# Were the 2010s a blur?



## ToroidalBoat (Jul 29, 2021)

I've mentioned it before, but it seems like the 2010s were a blur to me. Events and trends of the early 2010s still seem recent - like that 3D TV craze or this site changing from "CWCki Forums" to "Kiwi Farms". The 2010s felt like maybe 3 years at most.

* 2010 - 2012: the year of Occupy and "the end of the world" because Rapture and something Nibiru 2012.

* 2012 - 2016: the year of GamerGate - as well as rising woke, social media, and smartphone cultures.

* 2016 - 2019: the year of Clown World and Orange Man Bad.

And I think there are many - if not most - who think the 2010s zoomed by.

Were the 2010s a blur to you? Why do you think they were a blur if they were?


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## oldTireWater (Jul 29, 2021)

It's part of getting older. Subjective time really does start to speed up.


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## Some Badger (Jul 29, 2021)

History happens in slow motion; only time will tell if the twenty-teens were a blur or not. While I agree with @oldTireWater that the feeling of the last decade feeling like a blur simply comes from age, if there was a definitive blur that society collectively felt looking back, the commercialization and widespread adoption of the internet by businesses and news outlets most definitely contributed to it.

The oversaturation of both information and misinformation coupled with social media centralizing user congregation kinda killed everyone's attention spans, so things like Kony 2012, Occupy, GamerGate, GameStonk (not a 2010s phenomenon but you get the idea) and the like were all flashes in the pan that couldn't keep the attention of most people unless they were autistically invested in the phenomenon long after it ceased from relevance, usually a month at best. The reason you might think the last decade feels like a blur is because a lot of stuff was happening and being documented at the same time, on the same 2-3 media platforms.

Frankly, social media in general felt like a slog to scroll through after Trump got elected and it lasted throughout his entire presidency (and still lasts to this day thanks to covid). The 2016 election broke a lot of people, and a lot of those people happened to be terminally online and will never shut up about the Orange Man until the end of time. 2014 was probably the last year I really enjoyed going online tbh


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## Sithis (Jul 29, 2021)

More a haze for me. Drugs are bad, kids.


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## Lunar Eclipse Paradox (Jul 29, 2021)

Every event that ever happened in the 2010s seems to be a distant memory within months especially when the year ends. There's hardly really anything that memorable or worth wanting to remember that happened in the decade giving the impression that it has gone by so fast. The only thing you really knew that was happening that decade was everything progressively getting worse.


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## Cabelaz (Jul 29, 2021)

Yeah it was fucking uncanny. Everything post 2014 felt like a autistic sprint to the finish, while the 2000's felt like a slow burn.


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## Finder (Jul 29, 2021)

It's just what happens when you get older. The 90s feels like yesterday for those of us who can remember them clearly, the 2010s were nothing special in this regard imo.

I do think the internet and everything on demand may make time seem like it's going quicker even for younger people though. I mean what do you have to wait for now? There's no delayed gratification anymore.


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## Dom Cruise (Jul 29, 2021)

Cabelaz said:


> Yeah it was fucking uncanny. Everything post 2014 felt like a autistic sprint to the finish, while the 2000's felt like a slow burn.


Agreed, starting around 2014 and especially 2016 it seems like time started moving by absurdly fast, I can't fucking believe 2014 was as long ago as it was already.


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## The Last Stand (Jul 29, 2021)

I don't recall much from the early '10s until Trump. It all blurred together as "normal." Then when Trump came in, "normal" wasn't a thing anymore.


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## draggs (Jul 29, 2021)

Well, yeah most of the 10s are a blur. Same with all of the 00s. Drugs do that.


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## Dom Cruise (Jul 29, 2021)

The Last Stand said:


> I don't recall much from the early '10s until Trump. It all blurred together as "normal." Then when Trump came in, "normal" wasn't a thing anymore.


Normality was already starting to take a holiday before Trump came along though, I remember people started getting weird in 2014, but 2014 and 2015 were downright normal compared to 2016 and beyond.


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## L50LasPak (Jul 29, 2021)

The early portions of the decade when I got out of high school and left for college all full of hope and bravado not so much. 2016 onward that I spent in a nearly perpetual drunken/hung over stupor? Yeah, more or less.


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## Lurkio (Jul 29, 2021)

Cabelaz said:


> Yeah it was fucking uncanny. Everything post 2014 felt like a autistic sprint to the finish, while the 2000's felt like a slow burn.



Honestly, while I think it's part of due to just getting older, I also think this is part of too.

The late 2000's/ early 2010's saw the end of the "Wild West" era of the Internet, and whether you think that was for better or for worse, it was something to watch unfold. But after that, everything just gradually...slowed down. Nothing really happened under Obama after his first 2-3 years in office, and Trump was either cock-blocked from every sweeping change he tried to make or just ended up giving up and complaining on Twitter. I think "complaining" is probably the best word to describe the middle-latter half of the decade, because boy do I remember a lot of complaining going on post 2013/2014, but nothing really changed because of it. It was all talk and no action, and that doesn't exactly kick-start huge events that'd leave anything memorable...outside of the 2016 election of course.

Also, I swear every content creator got lazy in the second half of the decade. I noticed all the franchises and major content creator's I used to love just...slowed the hell down on making stuff around 2013/2014 for some reason, and the ones that didn't just sort of...went to shit.  Part of me thinks it due to things like social media, lets plays, and streaming, which I believe many content creators (particularly Internet ones) put too much time into because it's quick and easy money, but it's content that doesn't really stick with people (basically popcorn entertainment). The other part I think is due to society, as a whole, has just become...less encouraging of creativity. You can't do anything risky or edgy without someone getting pissed off and trying to rake you over the coals for it, and anyone who tries to toe the line to a "T" to not piss people off ends up making something so bland and uninspired it ends up flopping. There's a bit more to it then that, but that's the long and short of it from the entertainment end.

It's kinda hard to put into words, but the best way to describe it I guess was that the early 2010's was the end of a cultural renaissance with the Internet and the rest of the decade was everyone just pandering around in a particularly dull-ass status quo.


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## Juan's Sombrero (Jul 29, 2021)

Not really? I mean, I can remember a lot of things back in the 2010s pretty vividly. Granted, none of the bullshit we're dealing with these days was ever prominent or even mainstream. Then again, I'm starting to see trends changing.

If any of you guys ever thought that history started around 2016, I don't even know what to tell you. Plenty of idiots seem to think that the past never happened or that Donald Trump hijacked it. Imagine, a single guy triggered an entire generation into becoming idiots on all sides. I don't know whether to lament or admire that.


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## ToroidalBoat (Jul 29, 2021)

oldTireWater said:


> It's part of getting older. Subjective time really does start to speed up.



Like others said, I think it's age "time acceleration", but there's also the tech over-saturation and Current Year crazy, it can seem faster to even people not old enough to remember the pre-9/11 world.


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## Serbian Peacekeepers (Jul 29, 2021)

I think its because we have yet to really look back on the 2010s , im sure someone during the 90s felt the same way during the 90s as we do now.


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## Maurice Caine (Jul 30, 2021)

ToroidalBoat said:


> I've mentioned it before, but it seems like the 2010s were a blur to me. Events and trends of the early 2010s still seem recent - like that 3D TV craze or this site changing from "CWCki Forums" to "Kiwi Farms". The 2010s felt like maybe 3 years at most.
> 
> * 2010 - 2012: the year of Occupy and "the end of the world" because Rapture and something Nibiru 2012.
> 
> ...


Why do people define it solely by these events? It was so much more that I think I'd have to pause a little to make my own little retrospective. Now, answering the thread's question, no.


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## ToroidalBoat (Jul 30, 2021)

Maurice Caine said:


> Why do people define it solely by these events?



they were big on the internets


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## Lemmingwise (Jul 30, 2021)

3 reasons, some repeated.

1. As you get older, you deteriorate. Every experience becomes less impactful.

2. We ignore / forget the times when it looks history might go a different direction. A lot of events like islamic terrorism are suddenly null events in the face of medical dictatorship / pandemic.

3. Smart phones destroyed people's attentionspan even further than the TV did.


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## ToroidalBoat (Aug 2, 2021)

The GameStop incident and the 14 BLC fire seem like they happened about couple of years ago.

But they happened over half a dozen years ago.


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## Francine StripeCheer (Aug 2, 2021)

Not really. Decades only get their stereotypes long after, like the years 1980-89 only slightly resemble "the 80s", and most of what we think of "the 60s" was 1967-69 and much of the culture was very different.


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## Gender: Xenomorph (Aug 2, 2021)

2016-2020 Trump derangement syndrome was  lulzy and memorable.


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## Gender: Xenomorph (Aug 3, 2021)

Oh shit! Y'all faggots seem to forget that 2010s was the raise of MLP and the Brony community. 







Which was totally not sexual or cringe, you guys! Just watch the show! You'll get it!


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## Bad Gateway (Aug 3, 2021)

No, a decade is a standard measurement of time. You're too young - or more likely too fuckin gay - to understand what that means yet.


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## RMQualtrough (Aug 3, 2021)

oldTireWater said:


> It's part of getting older. Subjective time really does start to speed up.


I think it is actually just stronger more vivid memory. I noticed that days go soooo slowly yet my memory recall is "like it was yesterday".


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## ToroidalBoat (Aug 3, 2021)

Kiwifag said:


> MLP and the Brony


That "brony" thing seems recent too. Like one moment it's all over the 'net, and the next there's that movie, and now it's (almost) over.



Bad Gateway said:


> You're too young


I'm old enough to remember the pre-9/11 world, so I know what a decade is.


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## Dom Cruise (Aug 3, 2021)

Serbian Peacekeepers said:


> I think its because we have yet to really look back on the 2010s , im sure someone during the 90s felt the same way during the 90s as we do now.


To look back, what I think defines the 2010s is "wasted potential", I remember the vibe there was in 2009, 2010 and 2011, there was a genuine desire to make the world a better place, to dig ourselves out of the pit of terrorism, war and recession and get things back on track, it was honestly a pretty beautiful thing while it lasted, but then it got high jacked by evil militant leftists that just wanted revenge and here we are, worse off than we were in 2010, which is mind boggling.

Culturally when we entered the 2010s there was a strong desire to bring back some cool elements of older pop culture that had fallen by the wayside, a desire to "get the old band back together" among many creative types and franchises, fueled by things like Kickstarter, I still remember how fucking exciting it was when the news that Disney bought Star Wars dropped, there was literally a universe of possibility.

But then, instead of bringing old things back and doing them justice, things veered off into deconstructionist territory, aka "Woke", which in many instances has buried these beloved franchises for good, with Stars Wars being the biggest example.

Only Mad Max: Fury Road really gave us an idea what these retro revivals could have been like when done well, instead we mostly got garbage like Ghostbusters 2016 and The Last Jedi.

Somewhere out there is probably an alternate universe where the 2010s was an amazing decade we all dream about, but it wasn't this timeline.



