What can you say about a decade that doesn’t even have a widely accepted name. What did we ever decide to call the decade that contained the years 2000-2009? The aughties? The naughties? The early 2000’s? None of those terms even comes close to evoking what those years were like. The decade’s morphological challenges are indicative of its core values; confusion, complexity, decline.
This was the decade where the future finally arrived. We danced in the streets in the wee hours of January 1st, 2000 as the much hyped Y2K dematerialized. An election was stolen. Our nation was directly attacked in a shocking act of terror. The president responded with unprecedented unilateral preemptive action abroad while placing the most invasive policies in this nation’s history on the American people. The world's information was indexed by Google and Wikipedia. Millions of people worldwide embraced modes of production that allowed them to broadcast their every thought and action through blogs and social media. Levees broke. Cities flooded. American citizens were cast out into the streets. Our economy finally broke down, maybe permanently. We elected the first African American President of the United States.
On a personal level the past 10 years have been some of the most difficult and rewarding of my life. I passed from the simple naivety of my mid 20’s into the bittersweet reality of my mid 30’s. Along the way I got married, survived a Hurricane and the subsequent flooding, advanced my career, made a ton of work, scribbled obsessively, sired a child, and I read, watched, ate, viewed & listened to thousands of amazing things.
Over the next few weeks I’ll post some of my favorite cultural ephemera from the past 10 years. These artifacts were my constant companions through all of these crazy and amazing years.
It’s been a wild ride.
