opening up of China, as well as the cheap energy, resources and virtually free wealth from the cannibalizing of the former Soviet Union and the almost complete opening up of much of the global south to unopposed neo-colonial plundering… there were still deep socio-economic problems that were being papered over by the general enthusiasm that came with the illusion that capitalist imperialism had won.

All of this is a product of the inherent contradictions of capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal form, culminating in inevitable crashes, each subsequent one being worse than the last and each permanently damaging the economic health of the system, leaving more and more people in a more precarious state than they were before. The general socioeconomic malaise then manifests as various cultural pathologies such as those that you describe. These are all signs of a system and a model of society in terminal decline. In places like China where there is a positive trajectory the mood is the exact opposite: a general political consensus, a flourishing culture and social harmony.

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.

once corporations noticed the profitability of the internet, they wanted in on it, to make profit through it.

the fastest way to make money through something is that people use it more than anything, make them mad and looking at drama, to increase conflict so you have to see a 12 part analysis on why did [important youtuber] fucked his cat or whatever. its a process that was happening even before 2012, the fact that it wasnt obvious then does not mean it wasnt happening.

youre also experiencing nostalgia of a time you were unburdened by a lot of things. gamergate was fairly big by then.

it couldnt have happened any other way.

now you can just hope that someone tries to revive that atmosphere in a obscure mastodon instance or something. https://sadgrl.online/ is a site that helps with learning to do website stuff if you want to make a little shrine of those times. hope this helps

Could very well be the case for you personally. Cherish those moments instead of looking back on them with rage towards current day life. Don’t let your anger spoil the moments you made.

Things did change, yes, although I used to draw the line around 2014. And not just for political reasons either

You’re not alone. I also wish for a way to experience the Pre-2015 internet again. I wonder if Chinese Internet has a similar atmosphere due to China putting corporates on a leash, unlike the west

I definitely agree with you, maybe not on the same timeline, but the phenomenon itself definitely exists. I think it is a mixture of the current social conditions and also our stages in brain development that create these times in our heads where things were much “better.”

I think there comes with life an inherent nostalgia for certain epochs of our lives, no matter how shit they were in reality. I can remember times in my life where I was completely miserable, yet I still look at the past with rose-colored glasses. This is not to invalidate the way you feel at all, it may have just been objectively better for you at that time. I’m just saying personally, this phenomenon happens for me regardless of the circumstances and I only realized it after taking a deep look at what went down in my life and how I feel about my life now.

I think you should, like others said, cherish those moments because (as hard as this is to hear and accept) they are never coming back. Focus on creating a better future for yourself and society today, make these moments now a memory for future you to enjoy (I think that makes sense).

<3

Edit: this is not saying at all that things did not change. They absolutely did. I’m just saying these changes happen throughout human history and it’s more a matter of where we are in our lives that determine how big the blow is to our psyche

Get more historical context and you’ll see this pattern is endemic to society. Where you draw the line has more to do with your age due to neural development stages than it has to do with actual social history. Cringe trends go back centuries. Storytelling trends evolve every year. Values are expressed in greater and greater levels of symbolism.

It’s not the years in history. It’s the years in you

no, the current dark age started between 2005-2007 with the rise of twitter and facebook and the release of the iphone