Francine StripeCheer said:


> Not really. Decades only get their stereotypes long after, like the years 1980-89 only slightly resemble "the 80s", and most of what we think of "the 60s" was 1967-69 and much of the culture was very different.


It's funny how that works, there's so many forgotten aspects of life in the 90s that I remember that aren't a part of the stereotype of "the 90s" today, the same will probably hold true for the 00s and 10s.


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## Serbian Peacekeepers (Aug 3, 2021)

Dom Cruise said:


> To look back, what I think defines the 2010s is "wasted potential", I remember the vibe there was in 2009, 2010 and 2011, there was a genuine desire to make the world a better place, to dig ourselves out of the pit of terrorism, war and recession and get things back on track, it was honestly a pretty beautiful thing while it lasted, but then it got high jacked by evil militant leftists that just wanted revenge and here we are, worse off than we were in 2010, which is mind boggling.


I'll be honest i think the 2010s will be seen as the decade of terrorism/the peak of terrorism , sure 9/11 and 7/7 happened in the 2000s but the 2010s saw terrorism become a much more common thing with the rise (and fall) of isis and the rise of domestic terror in many nations.


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## Jonah Hill poster (Aug 3, 2021)

Its only like that because the rise of a centralized Internet has mainly kept people less outspoken and more into pushovers. The 2010’s had things like this, but it was not as obvious or obnoxious back in the 2000’s.

It was just astroturfed in a way where they force you to notice, and not in a healthy way.


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## Shadfan666xxx000 (Aug 3, 2021)

The 2010s was just people copying the 90s but forgetting to bring the charm and cool factor.


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## LargeChoonger (Aug 3, 2021)

Everything before 2017 is complete mush to me. After that it was a fucking drag though


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## Dom Cruise (Aug 3, 2021)

One thing I think contributes to the oddness of our modern situation is digital photography, you can look at photos from over a decade ago that more or less look like they could have been taken yesterday, that wasn't the case in the era of film photography, I think that can make the past seem more recent than it is.




Serbian Peacekeepers said:


> I'll be honest i think the 2010s will be seen as the decade of terrorism/the peak of terrorism , sure 9/11 and 7/7 happened in the 2000s but the 2010s saw terrorism become a much more common thing with the rise (and fall) of isis and the rise of domestic terror in many nations.


Of course and any hope to stop that was cratered by Woke making it politically incorrect to even say terrorism is a problem, unless it's "white terrorism"



Shadfan666xxx000 said:


> The 2010s was just people copying the 90s but forgetting to bring the charm and cool factor.


This is on point, a retarded version of the 1990s is basically what the 2010s was.

There's a lot of parallels between 90s and 10s culture wise, except the 90s was like a better version, more fair, more interesting, more honest and simply cooler.


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## The Last Stand (Aug 4, 2021)

It seems like just yesterday I would look forward to each new Call of Duty coming out in time for Christmas.


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## Jonah Hill poster (Aug 4, 2021)

The Last Stand said:


> It seems like just yesterday I would look forward to each new Call of Duty coming out in time for Christmas.


Same but with Fallout 4


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## ToroidalBoat (Aug 5, 2021)

Dom Cruise said:


> it wasn't this timeline


In the Berenstein timeline:

+ 9/11 never happened.
+ The recession never happened.
+ No one invented social media (but the Arab Spring was still a thing).
+ Woke remained a fringe academic and activist thing.
+ The coof blew over like the swine and bird flus.
+ CWC is still "classic CWC" and never incested Barb.
+ The Simpsons is still good.



Kiwifag said:


> 2016-2020 Trump derangement syndrome was  lulzy and memorable.


Especially the way CWC reacted.

"Pmurt"



albert chan said:


> Fallout 4


"Let's go pal."

Fallout 4 seems recent. Let's see how long it's really been...

6 years ago?!


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## talk talk talk (Aug 5, 2021)

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.


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## Dom Cruise (Aug 5, 2021)

ToroidalBoat said:


> In the Berenstein timeline:
> 
> + 9/11 never happened.
> + The recession never happened.
> ...


It's almost too painful to even speculate about stuff like that, but I see about 4 major divergent points over the last 20 years, the first being 9/11 of course, the second being the recession, the third being Woke and the fourth and most recent being Covid.

It's probably impossible to underestimate how different the world would be today if 9/11 had never happened, although one potential downside to 9/11 never happening I've heard is tension with China could have exploded far earlier, because of the spy plane which China captured, all of which was forgotten as soon as 9/11 happened.

But things would be so radically different in a world without 9/11 that it's pretty much impossible to really imagine, what's far easier for me to envision is a world without the Great Recession and a world without Woke, I wish we could have gotten that at least.


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## ToroidalBoat (Aug 5, 2021)

Dom Cruise said:


> if 9/11 had never happened


AlternateHistoryHub made a video about that (and which is already 7 years old):

What if 9/11 Never Happened? - YouTube

Also if either "social" media culture never happened, things would be a lot better. Woke wouldn't be as bad as it is, the "New Normal" may not have been a thing (no fearmongering "influencers"), and it wouldn't feel like real life was "cancelled" - at least not as much.


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## Angry Canadian (Aug 6, 2021)

I think you can objectively argue that the 2010s were a blur decade based solely on the rise of social justice and the way in which it operates and the way the mainstream media reported on it. Take an oil painting and pour turpentine all over it and wipe it up with a rag, blurred lines, blurred edges, and the things that were previously well defined and in context lose their forms and distinctions, everything becomes one flat, 2 dimensional plane where distance is indeterminable, and the edge of one object is indistinguishable from the next.  It's one big muddled, blurred mess of colour.  
Outrage culture was like the coal that fed the hyperreality foundry that churned out simulacra after simulacra.  The 2010s are inevitably going to be a disorienting and confusing decade that even historians will struggle to contextualize, there doesn't appear to be a unifying thread that runs through each individual event, it all appears random, because it is "random";
How did sexy female video game characters lead into trannies raping little girls in bathrooms?  How did #occupy movements result in video game developers committing suicide over allegations of fish-hooking unfuckable game-thots in the pussy?  No one will ever know, there is no connection, only insanity.  We are, as a civilization, the living manifestation of the Allegory of the Cave.  We're doomed to grope around in the darkness, rattling our chains, trying to define the shapes we feel in the blackness.
I am not hopeful.


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## Sithis (Aug 6, 2021)

After a few days I guess I'll try to add more to this than a lame snarky joke, although that was the truth in some ways, I did a lot of drugs in the 2010s lol. I remember it all, just some of it may be viewed through an altered perspective that doesn't relate to the overall gist. 

I think the best way to describe how I feel about the 2010s would be the speech Tony Soprano gives at the beginning of the Sopranos. I started to feel that way around the middle of the decade, maybe a bit earlier. Everything felt stale. It was like an existential crisis before I even had any right to have an existential crisis but I consistently had an overwhelming feeling that I had been born too late, that the best times I could have had were behind me, and that it was a downward slump from then on out.

Part of that could probably be blamed on my upbringing. I was brought up in a Christian household and though I wasn't going through boot camp learning bible verses or anything I absorbed a lot. So when I see the world and the direction things are going lining up so smoothly with what I have heard my entire life are signs that Christ is coming back and the world is close to being over, yeah, of course I started to feel like "what's the fucking point?" And the objective realist in me says "yeah that's just time going by and you're getting older, you're fine" but still I do feel like the sheer amount and combination of things that are lining up with scripture bears at least taking notice of.
But in retrospect I think even absent some end of the world chain of events, those of us who fall within the "early adulthood/adulthood" age range (probably most people on this site) honestly were just born on a down swing. History does not move in a straight line forward, it swings like a pendulum, rolls like a circle, whatever metaphor helps you get it. But there are ups and downs. The 80s through the 90s, though they had some minor downward trends, were overall a huge upward momentum period in human history. We hit plateau right around the turn of the millennium and stayed there until right around 2010 imo, we had a deep breath, then we began the big downward swing. 
That explains why the time around 2000 seems to have been such a slow burn as it's been described ITT. We remember it clearly because we had ascended for several decades in all ways - technologically, socially, economically, etc - and we had a period of time to enjoy that. That time was very brief though, by 2001 the slope had begun to appear.
By 2011 we had passed the point of no return. The descent started somewhat slowly but a lot of people I have talked to seem to pinpoint 2014-2016 as a real turning point where progress was not only stalled but we were actively taking steps back. Now that feels even faster.
But tl;dr on that bit, I feel like we really are just living in an overall downward trend of history. Of course if that is true we should probably enjoy what we can while we can because the rock bottom point of the swings usually have fun events like "fall of rome" and "french revolution" and "world wars".


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## Ghost of Wesley Willis (Aug 6, 2021)

I feel like the early part of the 2010s had plenty of distinction and uniqueness, but sometime after 2014/2015 it just started all feeling samey same.


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## ditto (Aug 6, 2021)

Serbian Peacekeepers said:


> im sure someone during the 90s felt the same way during the 90s as we do now.


I remember the 90s. We thought it didn't have an aesthetic in the same was the 80s, 70s, 60s and 50s did. There was a real 'end of history' vibe that was totally reversed by the 2001 recession and 9/11.


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## Troonologist PhD (Aug 6, 2021)

They didn't end quickly enough.


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## Fools Idol (Aug 7, 2021)

Yes, but I blame the head injures.


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## Pissmaster (Aug 7, 2021)

@Dom Cruise outright pointed out how Clown World really seemed to start in August 2014, the month of Gamergate, Ferguson, and The Fappening.  Ever since then, happenings in the world have all just been loops of the same exact shit.  Rape accusations, cancellings over bullshit perceived *ism, and all sorts of obviously horrible shit dressed up in articles ending with _And That's a Good Thing™_.  Technology also stopped being exciting, with every new thing being some creepy shit obviously designed to be used for evil, and even designs of every single thing, from products to architecture, is bland and post-brutalist.  Even remodeled McDonalds _literally_ look like prisons now. 






Yeah, no wonder the latter half of the 2010s were a blur.  Everything, EVERYTHING from this era seems tailor-made to be depressing, and give the sense that we're all living in some kind of prison where your life can be ruined at the whim of some 400lbs purple-haired girl.  And the Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style psychopathy that seemed to affect so many people over Trump, which five years from now _still isn't fucking over, _is something straight out of a nightmare. 

I'll always have hope that this shit will come to an end someday, but if August 2014 was the genesis of Clown World, that means we're entering Year 7 of it.  It's been going on for so long that you can hold a conversation with someone who was born at the beginning of it, and has never known any other world.


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## Dom Cruise (Aug 7, 2021)

Ghost of Wesley Willis said:


> I feel like the early part of the 2010s had plenty of distinction and uniqueness, but sometime after 2014/2015 it just started all feeling samey same.


Dubstep is a perfect example of that, remember dubstep? That was something entirely isolated to the early 2010s.

