Does anyone else genuinely miss the 2000s?

Nothing seems to be getting better.
It is easy to give up hope that Current Year will ever end, or that Clown World will stop going crazier (let alone go away).

The show seems to be run by an evil force that wants this world to be a dark and miserable place, and make freedom a memory.
 
Just like Current Year itself. "Boring minimalism" seems to be the look of the IRL cyberpunk dystopia that is Clown World.

Like it seems new buildings always go for that dull hipster "brutalism" look, new GUIs are always that boring flat look...
Hey, at least New York is rolling out new Art Deco.
Everything feels hopeless right now because the mass action and large entities of our previous era are failing and everyone knows it. But, I agree with the astrologists and the Strauss-Howe theorists that we are entering an era of new individual action. It's difficult right now and 2020 really put a hamper to it transitioning peacefully as it should have (that singular year and its effects will fuel history discussions for centuries) but it will happen regardless and it will happen even if it's painful. Hopefully, the birth of this new world won't outright kill the society and render it unrecoverable but this world will change once its able, whether it's allowed or not.
 
I'd take Miyazakis take on this. Something he said about the difference between modern anime and older anime was that modern anime was made essentially by people who had never lived before, by shut ins, by people without any life experience (let alone the ones theyre making animes and mangas about).

Ill preface this by saying that I don't think you need to have real life experiences to make art, and that often "real life experiences" can be super shallow (like the yuppies living in NYC, world hopping to Lisbon one week, Thailand the next, riding an elephant for the instagram photo)

But I think, in part- the older school used to be inspired by life, by lived experience, by older literature (Kurosawa was a lifelong Dostoyovsky fan, I believe he got it from his older brother who died young). Honestly, the story of how Kurosawa got into making the movies he did, and his early life (among so many WW2 generation Japanese) is interesting unto itself. In sort, he wanted to continue his older brothers legacy, because these sorts of stories were all he really had left of the guy.
Regarding anime, you have to remember that writers and directors who really made the genre great either grew up during the war or immediately after and would have known a lot of people with stories to tell. And 00s anime in particular felt special because the genre hit a certain maturity where there was a lot of leeway to experiment and put in all sorts of themes or otherwise adapt all sorts of shit. Like I don't think you'd ever see anything crazy like Texhnolyze air on TV today, but there it was.

Probably helped that the Japanese economy was a lot better then before the 2008 crash. A lot of that went away in the 10s in favor of endless adaptions of trash light novels and godforsaken isekai junk.
Just like Current Year itself. "Boring minimalism" seems to be the look of the IRL cyberpunk dystopia that is Clown World.

Like it seems new buildings always go for that dull hipster "brutalism" look, new GUIs are always that boring flat look...
Because it's cheaper and easier for everyone involved, therefore is "efficient" by the algorithms investors and governments use. Remember, it's illegal for a company to not maximize their profits. Even ESG had to make money under this system, and since it's largely been a failure, it's dying a slow death. That's why things like nice art and nice buildings are not allowed to exist in Current Year.
 
What could such an era be like?


Why is such law even a thing in the first place?
It actually isn't. Shareholders have sued because of a corporation's decisions to take some political position or spend company money on politics that didn't increase profits, under a theory of corporate waste, but these are always dismissed under the so-called "business judgment rule," which means short of outright embezzling money or otherwise acting in provable "bad faith" (in practice nearly impossible), their decisions are immunized against derivative suits.
 
What could such an era be like?
It will be one where the actions that drive the public good will be the done by singular entities and local groupings instead of state bureaucracy and public corporations.

The grander scale of action will be like Elon Musk and Donald Trump where billionaires will actively hijack an institution and mold it to their personal liking while spreading their brand and agendas through personality and influence (Elon musk with Twitter, and to a lesser extent, NASA and Donald Trump with the republican party and perhaps the American government).

On a smaller level, artists and entrepreneurs will conglomerate on the internet and develop their branding independently with small loyal fanbases.

On the local level, those who can maintain their means through the economic straits ahead will campaign for their rights and may turn to lobbying and getting themselves elected to important positions within their cities and counties. On a darker level, if they fail, we may also see a rise in vigilantism as the police forces of out country suffer from a lack of funding, personnel and public trust.

In the end, it will be an era where the independently wealthy (or at least well off) will likely have their hand forced in order to lubricate the wheels of society and where those in the masses who have likely fallen away from a position of influence will likely gather strength and influence by driving themselves into local politicking and guerrilla action. Through it all, the alphabet initiatives and their benefactors will attempt to hinder it but at most they will have only succeeded in committing a murder suicide. The age that works to supplant them will still attempt to come into being as one where people will see a face and that face will truly represent itself and only itself and where those faces don't come, those places will die.
 
You know what's a thing I haven't seen in a long time?
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I guess there are too many cardcucks to justify having one of these on the counter anymore. What a shame.
 
