The zeroes
Aug. 29th, 2006 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
Today is the first day of the rest of the zeroes.While it's far too early to get a big retrospective sense of what this decade has been "all about", something in the autumnal air, as we approach September 2006, tells me that we ought to have quite a strong inkling of the basic narrative shape of this decade by now. By late 1996, for instance, quite a lot was already clear about the stories we'd tell about the 90s. One of the things I notice in my own life is that I "get" a particular decade towards the end, and start feeling comfortable with it -- or at least with my filtered, personalized version of it. What I'm comfortable with in 2006 is mostly a series of values opposed to the mainstream culture. That wasn't the case ten years ago, when I could really get behind relatively mainstream things like the dot com boom.
First, though, some caveats. This decade doesn't even have a generally-agreed name yet. I'm calling it the zeroes, others call it the 2000s or the noughties. We also have to say that the idea that a cultural story can be told in decade-long chunks is nothing more than a convenience, a narrative convention. Big cultural changes have often happened mid-decade; think of UK punk rock in 1976, when trousers, lapels and ties went from fat to skinny, rock went from slow-complicated to fast-direct, hair went from floppy to spiky, and peace signs changed to anarchy signs -- all more or less overnight. I remember cutting the wing collar off my leather jacket before I went to university; it was utterly crucial to show that I was on the right side of the cultural revolution we called New Wave.
It also has to be said that we're living in a time generally seen as lacking big, dominant styles. Things have never been more fragmented, thanks in part to technology and the cultural bastardization brought by globalization. What does it mean to talk about the "one big dominant style" of a decade in which memes fly and die at unprecedented speed, and "everyone is famous for fifteen people"?
But I think it would be wrong to say that we're all now free to do whatever we feel like or that it's "every man for himself". We only don't see what we have now as a "style" because we're too close to it. Travelling -- and simply being around in as many different decades as I have been -- has made me a bit of a cultural determinist. A decade, a nation, a city or a generation always thinks it has no accent, and that the way it does things is natural. The more you travel, and the more you age, the less you believe that. Things do have specific styles, with borders. They are fairly determinant of what you'll find people doing and saying and looking like in any given context. People want and need to conform, to agree. It's a pleasure as well as a danger.
So have we got it yet? What is the style of the zeroes?
The Wikipedia entry on the 2000s makes a bold, if rather scattershot and American-centric, attempt to sum up the story so far. In 2004, we learn, the video game industry's profits overtook the movie industry's and internet usage overtook TV viewing. Religion made a surprisingly strong comeback during the decade. Whereas Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand continued to become more secular, religious groups increased their hold on the US and the Middle East. Music was dominated by the "rogue stereotypes" of hip hop, which overtook rock in cultural importance. Interracial dating became more widespread. Mesh caps were worn backwards, then forwards or to the side, then backwards again (a nice example of a deck with only one card, which can nevertheless land on the table in various different positions).
The Wikipedia's coverage of non-American styles is sadly limited. It notes the rise of ostalgie -- the nostalgia for communism -- in Eastern Europe, along with anti-Americanism and a trend for hip hop influence in J-pop and K-pop. It says nothing about Slow Life or LOHAS, ecological concerns, a shift to organic food, or the stunning success of international art biennials. For coverage of the neo-folk boom we have to turn to Pitchfork, which notes "the ongoing profusion of new and reissued folk-related material. Complicating matters is the fact that the current international folk revival is less a unified movement than a series of smaller, overlapping sub-movements that might include any variety of American Primitive guitarists, free-form avant-folk collectives, ramshackle campfire pop, medieval-tinged electronica, or wayfaring acoustic singer-songwriters."
We're getting closer to the memes I'd understand as "the face of the zeroes", but of course I have really too much of a vested interest in things like "medieval-tinged electronica" to know if rooting for it would be anything more than insider trading.
So how have your zeroes been so far, I hear you ask? (It's not as if I don't answer this question every single day in these pages, but I'll pretend you asked anyway.)
Music: I feel like the proliferation of available music has corresponded with a personal need to listen to less, and for that music I do seek out to do less. I've wondered if my taste for ambient avant garde or raw roomtone recordings represents a "hatred of music" or just a move into bobo organics. I've also travelled, electronic banjo in hand, on the neo-folk bandwagon, and got interested in weird World Pop (currently Cambodian 70s and Thai 90s). But sometimes I think that music is dead for me, except as something I make. Although it's a bit embarrassing to admit, I love listening to my own music; Ocky Milk is undoubtedly the record I've listened to the most this year. Maybe, amidst a cascading plethora, I became self-sufficient in music. Famous for one person.
Cinema and TV: Hollywood and terrestrial TV are pretty much stone cold dead in my zeroes. YouTube is where it's at: the other day I played a sequence of Associates and Telex videos and danced around my room in complete ecstasy. Nothing shown in cinemas could take me to that place, although I've certainly ridden the documentary trend to some extent, enjoying non-fiction movies like "My Architect". I've never seen Reality TV though. I refuse to watch it. For me it's 90s, because I got pretty involved in the really early series of MTV's The Real World back in 1996, but have no interest in seeing that turn into something beyond Charlie Booker's wildest nightmares. Oh, and speaking of Charlie Booker, my television of the decade was his Hoxton satire Nathan Barley. Obviously.