Early 2010s was either Neo 2000s style, peak hipster or geek chic, but then everything just became mush, dyed hair, piercings, tattoos, soybeards etc, everyone looks basically exactly the same as they did in 2016.



Pissmaster said:


> @Dom Cruise outright pointed out how Clown World really seemed to start in August 2014, the month of Gamergate, Ferguson, and The Fappening.


It wasn't exactly August I don't think, but don't forget the Cosby scandal in 2014, which was a prelude to #MeToo and helped normalize cancel culture.



Pissmaster said:


> Ever since then, happenings in the world have all just been loops of the same exact shit.  Rape accusations, cancellings over bullshit perceived *ism, and all sorts of obviously horrible shit dressed up in articles ending with _And That's a Good Thing™_.  Technology also stopped being exciting, with every new thing being some creepy shit obviously designed to be used for evil, and even designs of every single thing, from products to architecture, is bland and post-brutalist.  Even remodeled McDonalds _literally_ look like prisons now.
> 
> View attachment 2423636
> 
> ...


Brutalist McDonalds feels something out of a dark 2000s era satire of corporate culture.


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## ToroidalBoat (Aug 9, 2021)

Buck Bumble 10 months ago said:
			
		

> The title: "untouched for 40 years"
> My brain: "oh cool it's been abandoned since the 1960's"
> Reality: It's been abandoned since the 1980's


(source: Exploring an Abandoned Japanese Clinic - Untouched for 40 Years - YouTube)


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## Pasta Head (Aug 10, 2021)

I have honestly marvel at the early 2010s because life just seemed simpler back then. Seems so radically different now and not in a good way.


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## Dom Cruise (Aug 10, 2021)

Pasta Head said:


> I have honestly marvel at the early 2010s because life just seemed simpler back then. Seems so radically different now and not in a good way.


It really fucking bothers me how long ago the last time the world seemed to make some sense was.

I hate this fact but I'm increasingly missing the 2010s, even up to the end of the decade, 2019, at least you could go outside without worry, at least you could hold out hope that Woke wasn't here to stay, which seems increasingly unlikely now, Orange Man is gone, but what really has changed? Without hesitating a split second the left pivoted from being mad he's President to being mad he was ever allowed to be President in the first place, nothing's changed.

I used to joke about what it would take the 2020s to make me miss the 2010s, thinking there was no possible way the world could really be that terrible a place to make me miss the 2010s and yet here we already are, I miss the 2010s.

Can we just have a do over on the last decade? Where did it all go so wrong?


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## RSLUG30 (Aug 10, 2021)

slightly related tangent, but it could explain why many feel this way about that weird transition period of the internet.
the transition from wild west internet of many individual sites and raw unfiltered expression to the stale, centralised and sanitised internet we know and use today was during this period, primarily between the years 2013-2016.
conveniently, this was about the same time smartphones were rising in popularity and accessibility with the general population and were slowly overtaking the desktop/laptop majority of internet users.

as someone who grew up with early-mid 2000's internet, the key difference was in how webdesign was chaotic with millions of different styles, themes, layouts, etc etc; no two sites looked the same unless they used a template service or were intentionally trying to copy another.
the reason why this happened was because there were no expectations for websites, as long as you got your message across you were golden.

however, as smartphones overtook the general web population the concerns for making a site work on multiple screen types and aspect ratios grew, and implementing a design to do that would be far too much work for the typical normies of that time period. so a lot of personal sites had to choose between dying off, or redesigning their website for a more uniform and flexible theme. many took the former.

the same applied to big company websites; youtube used to allow for an incredible amount of channel customisation but most of that was axed to account for a new, mobile friendly design. remember annotations? remember custom channel colours, banner images, and full channel background images? all gone for a new, flexible, consistent, and easy to moderate platform.

i.e. it's the loss of personal expression and freedom of design that killed off a lot of soul the online world had, and the reason for this can be attributed to the need for dynamically scaling webpages, corporate expansion and professionalism, and ease of moderation by having less opportunities for _"bad content"._
look at timecube for example, that website is a fucking mess but it's infinitely more memorable because of that. if it was collated in a modernised, easy to digest form like most websites are these days it would be far less interesting.

if you want to try and bring back that crazy era of the net, make your own website and don't just create a fucking blog on blogger/squarespace because they're just as restrictive as most social media platforms in terms of customisability. you need to learn web languages, design the site to your exact specifications, build it in a way that actually represents (you) rather than a flat minimalist slate that all of these site builders offer to you on a silver platter because all those represent is a faceless corporate entity.

*tl;dr* abridged version for those of you with adhd -* aesthetics matter for memorability*, and the 2010's were severely lacking in such for most of that period.


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## ToroidalBoat (Aug 10, 2021)

Pissmaster said:


> I'll always have hope that this shit will come to an end someday, but if August 2014 was the genesis of Clown World, that means we're entering Year 7 of it.





Dom Cruise said:


> Brutalist McDonalds feels something out of a dark 2000s era satire of corporate culture.





Pasta Head said:


> Seems so radically different now and not in a good way.





Dom Cruise said:


> Can we just have a do over on the last decade? Where did it all go so wrong?





RSLUG30 said:


> *tl;dr* abridged version for those of you with adhd -* aesthetics matter for memorability*, and the 2010's were severely lacking in such for most of that period.


Seems Clown World is just the next step in an evil plan to change this world to a cybernetic Prison World.

"Check your privilege. Eat the bugs. Live in the pod. Wear the mask. Take the jab. Own nothing. Be happy."


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## Lunar Eclipse Paradox (Aug 10, 2021)

Pissmaster said:


> @Dom Cruise outright pointed out how Clown World really seemed to start in August 2014, the month of Gamergate, Ferguson, and The Fappening.  Ever since then, happenings in the world have all just been loops of the same exact shit.  Rape accusations, cancellings over bullshit perceived *ism, and all sorts of obviously horrible shit dressed up in articles ending with _And That's a Good Thing™_.  Technology also stopped being exciting, with every new thing being some creepy shit obviously designed to be used for evil, and even designs of every single thing, from products to architecture, is bland and post-brutalist.  Even remodeled McDonalds _literally_ look like prisons now.
> 
> View attachment 2423636
> 
> ...


McDonalds has been doing brutalist renovations even before 2014.




McDonalds near Calgary Prior to the 2012 Renovation.




McDonalds after the 2012 renovation. Note that almost every single McDonalds in Canada looks like this.


----------



## Fellen (Aug 10, 2021)

With the rise of the Internet, the 2010's had more people spending time on the computer than ever. Everyone knows how much time can go by when you're on the computer.


----------



## Realistic Elephant (Aug 10, 2021)

It did, due to the social, economic, technological and cultural decadence that really set in during those years.  I would be shocked anyone could come name a single work of art, literature, or music in the past twenty years that is even remotely memorable today, let alone stand the test of time.

Today one of Bryce Dessner's "modern" compositions was on Sirius' Symphony Hall. and the guy on the channel was fawning all over him and the composition.  "Aheym" sounded like complete dogshit and went on and on without getting better...

I had to shut it off and play the Shostakovich soundtrack from The Gadfly on YouTube of all damn things.


----------



## ToroidalBoat (Aug 11, 2021)

If this cultural wasteland continues into the 2020s along with tech oversaturation (real life "cancelled"), I imagine the 2020s are going to be a blur to many of all ages too. Except worse, with the way things are going. It'd be 2 decades of samey blurry time, with endless politics in endless Current Year. Hopefully something happens for change for the better, like the "pendulum" going away from far left.


----------



## Terrifik (Aug 11, 2021)

You forgot
* meetoo 
* youtube ad rapture.
*Big data full takeover
* good 1990 tv schedule
* loss of for the customer or customer all ways right
* comic & Anime gate
........
School-
Lost of A+ program - scholarship for community service.
Lost of gender norm
Monopoly game cancellation due cheating
Loss of dsa- gender disfora but gain video game addiction.
Everything is political & communist push
CRT - end of Martain put her king dream
Mariwana legalization
Crypto boom-as far back as I knew was second life currency.
Rise of MIGTOW
Normalization of sex& porn at grade school
Gender is a construct
America is rasist country kappa
China#1 / awakening of 1000 year plan
Land on Mars rover
It's ok for games $70 & rise mobile gaming
End of blockbuster
Marvel universe endgame
Harmabe & Saint Floyd
Child Exploitation law reach of God's
For NULL- 9/11 patriot act credit card company bullshit/god complex


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## serious n00b (Aug 11, 2021)

RSLUG30 said:


> youtube used to allow for an incredible amount of channel customisation but most of that was axed to account for a new, mobile friendly design. remember annotations? remember custom channel colours, banner images, and full channel background images? all gone for a new, flexible, consistent, and easy to moderate platform.


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## get_ur_gamon (Aug 12, 2021)

2010-2016 felt normally slow, no really big political or media trends occuring over those years. Just some short term stuff here and there. The war on terror continued as normal. But 2016 onwards I felt like it was a neverending saga of Orange man bad which all blended together. Just one crushingly long media cycle. I always thought that the gamer gate fallout would have blown over by the end of the decade, but here we are still waiting for the conclusion.

A lot of the big political issues today started blowing up around that time, 2015-16. The immigration crisis in Europe, Islamic terror attacks, Brexit, Trump, Trannies, ISIS, Russia invading Ukraine, Syria, cancel culture.

I feel cheated. I wanted 5 years of unique development, but we just got 2015's issues over and over again. We fought the same culture battle over and over again and the sides didn't really change.

Historians will look back at this time like the Interwar period. We are just living the consequences of the decades before, failing to really change anything.


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## Maurice Caine (Aug 12, 2021)

ToroidalBoat said:


> (source: Exploring an Abandoned Japanese Clinic - Untouched for 40 Years - YouTube)


----------



## ToroidalBoat (Aug 13, 2021)

ToroidalBoat said:


> "Winning formula" to the globalist tyrants:
> 
> - "Woke" keeps people in a cult-like state.
> - "The New Normal" keeps people scared, isolated, and obedient.
> ...


This stuff could also be why everything feels "samey", and thus could feel like a blur.


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## StarDreamer2002 (Aug 17, 2021)

I think the 2010s were good in terms of pop culture if you ignore the SJW stuff.

BTW our memories are as fake as celebrity gossip. Psychology is a really interesting science. The brain isn't endless so it can store only important information, and when we recall complex past events, our subconsciousness just fills the voids with imagination based on photos, different memories, conversations, television etc. The mental images we see when thinking about our lifes feel like films but they're more like improvisional theatre.


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## celebrityskin (Aug 18, 2021)

Early 2010s are definitely distinct from the rest of the decade. Obviously social media boomed with insta, vine, sc, twitter growing massively (between about 2009-2012 the go-to platform was facebook). After 2013 the trends were very different (Kardashians, 90s revivals, Y2K etc.)

I think 2017-2019 was a bit of a blur when you take out politics. Fashion, music, technology etc. basically remained the same.