State of video games and the internet in general was a lot better back then. You didn't have the rampant censorship that you do today, Even if you were speaking in the WoW game world you could usually get away with saying whatever you wanted and rarely would the moderation stop you. You have all heard of the infamous barrens chat, And rather than having all internet activity centralized around discord you mostly had thousands of smaller forums scattered all across the internet with varying degrees of leniency.

And this was before google bought out youtube and reddit had any real influence and the constant algorithm manipulation, shadow bans and auto moderation on youtube wasn't prevalent so there was definitely more activity going on, More memes being produced. Now a days you can hardly saying anything without the system auto removing your comments.

I don't remember people adopting such extreme spiteful view points back in the day either, You wouldn't find commies or nazis unless you dug pretty deep. Most people were just shit posting and people seemed a lot more calm and reasonable back then. I didn't see the bat shit TDS like symptoms between obama, bush in general. At least not to this extent where everyone thinks the world is ending

And finally the quality of video games was way better back then, World of Warcraft got progressively worst as time went on and by cataclysm it was a trash heap, Similar declines in Runescape as well mostly centered around the year 2008 (Though they were heavier on censorship back then making them an exception to the rule)
 
I think the '00s were better because the infiltration of communism wasn't as widespread in America.

State of video games and the internet in general was a lot better back then.
It seems like almost anything new in Current Year always has that shoddy or "watered down smartphone" feel to it.

New building designs, new GUIs, new movies, new vidya, new cartoons little kids grow up on*, endless new terms...

* The slop our kids watch online, and how it affects them. | Kiwi Farms
 
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The virgin 2024 America:

  • "identity politics" are taking over business, academia, and mainstream media
  • housing and even just renting is getting increasingly expensive
  • food is overpriced
  • vidya is moving towards all DLC and subscription BS
  • physical bookstores seem to be fading into history
  • no more video rental stores
  • few shopping malls left (and a number of them are "dead malls")
  • the internet is becoming increasingly crappier and censored
  • tech companies are "activists"
  • IT professionals have the reputation of being "transgender"
  • "smartphone culture" is ubiquitous
  • "social media culture" is ubiquitous
  • tattoos are worn by "normies"
  • the nation seems to be heading towards a civil war
  • major cities have become crime-ridden crapholes

The Chad 2004 America:

  • little or no "identity politics" in the mainstream
  • more affordable housing
  • cheaper food
  • pretty much all vidya distributed physically
  • bookstores are still a thing
  • video rental stores are still a thing
  • shopping malls are still a thing
  • the internet is finally getting fast without much censorship
  • tech companies aren't "activists"
  • IT professionals have the reputation of being nerdy
  • no "smartphones"
  • no "social media"
  • tattoos are worn by "tough guys"
  • politics aren't that divided despite the "War on Terror"
  • major cities can be getting better
 
My take is nuanced as a late Gen-Z.

What I like today is that Chinese got way better at quality, still not at the Japanese level :(.
The PC hardware is way more higher quality than in 2000s. (in 2000s you had shitty capicitors, shitty cheap motherboards, shitty PSUs, shit cases (used one and fryed my beloved Kingston 32GB stick))
You have progress made in mechanical keyboards today.
You have way better and cheaper audio tech now.
Open source projects/scripts from git are more popular. In the past you used to pirate a program for every small task.
My country is way way richer than in 2000s and it is less corruption, though the rich do it mostly. :(

What I miss from 2000s is Japan/Taiwan made tech, CRTs, the sane culture, the great films, games, the emo girl aesthetic I saw when I was a child.
I also miss the willingness of companies to experiment and create gimmicks/nice stuff.
Cars are looking OK, compared to 2010s but not as great as past decades.
Better music compared to the shitty 2010s-present, though I prefer the 80s-90s Rock.
 
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The show seems to be run by an evil force that wants this world to be a dark and miserable place, and make freedom a memory.
To be honest, I don't even blame the evil forces.

I blame us.

We saw this was coming. We knew. And we could have stopped it one way or another. After all, statistically the population outnumbers the corporations, governments etc. by like 100 to 1 (I suck at statistics).

But instead we sat back and accepted it.
 
To be honest, I don't even blame the evil forces.

I blame us.

We saw this was coming. We knew. And we could have stopped it one way or another. After all, statistically the population outnumbers the corporations, governments etc. by like 100 to 1 (I suck at statistics).

But instead we sat back and accepted it.
>we

It's always annoying when it's put that way, as if you or I could do anything about it. I don't think any of us just sat back and accepted it. I've got a number of people who still won't have anything to do with me, just because I told them not to freak out so much when Trump was running back in '16. That was eight years ago now. How the fuck were we supposed to stop Clown World when even people we knew in person were going totally looney tunes over what they were hearing on the news?
 
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