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## ToroidalBoat (Aug 19, 2021)

fleetwoodcrack said:


> Fashion, music, technology etc. basically remained the same.


@Dom Cruise said something like that too.

Like aside from the "face masks", soyboys still like the soy look from 2017ish?


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## BlaireWhitesBottom (Sep 26, 2021)

Some Badger said:


> History happens in slow motion; only time will tell if the twenty-teens were a blur or not. While I agree with @oldTireWater that the feeling of the last decade feeling like a blur simply comes from age, if there was a definitive blur that society collectively felt looking back, the commercialization and widespread adoption of the internet by businesses and news outlets most definitely contributed to it.
> 
> The oversaturation of both information and misinformation coupled with social media centralizing user congregation kinda killed everyone's attention spans, so things like Kony 2012, Occupy, GamerGate, GameStonk (not a 2010s phenomenon but you get the idea) and the like were all flashes in the pan that couldn't keep the attention of most people unless they were autistically invested in the phenomenon long after it ceased from relevance, usually a month at best. The reason you might think the last decade feels like a blur is because a lot of stuff was happening and being documented at the same time, on the same 2-3 media platforms.
> *
> Frankly, social media in general felt like a slog to scroll through after Trump got elected and it lasted throughout his entire presidency (and still lasts to this day thanks to covid). The 2016 election broke a lot of people, and a lot of those people happened to be terminally online and will never shut up about the Orange Man until the end of time. 2014 was probably the last year I really enjoyed going online tbh*


I vtoed Trump twice but I feel like his fans are often almost as bad as the haters when it comes to being silly


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## Shadfan666xxx000 (Sep 27, 2021)

While the 2010s in general weren't very remarkable from this current viewpoint, one thing which marks a very considerable contrast between 2019 and the past two years has got to be urban life. The energy of going out into the city as an adult and being able to do something new every month if not every week is a hugely different experience than the hollowed out husks the downtowns of the US have largely become. While NY, LA and Chicago were going through serious crime spikes, mid-sized urban centers across the natioms were slowly gentrifying and you would see a lot of money go into these places to revitalize these areas. A middle class person could afford and would be given opportunities to meet new people and do things even in relative backwaters. Then the COVID lockdowns and summer riots hit and now everything has been driven into disrepair by comparison.


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## ToroidalBoat (Sep 27, 2021)

Shadfan666xxx000 said:


> Then the COVID lockdowns and summer riots hit and now everything has been driven into disrepair by comparison.


Reminds me of this from the "missing the 2000s" thread:


ToroidalBoat said:


> The powers that shouldn't be seem to want a one-world commie tyranny.
> 
> A free and independent America goes against, so "they" summoned 2020?


----------



## Ishtar (Sep 29, 2021)

I came of age during that time. For me the 2010s were middle school through undergrad college.

I’d say personally they weren’t a blur for me, but they were the most consequential decade of my life. (So far anyway).


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## ToroidalBoat (Sep 29, 2021)

Another example of the 2010s being a blur: "Homestar Runner" still feels recent.



Shamash said:


> I’d say personally they weren’t a blur for me, but they were the most consequential decade of my life.


Being in school - especially before college - can definitely make time pass slowly, or at least normally.

(this isn't always a bad thing)


----------



## Dwight Frye (Oct 1, 2021)

More of a slog for me. I was in my mid 20s through my mid 30s during the decade. The first half felt fine, if a tad monotonous. I’d go to work, hang out with friends or work on hobbies on my days off. Kinda boring but could be far worse.

2016 was when “it could be far worse” kicked into gear. Lost a fair amount of friends to TDS who now saw me as a traitor because I wasn’t lock stock and barrel in line with leftist rhetoric (neither were they before Trump I might add) my job and my coworkers started getting more and more politics driven, and you were looked at with suspicion if you chose not to discuss politics while working. Most of my hobbies and interests started getting taken over by woke bullshit, which made it a drag to keep following. I just started keeping to myself more and more, just doing my job coming home and trying to find entertainment or something that didn’t revolve around politics or virtue signaling 24/7. Corona at the end of the decade just escalated it even further to where I’d kill to have my relatively dull but happy and fun life back where people weren’t at each other’s throats constantly


----------



## Pokemonquistador2 (Oct 1, 2021)

Obama's second term is when life seemed to get both faker and gayer.  People had always laughed at dangerhaired feminist wokescolds, but as soon as 2012 came around, important people -like big corporations--, started listening to them.  It felt like society was being infiltrated from top to bottom by those with totalitarian mindsets, and social media just made it easier to monitor everybody and punish wrongthinkers. I don't want to invoke Godwin's law here, but I get the creeping feeling that this must've been what it was like for people in 1930s Germany who were going about their business to see more and more people walking around in swastika armbands and more brownshirts screaming at people in public for not supporting their politics. Then the brownshirts start burning city blocks down and abusing their government positions to jail their ideological enemies. I feel the only thing missing is Liza Minelli singing and  dancing with a chair in a cabaret, (although these days it's more likely to be a drag queen dressed like a demon reading books to children in a library.)


----------



## ToroidalBoat (Nov 23, 2021)

Pokemonquistador2 said:


> as soon as 2012 came around, important people -like big corporations--, started listening to them


What if the Mayans really could see the future and planned the calendar accordingly?


----------



## benutz (Nov 23, 2021)

ToroidalBoat said:


> What if the Mayans really could see the future and planned the calendar accordingly?



I was big in to Terrence McKenna and that whole Timewave 0 theory. I even downloaded the program and installed it on my laptop and ran it a few times. I remember when it was New Year's Eve 2011 and 2012 came in to being. Nope, still here. Don't feel any different...

But then...

It didn't take long for the future to arrive. Weird shit started happening. Anomalies. Unexplainable stuff. And bit by bit, new discoveries in science were being made and old dreams such as quantum computers and nuclear fusion came in to being. The first teleportation of atoms. The first invisibility cloak. Bam bam bam, hit after hit until it just couldn't be ignored anymore, the future wasn't just arriving, by 2014 it had fully arrived. The peak of the industrial revolution. Everything that man had worked towards he had achieved. Or could see that it would be fully realisable in the coming years (quantum computers + nuclear fusion).

2014 was, in many ways [CURRENT YEAR]. I know that it's stated as being 2015, and it is as well in many ways. It was some kind of pinnacle of science, civilisation, futurology, and all mixed in with an understanding and connection to history, to each other and ourselves as a species - humanity. 

2014/2015 was where the rubber met the road and the shit well and truly hit the fan. Then it got weirder from there.

Sure, the whole smartphone thing and attention span complications it brought about are true. Ditto the internet becoming more ubiquitous. Plus after 2015 most people browsing the internet were doing so on a handheld device. So the old Web 1.0 got thrown out the window and every man and his dog started designing for Web 2.0 with the requisite touchscreen API and paradigm. Not good if you are a boomer or a Gen X'er and you like to actually look at things on a big screen and you know actually type things out on a keyboard. You can't do that on a handheld device, so the internet was dumbed down to meet these new low standards.

Fast forward to today, you can't do business unless you run whatsapp. People refuse to deal with you now. I'll phone up and ask about stock, particular stuff, general stuff, and I get fucked off by some shirty bitch - have you ever thought of looking on the website? But it's worse than that, because now they don't even say that any more, it's like 'oh you have a question about stock? give me your whatsapp'. And that is fucking that. If you tell them you don't use whatsapp then they say they can't help. Yes, actually fuck you off and say sorry, you will have to come in to the store. One example of the madness this whole web 2.0 thing has brought about.

Has anyone noticed just how fucking broken the internet has become not just the last year, but the last six months. There is a captcha for just about every single fucking website I visit these days. It's tiresome to navigate. Sites like youtube bully you in to signing in, cookies on every page you have to approve, you're not given an option where you can opt out.

Forums are dying. They won't exist in 10 years time. Every forum that you could ever rule34 in to existence has been made. Knitting, bikes, sex, farming, music, guitars, tools, photography. What's more, there are people on those forums that have been on them since their inception, probably some time post 2000, as that was when most people got the internet and everyone rushed in the wild west spirit of the time to be the first to have those particular niche forums. There are people out there with fucking nearly 100,000 fucking posts. And those people now rule those forums by seniority even though they are not mods or admins. And they all have their little clique.

Nobody who was in to bikes or music or swords or knitting or fish to that great extent turned around in the last year and said, oh I think I'll join a forum. No, they already did it. And it either worked out or it didn't. Probably it didn't because most people are cunts. And they make sure most other people don't fit in by bullying them off or shunning them. Many such cases.

So now you have a whole world of people that are in to this shit: music, guitars, bikes, swords, fish... that have nowhere to go, because you can't start up a new forum because no one will fucking visit it. The forums that deal with all these subjects have fuck all to do with their intended purpose anymore and have become defacto social media for boomers and gen x'ers. They chat shit about this or that and anyone wanting to talk about the subject matter at hand had better lick arse to the seniors to be accepted or get bullied or shunned off. And the mods and the admins and the owners allow this because now big dollar advertising is involved, and that is their sacred holy cash cow. Users can go fuck themselves. You are a consumer now or you aren't accepted in.

There are websites that deal in astronomy equipment, let's say, and you just got ripped off for a few hundred bucks on a telescope, not only did you get ripped off, when you phoned up to get some satisfaction, you were called names, verbally abused and threatened. Yeah, fucking threatened. Good luck with being allowed to even claim that happened on a site that takes the dollar from those very same people. It's cancer and it's everywhere. Not just telescope forums, music forums, everywhere. It's over bar the crying.

So people are very disenchanted and disenfranchised now. You probably have a hobby, you probably want to learn more about it, or maybe just talk with like-minded people, but you can't, because it's a big fucking club and you aren't in it. It's demoralising. I know many people feel the same way through conversations I've had via PMs on these sites. It's over.

For some interesting reading look up and google why forums are dying and the stats involved. 

Plus, as has been mentioned, we are now well and truly in an orwellian/brave new world scenario of censorship and wrongthink. The plan of the elites was to 'master the internet' and they have mastered it. They only allow this very website to exist because they are using it for data mining. We've been funneled. Sure there's a few full time feds reading in real time with real eyeballs, but most is being fed in to the databases and pattern matched and machine learned or wtf it is they do. They get to check opinions, even those of a very contained subset of wrongthinkers like us. We aren't rebels, we are goldfish being observed who don't even realise they are being observed.

All of this is pertinent to why the last decade is a blur. Just as someone said earlier: because it was. Society fractured along political lines but it fractured along technological lines as well. Different people championed different forms of technology. I remember one girl I met and she was in bed just checking her phone, blatantly for new dates and fucks, with no fucks given. Yeah whatevs. Knock yourself out. A phone is of little interest to me. I can have a tonne of fun with an old laptop and run all kinds of programs on it and create all kinds of things. I can do even more interesting things again with a full size tower case with six hard disks in it.

We became alienated from each other by the very technology that catered to our very specific use-cases and needs, and wants and desires and dreams. And we got funneled there as well. Like inflation in the big bang - every point ever more quickly accelerating away from every other point. And that is why we are at an impasse now with humanity, probably best illustrated with the polarisation in politics. We've been farmed this way. We are all nigger cattle. 

Technology was a wonderful dream, but by [CURRENT YEAR] I saw which way it was going. Bitches using smart phones for 'hook up' culture. Shop assistants refusing to serve you because fuck you do your own research on our website. New laws coming in to effect that all our search histories would be recorded by our ISPs and available to several hundred of different authorities such as fucking bin collection or waste disposal. Data rape and privacy rape became a thing. It just wasn't fun anymore. Worse than that, from [CURRENT YEAR] things just became increasingly more sinister with the PTB usurping ARE technology. Our superpower had been well and truly turned against us.

And the more alienated we got from each other the more alienated we became from ourselves as well. Our inner selves. As we felt this yearning chasm of emptiness swell up, some of us filled it with drink, some of us filled it with drugs, some of us filled it with porn, some of us filled it with shitposting. Choose your poison. But everyone feels dirty the morning after. And the more divided the self becomes, the more split the id becomes from the ego, the more the animal flails, reaching out for anything, something, not even looking for comfort anymore, just looking for sense or logic. But that has all but gone now as well. 

We all have our own facade. We all have our own hopes and dreams. Very few people are fulfilled these days. We really have been corralled like the nigger cattle we are in to this situation. I'm not pointing any fingers, I'm only starting to wake up and realise what the fuck has been going on myself these last few (10 years). It's time to wean off technology. But guess what suckers? It is now illegal to not have a tracking device, sorry, mobile phone. Well it is in china and it will be here soon too in a couple of years.

Technology is just a tool and it can set us free or it can enslave us. Really we should be embracing automation and all the advantages that it brings, but we can't, we beg to still be allowed to work. Why is that? Money. What is money good for? Money is the conduit for the transfer of human energy, that is all. But even that has got corrupted. 

Everybody wants the same things. We all like to eat nice food. We like to dress in warm and comfortable clothing. Perhaps extending out from there to a bit of fashion and looking good, more attractive to the opposite sex. We like to be able to travel, to go places, see people, see things. We like to dance, we like to listen to music. We certainly all like to have sex. 

All those things have been stolen from us, repackaged, re-bottled and sold back to us at an extortianate price. Monopolies run the fashion industry, the food industry, the art industry, the music industry. Not talking about the (((you know who's))) for once. That's just a joke. This shit runs deeper than all of that. It's a game and many of us want to play, but we aren't allowed. And those that try to, we are crushed or we are bought out, whatever the case may be, even being embraced, extended and extinguished. 

Some men like to build houses, some men like to build cathedrals. Some men like to build magnificent architecture and spaces for people to live in and be in. Where is that architecture? We are all reflections of our surroundings. Where are the beautiful places to be in? 

None of this exists. What is there is pitiful and the best of it is not for you anyway, peasant. 

And the saddest thing of all is that for many of us, there is no club we want to be in. There is no party we want to join. There is no fear of missing out. Nothing to miss out on. And we wither ever more, dying on the vine. We become almost totally disconnected by this point, not just from each other, not just from ourselves, but from objective reality itself, as much as any one person can experience objective reality.

I've noticed a couple of random references to Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, on the farms the last few days. And for once they weren't being pretentious gits as is the wont of most people when they throw around that, which is a load of pretentious shit a lot of the time. But it's got some good bits. And the references to Hyperreality were both apt and on point, enlightening even when used in the slightly different contexts in which they were. And this is the age. Facebook have changed their name to Metaverse to embrace that whole "virtual reality" kind of thing. Haven't they been involved in "virtual reality" all along? Many would argue they have.

Kiwi Farms is a very special place. And I'm not sure how many people really appreciate it for what it is at its best. Whatever that is, I'll let you decide. 

It's good that there is a mix of people here. It's nice that a lot of us can get along. It's also good that others can disagree and point out when we are being faggots or narcs or bores or schizos or cunts. There's not many places left in the world where that kind of discourse can take place anymore, let alone in they decaying medium of forums.

Yeah, the last decade has been a super zoomed blur of insanity and craziness mixed in with static boredom. And no, it wasn't all the drink/drugs/porn that made it zoom by so fast. And yes it is a lot to do with getting older and time flying by faster. And no, you weren't the only one to notice it or experience it subjectively like that; maybe you were tapping in to some kind of objective reality after all.


----------



## Rome's rightful successor (Nov 23, 2021)

2014 til the present day does feel like a blur but except with there was something about the 4chan style shitpost meme culture. It's hard to exactly explain but much of the 2010s culture felt sterile, corporate and unnatural and looking back it felt like a dull blur. However the very organic and naturally happened 4chan meme culture does appears to me like a distinct categorized timeline.  Both because we participated in it and we were shaped by it. The point is Meme Magic is real.


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## ToroidalBoat (Nov 23, 2021)

Dom Cruise said:


> It's nothing less than insane to me to think of 2011 being a decade ago, 2012 being close to it and 2013 being the better part of a decade ago.


The various "circus acts" of social and political trends of the 2010s feel like a blur too. Like the reactions to the Elliot Rodger mass shooting, the whole freakshow of GamerGate, the fedora'd euphoric neckbeard, the "MGTOW" fad, the #MeToo thing, and the SJWs on Tumblr fad feel recent.

hey @benutz (post too long so bug won't let me quote it)

What if Current Year Clown World really was a plan by technocrats to finish breaking down and rebuilding "society" as cybernetic slaves, hence the "acceleration"?

Either way, 2020 has given me a rather pessimistic outlook on the species. Hopefully the world gets better.


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## Aqua Panda (Nov 23, 2021)

Depends. I agree that the decade felt like it was split into 3 parts. 2010-2013, 2014-2016, and 2017-2019/20. (And with hindsight, the Covid years of 2020/2021+ may be its own special subset.)

The early part of the decade was decently hopefulish despite pain. The 2008 crash was still very acute for most people and evictions peaked in 2011. However, things were on the path of recovery and the worst of the economic woes were over by 2012. Pop culture wise it felt like the tail end of the late 00's. Several movies, games, and other trends released here were actually good and well done. Some of the big power moves in pop culture, like Disney buying Star Wars, seemed like it was going to be the begining of something amazing.

2014 saw a lot of shit go tits up. Gamergate being a really big screw over to pop culture. Along with major geopolitical fallout in the Middle East. (ISIS and Syria especially.) The entire Arab Spring basically stalled and stagnated and ended up just shuffling to yet another dictator instead of actual reform and democracy. Pop culture radically shifted to "like what we want" and "creation by committee" to please MBA corporate types and cowtowing to Chinese markets. Gay marriage got recognized in the states and we saw an immediate push to the more extreme Trans degeneracy. (Seriously, check just how many people suddenly came out as trans or LGBTQ that year. It's way beyond normal trends.) Social Media and smartphones reached mass saturation and effectively everyone had access to the Internet. 

2016 was a big breaking point for a lot of people. Trump getting elected changed things forever. Trump was a big pushback against a lot of the crazy shit that popped up in 2014-16. However, instead of learning from this, most media and pop culture went batshit. The tech and social media crackdown in the following years was insane. You could tell the major tech power players were taken off guard and took active steps to avoid the loss of narrative control. Everything became politicized. Cultural Marxism, long since spread at the college level, began to see major pushes in grade schools. Starting around 2017 "deconstructions" became a huge new meta trend. Everything fun and good had to be reworked to actually being terrible and needing to be replaced with a modern woke agenda.

Where we are now is pretty much a continuation of this last era. We're now openly seeing racism/bigotry towards Whites and Asians that would have been called out as such 20 years ago. Big pushes into openly rewriting and tearing down history as well as reframing everything from the past as evil and/or not living up to current woke standards. Major governments trampled over civil liberties for the Covid lockdowns and we are still seeing the fallout. (Protip: Most are not going to hand back most of the power they grabbed for themselves.)

The most concerning thing is that the late years of this decade saw a big push into normalizing violence and rioting. The "It's just property" mantra entered here along with "mostly peaceful protests." We are actually watching people try and justify it in real time now.

Edit: I'd also argue we saw the beginnings of a big "girl power" push in 2013. The first few years of which were honestly fine. (We had something similar in the 90's and it worked fine.) However, around the time of Ghostbusters 2016 and The Last Jedi, it turned insanely mysandric. Most children's programming now actively excludes boys or does stuff like Stephen Universe and actively makes the character reject masculinity.


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## ToroidalBoat (Nov 23, 2021)

Aqua Panda said:


> Big pushes into openly rewriting and tearing down history as well as reframing everything from the past as evil and/or not loving up to current woke standards.





ToroidalBoat said:


> > Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
> 
> 
> *[honk honk]*


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## Dom Cruise (Nov 23, 2021)

@benutz


> I was big in to Terrence McKenna and that whole Timewave 0 theory. I even downloaded the program and installed it on my laptop and ran it a few times. I remember when it was New Year's Eve 2011 and 2012 came in to being. Nope, still here. Don't feel any different...


What is all that?



> But then...
> 
> It didn't take long for the future to arrive. Weird shit started happening. Anomalies. Unexplainable stuff. And bit by bit, new discoveries in science were being made and old dreams such as quantum computers and nuclear fusion came in to being. The first teleportation of atoms. The first invisibility cloak. Bam bam bam, hit after hit until it just couldn't be ignored anymore, the future wasn't just arriving, by 2014 it had fully arrived. The peak of the industrial revolution. Everything that man had worked towards he had achieved. Or could see that it would be fully realisable in the coming years (quantum computers + nuclear fusion).
> 
> ...


I remember in the early 2010s there was lots of talk about stuff like the singularity.

The technological leap from 2000 to 2010 was insane so anything seemed possible and yeah, 2014 kind of felt like a peak of that, remember there was that forgotten Johnny Depp movie about the singularity.

Despite some bad things that happened early in the decade, there was still a hopeful vibe that is just totally gone today, it did feel like big change was coming and sure enough there was, but it was all change for the worse.



Aqua Panda said:


> Edit: I'd also argue we saw the beginnings of a big "girl power" push in 2013. The first few years of which were honestly fine. (We had something similar in the 90's and it worked fine.) However, around the time of Ghostbusters 2016 and The Last Jedi, it turned insanely mysandric. Most children's programming now actively excludes boys or does stuff like Stephen Universe and actively makes the character reject masculinity.


It was never fine, 2010s feminism was always deeply misandrist, obnoxious and out of touch with reality from the start, I hated that shit from the word go.


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## moonman1488 (Nov 23, 2021)

Just wait until it's the 2040s and you fondly look back at how great everything was in 2021.


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## Dom Cruise (Nov 24, 2021)

Aqua Panda said:


> Depends. I agree that the decade felt like it was split into 3 parts. 2010-2013, 2014-2016, and 2017-2019/20. (And with hindsight, the Covid years of 2020/2021+ may be its own special subset.)


The best part of the decade was the first part, but the trouble is that it was just kind of boring, nothing particularly interesting or exciting was going on culturally or in general, but there was a feeling of potential that good change was coming and boring is preferable to today's constant fight or flight feeling, there was an inherent sense of calmness I used to feel back then that is just gone today, it was nice while it lasted feeling like you weren't living in a world that hates you and wants you dead.

The second part is when things got more interesting culturally, I would say 2015 was the decade's peak year as far as pop culture goes, trouble is that was when Woke politics was gaining steam, I remember feeling really depressed in fall of 2014, knowing things had taken a bad turn, but 2015 was the last year that things ever felt in any way normal.

Then we have 2017-2019/20 which is when things truly became a nightmare, but at least 2017-2019 was pre-Covid, the genuine hate and insanity that has outpoured from the left though has been terrifying though, I've never seen anything like it in my whole life.


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## Erich Honecker (Nov 24, 2021)

I don't think it was a blur at all, but then, I'm probably younger than some of the people in this thread. In the 2010s I was finishing up high school and then going to university. For me, the time actually went very slowly and I can vividly picture what each year felt like individually. 2013 to me feels like a completely different world to 2019. The cultural changes that seemed to come around 2016 were so pervasive that it's difficult for me to look at those two years as even being part of the same decade.

A few people have said it but there was one thing we had in the 2010-2015 period that we simply didn't have in the post-2016 period: Optimism. Regardless of what political background you were from, in the west at least, those first 5 years of the decade felt drastically more optimistic than what came after. People look back now and say "well we could see that X event led to Y", such as seeing that the Tumblr SJW fad led to the all-pervasiveness of woke and cancel culture in the late 2010s, but at the time no one could have known that. Similarly, someone of a progressive bent might look back on the Tea Party in the US or the rise of UKIP around 2013 in the UK and say "these were early signs of the rise of the alt-right", but it simply wasn't looked at in that way. 2010-2015 was a remarkably centrist era compared to now and most people looked at "the crazies" on both sides and dismissed them as if they would be short-lived fads. There was an optimism that most people had because they didn't believe the norms we had grown accustomed to could be broken.

One thing that people DID seem to overestimate and thought would drag on for years, but kind of didn't, was ISIS. Around 2014/15 it seemed to be the consensus that we were re-entering the War on Terror big time and that ISIS could establish itself as a major regional power in the Middle East that we would have to reckon with. But it ended up being a conflict that mainly played out in the background and, a few years later, dropped from the news cycle entirely.

Covid fucked with everything too because it effectively put us in a cultural time-loop for 2 years, while also changing the course of some events that probably would have been different if not for the pandemic. Before covid, one might have assumed the woke trend was dying out in the same way that the alt-right trend fizzled out around 2018, but with covid, we basically froze at the point we were in February 2020 with little room for further development due to perpetual lockdowns. You then get the BLM riots (Which I don't believe would have been anywhere near as bad if not for lockdowns meaning they were the ONLY news item and the ONLY acceptable reason to go outside), which gives a massive jolt to the social justice rhetoric at a time when many of us thought it was on its way out. Then, the 2020 US election, which I think a lot of us assume Trump would have won if not for all the post-March pandemic chaos and economic downturn as a result.

What does 2021 look like in a world where covid never happened, where BLM didn't receive it's second jolt (or at least not in such a big way), and where Trump won re-election? In that universe, we might already be at the beginnings of a new "cultural decade" and looking back at 2016-2020 as being an era that's already concluded. But, as we are now, I'd say we're still in the post-2016 cultural era. People are getting bored with the news topics being exactly the same (except now with the addition of covid-related misery) and how political people are just doubling-down on the same beliefs they had before.

If anything, I'd say that the time we're living in right now is where the real blur is. People in future will struggle to differentiate any years between 2016-2020 unless they had any major life events in that period, and especially now in the covid era, 2020 and 2021 seem more like one long year rather than two separate ones.


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## ToroidalBoat (Nov 25, 2021)

Erich Honecker said:


> 2020 and 2021 seem more like one long year rather than two separate ones.


I've said it before, I see 2020-2021 as one year, even though at the same time the start of the coof feels long ago.

I guess the time blur is still going on to me.


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## Dom Cruise (Nov 25, 2021)

Erich Honecker said:


> I don't think it was a blur at all, but then, I'm probably younger than some of the people in this thread. In the 2010s I was finishing up high school and then going to university. For me, the time actually went very slowly and I can vividly picture what each year felt like individually. 2013 to me feels like a completely different world to 2019. The cultural changes that seemed to come around 2016 were so pervasive that it's difficult for me to look at those two years as even being part of the same decade.


2013 was the last hurrah for any remnants of 2000s culture, it is crazy to think 2013 and 2019 were in the same decade.



Erich Honecker said:


> A few people have said it but there was one thing we had in the 2010-2015 period that we simply didn't have in the post-2016 period: Optimism. Regardless of what political background you were from, in the west at least, those first 5 years of the decade felt drastically more optimistic than what came after. People look back now and say "well we could see that X event led to Y", such as seeing that the Tumblr SJW fad led to the all-pervasiveness of woke and cancel culture in the late 2010s, but at the time no one could have known that. Similarly, someone of a progressive bent might look back on the Tea Party in the US or the rise of UKIP around 2013 in the UK and say "these were early signs of the rise of the alt-right", but it simply wasn't looked at in that way. 2010-2015 was a remarkably centrist era compared to now and most people looked at "the crazies" on both sides and dismissed them as if they would be short-lived fads. There was an optimism that most people had because they didn't believe the norms we had grown accustomed to could be broken.


One thing about the Tea Party is they never advocated for violence, meanwhile the left is all like " punch Nazis!" and "go out and riot"

To some degree our modern political zeitgeist did start with the Tea Party, but the left wing is who made things get so bad by bringing violence to the table.



> One thing that people DID seem to overestimate and thought would drag on for years, but kind of didn't, was ISIS. Around 2014/15 it seemed to be the consensus that we were re-entering the War on Terror big time and that ISIS could establish itself as a major regional power in the Middle East that we would have to reckon with. But it ended up being a conflict that mainly played out in the background and, a few years later, dropped from the news cycle entirely.


Now that we're out of Afghanistan we are very much in a post-War on Terror era (or a post post 9/11 era if you will)



Erich Honecker said:


> Covid fucked with everything too because it effectively put us in a cultural time-loop for 2 years


It's been a surreal as hell 2 years.



ToroidalBoat said:


> I've said it before, I see 2020-2021 as one year, even though at the same time the start of the coof feels long ago.
> 
> I guess the time blur is still going on to me.


2021 has gone by in a flash, I literally can't believe it's already almost December again already.

2020 on the other hand, when I think back to the early part of the year, feels so long ago it's absurd, 2019 feels like a long time ago too, longer than a couple of years has felt in a long time.


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## ToroidalBoat (Nov 25, 2021)

Dom Cruise said:


> 2021 has gone by in a flash, I literally can't believe it's already almost December again already.
> 
> 2020 on the other hand, when I think back to the early part of the year, feels so long ago it's absurd, 2019 feels like a long time ago too, longer than a couple of years has felt in a long time.


Maybe it could be like this: blur 2010s, slow 2020, and then a blur for some time after?


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## Sekirodiealot (Dec 2, 2021)

It feels like a year ago to me somtimes since around the early 2010's was when i was in middle school and high school. I remembered when justin bieber was huge in 2011 and sround 2012 or so he lost relevancy quick and how nostalgic game consoles was starting to gain traction. 
I remember around 2014 when SJW was starting to catch on and it was mainly because of how the left started power tripping after obama's relection and by 2015, it was common for people to claim they're moving to canada if Trump wins the election and how people constantly bitches about him 4 years straight and how the entertainment industry kept pumping out trump jokes after trump jokes and the sad thing is that people like Jimmy kimmel are STILL MAKING TRUMP JOKES ALMOST A YEARSINTO BIDEN'S TERM.

I miss the 2010's despite being born in 97 qnd growing up in the 2000's. I remember when newgrounds was huge before FNF made it relevant again.


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## Judge Dredd (Dec 3, 2021)

I'm surprised this hasn't been posted yet. It's this thread in video form.







ToroidalBoat said:


> _Skyrim_ feels like a recent game, but it came out about a decade ago.


I think this is not just an effect, but a cause. Very little is one and done these days. In the past, long, ongoing, consistently relevant entertainment was the exception.

I'm reminded of Resident Evil Remake. It felt so long between the original and the remake, and the upgrade between the two was night and day. Meanwhile, games like The Last of Us get a "remaster" that is basically the same game. 

Skyrim was released a decade ago, nine years ago, eight years ago, five years ago, four years ago, and last month. Nothing has come close to it technically in all that time so it continues to be popular. Other games spend years in "early access" getting constant patches and content updates, and even after "1.0" DLC and free content mean that games are made over time.


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## Dom Cruise (Dec 3, 2021)

Judge Dredd said:


> I think this is not just an effect, but a cause. Very little is one and done these days. In the past, long, ongoing, consistently relevant entertainment was the exception.
> 
> I'm reminded of Resident Evil Remake. It felt so long between the original and the remake, and the upgrade between the two was night and day. Meanwhile, games like The Last of Us get a "remaster" that is basically the same game.
> 
> Skyrim was released a decade ago, nine years ago, eight years ago, five years ago, four years ago, and last month. Nothing has come close to it technically in all that time so it continues to be popular. Other games spend years in "early access" getting constant patches and content updates, and even after "1.0" DLC and free content mean that games are made over time.


It's true, games have longer legs these days, I remember revisiting some games from 2001 and 2002 once in 2004 and they seemed like they were fairly old at the time, now a few years old is still basically a new release.


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## ToroidalBoat (Jan 1, 2022)

It's crazy that the year of "the rapture is totally going to happen", "the end of the world because an old calendar stops", and the fail of Occupy is already a decade ago.


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## Jewelsmakerguy (Jan 1, 2022)

ToroidalBoat said:


> It's crazy that the year of "the rapture is totally going to happen", "the end of the world because an old calendar stops", and the fail of Occupy is already a decade ago.


But has it really stopped though? It seems every year every doomsday sperg has been doubling down on their "This is the day the world ends!" nonsense. Hell, last year people were going "when they meant 2012, they really meant 2021!". Now that we're a decade on from 2012, I bet you right now that they'll double down on that doubling down.


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## ToroidalBoat (Jan 1, 2022)

Jewelsmakerguy said:


> But has it really stopped though?


In that "doomer" satire about Current Year never ending, I made up that end of the world predictions became a daily occurrence by 1000 years from now.


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## Twinkletard (Jan 1, 2022)

1980s>1990s>2000s>2010s

Society just keeps getting worse.


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## ToroidalBoat (Jan 2, 2022)

Twinkletard said:


> Society just keeps getting worse.


It's like entropy.

So much for the idea that history is a one-way path of "progress"?


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## MirrorNoir (Jun 21, 2022)

Sithis said:


> After a few days I guess I'll try to add more to this than a lame snarky joke, although that was the truth in some ways, I did a lot of drugs in the 2010s lol. I remember it all, just some of it may be viewed through an altered perspective that doesn't relate to the overall gist.
> 
> I think the best way to describe how I feel about the 2010s would be the speech Tony Soprano gives at the beginning of the Sopranos. I started to feel that way around the middle of the decade, maybe a bit earlier. Everything felt stale. It was like an existential crisis before I even had any right to have an existential crisis but I consistently had an overwhelming feeling that I had been born too late, that the best times I could have had were behind me, and that it was a downward slump from then on out.
> 
> ...








This clip applies more to the end stage Gen Xers/early Gen Y-Millennials. People like me, who came in the world just as the bottom started to fall out on everything and got to see it all fall away due to the War on Terror/911, the Recession of 2008, and the rise of the anti-life politics of the lunatic left.

We got just the briefest taste of paradise but it was the end of the paradise, before the horrific fall my generation would get to experience from the very beginning, as opposed to the younger generation (like you I would assume) who came into the world while we were already in free fall.



Dom Cruise said:


> Brutalist McDonalds feels something out of a dark 2000s era satire of corporate culture.


It was even worse as it came from McDonalds doing everything but fixing the core problem that they've had for the last twenty years as they lost the fast food wars, not fucking changing their menus and keeping new items full time on said menu like other chains do.

Also, some stores DID hold off on this bleak as fuck "we want the applebees demographic!" but corporate finally broke them and forced them to change over to this god-awful style. Mine held out until around 2019 and they not only changed the insides but also tore down the playground outside so that Door Dash folks could park there.


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## MirrorNoir (Jun 21, 2022)

Pokemonquistador2 said:


> Obama's second term is when life seemed to get both faker and gayer.  People had always laughed at dangerhaired feminist wokescolds, but as soon as 2012 came around, important people -like big corporations--, started listening to them.  It felt like society was being infiltrated from top to bottom by those with totalitarian mindsets, and social media just made it easier to monitor everybody and punish wrongthinkers. I don't want to invoke Godwin's law here, but I get the creeping feeling that this must've been what it was like for people in 1930s Germany who were going about their business to see more and more people walking around in swastika armbands and more brownshirts screaming at people in public for not supporting their politics. Then the brownshirts start burning city blocks down and abusing their government positions to jail their ideological enemies. I feel the only thing missing is Liza Minelli singing and  dancing with a chair in a cabaret, (although these days it's more likely to be a drag queen dressed like a demon reading books to children in a library.)



I've long said that Obama getting re-elected, in hindsight, was the game changer moment that sent the left onto their downward spiral. Obama coming out of nowhere and denying Hillary the nomination and Presidency in 2008 was a legit black swan event and that EVERYONE naturally assumed that Obama would never be re-elected and that after four years of Mittens, Hillary would swoop in to "save the day" and the elites timeline would resume as planned. 

Obama getting re-elected, combined with the half-measure health care reform and gay marriage getting made legal and the "demographics is destiny" meme, made the left and the elites think the Overton window had moved way more than they thought it could be moved in a short period of time and that they went hog wild, peddle to the metal in Obama's second term, pushing all sorts of bullshit thinking they could get away with it. Which backfired HARD and led to them tripling and quadrupling down out of spite.


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## PaleTay (Jun 22, 2022)

Sometimes I feel like 2013 or 2014 was last year or at least fairly recent. I guess that's just school and work though.


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## skykiii (Jun 25, 2022)

Cabelaz said:


> Yeah it was fucking uncanny. Everything post 2014 felt like a autistic sprint to the finish, while the 2000's felt like a slow burn.


I know this is an old fuck post but I just found this topic and yeah, this is how it feels to me too.  After 2015 I kept having this phenomenon where I was struck by just how fast each year was going by.

That, and being caught off guard by changes.  I remember for awhile being amazed that people called the PS3 a "retro" console.  It was also odd watching things like seeing Five Nights at Freddy's go from some niche indie game to being a major marketing force that now people are accusing of being a sell-out.

The thing I hate most about the 2010s was this feeling of "transitory" that afflicted the decade.  Everything feels like it was a flash in the pan and then it was gone.  I almost suspect this is the reason for the remake hell and the intense focus on bringing back older franchises.  Something like Alien will always be relevant, but who fucking cares about Random Internet Cartoon #66554?

Part of this, I think, is due to the internet and the "binge" culture.  I recall hearing about this thing someone did where they posted chapters of Dracula on a monthly basis, and people actually got involved with it as if it was a modern program and not a hundred-year-old book, doing things like theorizing, fanficking, etc.... whereas shows that are binged tend to, again, be flashes in the pans that nobody cares about once they're done.

Then of course all the social stuff.  the 201X's is when everything began feeling like you were walking on eggshells because the things that set people off seemed almost completely random.  I recall writers complaining about making cartoons in the 1980s because of all the "you can't do this" restrictions, but if anything the 201X's felt like they were that, but worse... especially because they applied to way more than just cartoons, but even works by private individuals or just random things you happened to say on a street corner.


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## skykiii (Jun 25, 2022)

Aqua Panda said:


> The most concerning thing is that the late years of this decade saw a big push into normalizing violence and rioting. The "It's just property" mantra entered here along with "mostly peaceful protests." We are actually watching people try and justify it in real time now.


Actually, forgive me if this sounds spergy--and also I am most definitely NOT advocating anyone here make plans or do anything, but I just have to get this off my chest...

I feel like one reason we ended up in Clown World is because... well, its mostly been the people with the Bad Ideas who are the most willing to be violent IRL.  Meanwhile people pushing back, in my experience, tend to have this "no no we've gotta be all nice" thing going for them, which is effectively just tying their hands behind their back after handing a nuke to their opponents.

Full stop, being good, righteous and honorable does not matter, it does not win battles, and "moral victory" counts for jack shit.

The Bad Ones win because people are scared of them.

Have you ever had that thing happen where people treat you like trash, but then one day you snap and beat the crap out of them and turn out to be stronger than they expected, and then suddenly they're all about bowing and scraping to you and actually respect you?

Yeah, exactly.

Unfortunately, the people with the Bad Ideas happen to have a bunch of crazies willing to actually take action, while the people who see the Emperor's New Clothes for what they are... they always puss out.  So society starts catering to the Bad Ideas, because they're scared of what those people might do.  Anything else is just a bonus.


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## ToroidalBoat (Jul 13, 2022)

The 1990s are as far from the 2020s as the '60s are from the '90s.


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## JimJams1998 (Aug 31, 2022)

I'm gunna necro because it was linked via another thread, but I think the blur was due to social media and the insane speed information travels at today. Back in early college, during the first 3rd of the 2010s social media was still very much relegated to your laptop or the computer lab, so you could only check new information so many times a day. I didn't see regular smart phone use in daily life until mid 2013, and by then everything really started to take off as a shitpost from spain could reach some asshurt danger hair in sanfran in an instant. I really do think this instant transmission form of communication is not only anti human, and works against our biology, but also responsible for a lot of the ailments we see societally today. From the feeling like time is speeding up (despite having gone to college in the 10s I graduated hs in the early 00s) and it is certainly moving faster than before even when I take into account my age. Shit just doesn't seem to last anymore, even beyond products. When anyone and everyone can instantly find your hip new subculture it doesn't last long before everyone is bored.


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## ToroidalBoat (Aug 31, 2022)

JimJams1998 said:


> I think the blur was due to social media and the insane speed information travels at today.


For me it could be the latter because I never signed up for the former.



> I really do think this instant transmission form of communication is not only anti human, and works against our biology, but also responsible for a lot of the ailments we see societally today.


More evidence of the theory that the modern world is trying to turn people into Borg IRL?


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## God of Nothing (Aug 31, 2022)

Something something you have decades where nothing happens and years where decades happen something something


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## Flavius Anthemius (Aug 31, 2022)

JimJams1998 said:


> during the first 3rd of the 2010s social media was still very much relegated to your laptop or the computer lab, so you could only check new information so many times a day. I didn't see regular smart phone use in daily life until mid 2013


Yeah you do bring up a very important point about just how much faster we're able to attain any sort of information ever since smartphones became an everyday device for the vast majority of people, currently nearly everyone above the early teens has a mini computer in their pocket, that was something people only could have dreamed of back in the early 2000's, heck I remember when people thought that getting a flip phone was the technological revolution of the mobile phone considering the slight advancements it made.

When you would be out in public pre-smartphone days there was a disconnect between the online world and reality, you wouldn't have anyone using a phone to browse the internet that much in public, and even if they did they weren't using social media, you had more people living in the moment and fixated on the reality around them, rather then what your brain is processing on a little screen and worrying about a facebook/twitter feed. You could only connect to the online/digital world really if you sat down at a desk with a computer, or even if you watched tv on the couch, and people wouldn't use that as way to distract themselves whilst out and about, it was in it's own contained sphere.

Now as long as you have reception, there is no reason for you whatsoever to not be connected to the internet if you have the means to be, the line really has been blurred between what you see in the real world and what you see online, as you remember certain memories in the same time frame, it makes certain events blend in with each other, even if they didn't technically have anything to do with each-other (like as you said some meme from across the globe having some relevance to something you see happening in your local city). 

We won't ever be in a world again where the "real world" was it's own contained sphere of reality, there is just so much more of an emphasis on this social media craze, always online mentality, that soon you'll pretty much have entire generations not ever knowing that the internet wasn't a major part of everyday life, and fewer will remember those days were they weren't.


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## ZazietheBeast (Aug 31, 2022)

The 2010s were not a blur to me. It was also the final period of "good internet".  (No censorship, people created for the sake of creation, media was anything you wanted and people could express themselves)

It was the internet's hippie era. 2008-2010s. Then it became corponet and it became shit thanks to the woke fucks and the globohomo who enables them for that purpose. 

Sadly, much of the media that was up during those times are gone now. So if you have em, you got some rare goods. Still, watching the internet become corporatized was still sad. Like watching a good friend leave forever.


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## Local Fed (Aug 31, 2022)

I'm not sure if I'll articulate it the best here, but something that I think about every so often, and I think it adds to the last few posts here, is that there's just too many options for things to consume and there's too much ease to it. Mind you that this isn't some rant about consumerism itself. What I mean is that now with so much (be it entertainment, news, general communication, etc.) being digital, on demand, etc. there's less living in the moment. On the one hand it's great that we have these options, and on the other I think that having these options so readily available makes even the most self-aware people have less appreciation for what there is.

I think that people enjoyed things and valued them more when there was more of a requirement to actually experience things as they happened and in a situation where they didn't have as much ability to choose for themselves how and when they'd experience them; basically there's something to having some kind of imposed boundaries (again, not that I want to impose that on people.)


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## LillWeeb (Sep 2, 2022)

Erich Honecker said:


> I don't think it was a blur at all, but then, I'm probably younger than some of the people in this thread. In the 2010s I was finishing up high school and then going to university. For me, the time actually went very slowly and I can vividly picture what each year felt like individually. 2013 to me feels like a completely different world to 2019. The cultural changes that seemed to come around 2016 were so pervasive that it's difficult for me to look at those two years as even being part of the same decade.
> 
> A few people have said it but there was one thing we had in the 2010-2015 period that we simply didn't have in the post-2016 period: Optimism. Regardless of what political background you were from, in the west at least, those first 5 years of the decade felt drastically more optimistic than what came after. People look back now and say "well we could see that X event led to Y", such as seeing that the Tumblr SJW fad led to the all-pervasiveness of woke and cancel culture in the late 2010s, but at the time no one could have known that. Similarly, someone of a progressive bent might look back on the Tea Party in the US or the rise of UKIP around 2013 in the UK and say "these were early signs of the rise of the alt-right", but it simply wasn't looked at in that way. 2010-2015 was a remarkably centrist era compared to now and most people looked at "the crazies" on both sides and dismissed them as if they would be short-lived fads. There was an optimism that most people had because they didn't believe the norms we had grown accustomed to could be broken.
> 
> ...


      I know this is a year old post I'm replying to.  It seemed like  the  SJW/ BLM stuff  had its high water mark at the end of 2018 and early 2019. and was starting to recede with #metoo being the  last big SJW-ish thing, but the general public saw it as not political but sex pest getting what they deserve. 
 It seemed like in the first couple months of 2020 the cultural fog was about to be lifted, and society was moving on. ( Not that society was about to swing to the hard right but just simply done with the Left) remember how much the one New guy comic some  random leftest made about a new guy at work who was supposed to be the mean strawman, but  everyone found him reasonable, and the author self insert was just being a cunt.  Even democrats at the time expected trump to win.
     Then came Covid  and George Floyd, which brought back BLM SJWS and brought us back to culturally 2016 but on steroids. I guess every corpo and institution backing that would help.  
      As for the 2020s I think the they/ them stuff would be start to die down in the next couple years around mid decade since kids won't  find it cool or different anymore. I predict a growing detrans movement will only grow overtime as more people especially if they transitioned when they where minors. As well as detrans horror stories will become common and no one would want the be the woman who chopped off her breasts and now has facial hair and balding at 25  or  the man who chopped off his penis and can't ever have sex or use the bathroom without intense pain again. It will  be similar what drove the decline of teenage pregnancy was not convincing kids not to have sex but gross STD pictures of what could happen if you do have unprotected sex  Thanks for coming to my sperg talk.


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## StickFruit (Nov 11, 2022)

I wouldn't say the entire 2010's flew by. The early years (2010-2014?) were pretty alright, but coincidentally that was when the Internet and computers/smart phones really became ingrained into culture and every year past that has become worse because of it. 2015 was when the warning signs started showing.

The 2016 election absolutely ruined people. It doesn't matter which side you were on, the division that election caused has completely changed people, and not for the better. Controlled opposition at its absolute worst.

I think it was someone in the Modern Web Woes thread (i cant find the fucking post reeee) that put it best. They said something like "before 2015, every year felt different and unique. Every year after 2016 has just felt like a continuation of the same shitty one, over and over again." That's not to say every year before then was good, but at least it felt fucking different. COVID was the final nail in the coffin and really cemented this cycle, in my opinion.


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## 74164978231 (Nov 15, 2022)

MirrorNoir said:


> This clip applies more to the end stage Gen Xers/early Gen Y-Millennials. People like me, who came in the world just as the bottom started to fall out on everything and got to see it all fall away due to the War on Terror/911, the Recession of 2008, and the rise of the anti-life politics of the lunatic left.
> 
> We got just the briefest taste of paradise but it was the end of the paradise, before the horrific fall my generation would get to experience from the very beginning, as opposed to the younger generation (like you I would assume) who came into the world while we were already in free fall.


I think a lot of it comes down to we have regressed quite a bit as a civilization. By every objective measure America and most western countries are worse off in 2022 than they where in 1992. More crime, insane inflation, increased healthcare cost etc. 

Not only that but we have nothing to be proud of.

No transcontinental railroad.
No winning a great war that made us the undisputed world superpower
No putting a man on the moon 

All we have is a highly censored internet and shitty marginally better phones to look forward to every year for the past 15.


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## Magicicada_septendecula (Nov 16, 2022)

I do feel like it was a blur. So much unrelated stuff seemed to come at us culturally and politically making it hard to digest, and it seems people themselves changed in ways they hadn't in previous decades. The previous decade was certainly eventful with 9/11, wars, the Internet becoming mainstream, and social media becoming a thing, but they seemed more like the events were somewhat related to each other, or a natural progression of what was going on in the previous decades. The change in the people seems to be the biggest thing with the endless virtue signaling, witch hunts, cancelling, along with the death of humor and critical thinking.


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## ToroidalBoat (Nov 22, 2022)

Another wat thing from the '10s being blur: first it was "Millennials" who were "in the spotlight" - now it's suddenly "Zoomers"?

Yet it makes sense: "Zoomers" born around 2000 weren't even in high school when the '10s started. Now they're graduating college.


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## NeoGAF Lurker (Nov 22, 2022)

ToroidalBoat said:


> Another wat thing from the '10s being blur: first it was "Millennials" who were "in the spotlight" - now it's suddenly "Zoomers"?
> 
> Yet it makes sense: "Zoomers" born around 2000 weren't even in high school when the '10s started. Now they're graduating college.


The oldest cohort of millennials are now 41 per the generally accepted starting point of millennials, which is 1981. Peak millennial was arguably 2000-2015.

The 2010s went by fast but only for personal reasons: I got two masters degrees at the beginning of the decade and afterwards made up for lost time by partying and traveling. Then I was part of the alt right scene from 2014-2018 so that was fun times. After that, I got engaged. I skipped most pop culture, which was shit even before wokeness became a thing. The 2020s are moving a lot slower for me because it’s such a train wreck that naturally it feels prolonged. The powers that be have decided I need to witness this as slowly as possible.


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## behavioral swamp thang (Nov 29, 2022)

A lot of fashion trends and fads are hard to spot until about a decade from the end of a decade.  Bomber jackets, square studs, huge statement necklaces are now dated symbols of 2009-2015 Minimalism is really the a e s t h e t i c right now.  Kim K just posted a pic of her home interiors today and it looked like everything was made out of concrete.


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## FatalTater (Nov 30, 2022)

This thread made me realize that the Bunkerville Standoff was in 2014 and then 2 years later in 2016 the Bundy clan was back at it at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. It feels like it was a lifetime ago. (And dear Gawd do I wish more social media from that shit had been archived. SO many livestreams hosted on Gavin Seim's yt from the last 4 losers at Malheur are lost now.)

I have no idea what else happened that decade.


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## Sugriva (Dec 2, 2022)

2011 was the last good year. Coincidentally, that's also when Moot removed dubs from /v/


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## Lady Bizness (Dec 2, 2022)

74164978231 said:


> I think a lot of it comes down to we have regressed quite a bit as a civilization. By every objective measure America and most western countries are worse off in 2022 than they where in 1992. More crime, insane inflation, increased healthcare cost etc.
> 
> Not only that but we have nothing to be proud of.
> 
> ...


I think we're supposed to be proud of our current social movement, but Civil Rights it ain't. Actually quite embarrassing.

Anyway, not a blur because many poignant things happens both personally and nationally/globally, but it did go fast. Started out with great hope towards the future, but the decade ended with such rancor.

I'm really tired of the division. People I know are horrified that I look forward to visiting conservative relatives. Thing is, they've come out of their corners and so have I. I look forward to seeing them because even though we don't agree on everything, we can have a reasonable discussion. I feel like even when I agree with progressives, everything is super charged and catastrophized. It's exhausting.

Also sometimes my conservative friends take me out to the range and that's fun.


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## ToroidalBoat (Dec 11, 2022)

Sugriva said:


> 2011 was the last good year.





ToroidalBoat said:


> Since 2012, there's been "social media" and SJW delusion going mainstream, the circus that was "GamerGate", the "transgender" craze, TDS, media going woke and broke, the witch hunt that is "#MeToo", the grooming of children, "drag queens" reading stories to kids, "The New Normal", a surge of "simping", a surge of "peaceful protests", the promotion of pod living and bug-eating and other BS of climate change*, the Ukraine invasion, insane censorship, "supply chain issues", housing and energy shortages...
> 
> All that in just 10 years.
> 
> *(whether it's real or not)


2012 really can feel like the start of a newer, crappier world - and the end of an older one.


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## NeoGAF Lurker (Dec 11, 2022)

ToroidalBoat said:


> 2012 really can feel like the start of a newer, crappier world - and the end of an older one.


Maybe the Mayans were right and the world really did end in 2012. We just waited for a meteor or a volcano instead of something self inflicted.


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## Arctic (Dec 11, 2022)

Some Badger said:


> History happens in slow motion; only time will tell if the twenty-teens were a blur or not. While I agree with @oldTireWater that the feeling of the last decade feeling like a blur simply comes from age, if there was a definitive blur that society collectively felt looking back, the commercialization and widespread adoption of the internet by businesses and news outlets most definitely contributed to it.
> 
> The oversaturation of both information and misinformation coupled with social media centralizing user congregation kinda killed everyone's attention spans, so things like Kony 2012, Occupy, GamerGate, GameStonk (not a 2010s phenomenon but you get the idea) and the like were all flashes in the pan that couldn't keep the attention of most people unless they were autistically invested in the phenomenon long after it ceased from relevance, usually a month at best. The reason you might think the last decade feels like a blur is because a lot of stuff was happening and being documented at the same time, on the same 2-3 media platforms.
> 
> Frankly, social media in general felt like a slog to scroll through after Trump got elected and it lasted throughout his entire presidency (and still lasts to this day thanks to covid). The 2016 election broke a lot of people, and a lot of those people happened to be terminally online and will never shut up about the Orange Man until the end of time. 2014 was probably the last year I really enjoyed going online tbh


Boomers still won't shut up about Nixon so this will probably keep going for a long time.


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## Rome's rightful successor (Dec 13, 2022)

ToroidalBoat said:


> 2012 really can feel like the start of a newer, crappier world - and the end of an older one.


Can we all admit that the Mayan doomsday prophecy had some truth to it? It does feel like the world ended in 2012.


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## skykiii (Today at 1:45 AM)

Rome's rightful successor said:


> Can we all admit that the Mayan doomsday prophecy had some truth to it? It does feel like the world ended in 2012.


I'd go farther and say the Y2K prophecies had some merit.  That was when I first felt a "shift" in the world.


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