Fashion: Basically I continue to see thrifting, which I started to do seriously from about 1997, as the only valid fashion. Recycle, recontextualize, play, and avoid snobby, expensive, conformist, ugly, vain, top-down fashion while you're at it. Though Japan has declined in its influence on me, it's still more acceptable in its mainstream than other nations. I've shifted from an interest in trendy Japanese street style to trad Japanese flamboyance: kimonos can still get me very excited.
Art: Art and visual culture have become more and more central to my life, becoming something between a religion and a career for me. Except that it's a weird career where I skip about on the edges of an ever-more-monied scene, making no money whatsoever despite appearing in the Whitney Biennial or authoritative surveys of "emerging artists". There's something odd about my relationship with the art world, but the distance I keep from its commercial engine allows me to keep the sparkle in my eyes. Who's my favourite artist of the zeroes? I couldn't possibly say any one person; I think I just love biennials. But my favourite photographer is Rinko Kawauchi.
Technology: I seem to have a technology column in Wired News, but to be honest it's hard, in a post 9/11 world, to feel as shiny-eyed and gung ho about the inherent goodness of technological progress as one might have done in the 90s. And, just like those Japanese street kids, the Apple computers I use now (a new white laptop every year or two, pretty much the same as the last one) seem less colourful than they did back in 1998 or so. One doesn't cry with joy during Steve Jobs' product roll-outs any more (and yes, I really did used to do that). I don't have a cell phone or an iPod, although if I could have a wifi laptop sewn into my cranium I'd do it tomorrow. Believe it or not, I had my first proper intercontinental video call last night, with Hisae in Osaka. It was mind-blowing.
Politics: Oh God, don't get me started. What a fucking disaster this decade has been. Imperialism, fundamentalism, terrorism, war war war. And my hunch is that it's all going to get much worse. I don't see any signs that the ongoing rightward shift towards oligopoly, theocracy, the paranoid security state and "fascism lite" is going to swing back towards Enlightenment or egalitarian values any time soon.
So how have your zeroes been, friend? What's the story of this nameless decade? Are you getting comfortable with it, or just waiting with gritted teeth and drumming fingers for the damned thing to end?
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 10:28 am (UTC)What's really scary is the way apologists for the above often claim they're trying to *protect* (or indeed *resurrect*) Enlightenment values.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 10:37 am (UTC)I like this idea very much.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 10:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 10:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 11:10 am (UTC)the confusion and heterogeneity is the story, the end of cultural monoliths, spreading microcommunication and leaking barriers have had odd effects personally, for music, and what we read, but more than that politically. our political violence is coming back at us on the underground and in airports, in a way that is shocking and new to us, and politically we don't have a coherent liberal reaction against it, there are no simple ideas, just millions of little ones. there's not just no music scene i'm into, there's no political party, no newspaper. i go on anti-israel/pro-lebanon demonstrations at the moment, not so much to show my face, but to dilute and debate with fundamentalist anti-semites who might be otherwise be interpreted as representing the anti-war movement. even my protest is a meta-protest.
this will be remembered as the decade when nobody knew what the fuck to think.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 11:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 11:43 am (UTC)the end of big ideas in politics is something thinktank people seem to talk about a lot, the "power commission", falling engagement, that kind of stuff. i'd almost view the resurgence of religion as the last gasp of the oldest and biggest ideas, "try them on for size, if they don't work none of them will" kind of thing.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 11:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 11:25 am (UTC)-Cultural Flow or Something-
90s: United States ---->Everybody else
00's: Japan ----> Everybody else (but America still thinks "they love us over there")
The Chinese diaspora is an amazing creature and I am delighted, though maybe not about the PRC. I hope they can do a better job of balancing environmental preservation and economic growth.
It was all about "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" back then, but lately, things have gotten bigger, with people talking about sustainability, preservation, organic food (really big in my household!).
Be happy, Momus--people do not talk about it, but "slow life" has really gotten big. You can see it in music, for sure. My generation doesn't want to party excessively or get really drunk. It would rather take it easy, hang out at so-and-so's house and take a nap. Jumping around and smoking is bad for your joints!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 12:15 pm (UTC)My "zeroes" have been pretty much terrible. However, stylewise I've gotten more glacial and abstract. The only good thing is that I got my first home computer in 2000, after using university computer labs for years. I also got a digital camera. This is one area in which technology has simplified my life, since I do so much reading, business and music activity on my little laptop, and it's widened the possibilities for visual research. I live in a smaller space than I did in 1990, or even in 1995, but I don't mind it so much. I find local politics more interesting than I did ten or fifteen years ago, but perhaps that is me getting older. I'm less interested in Americans online and more interested in the global online community. That's a fairly recent change.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 12:58 pm (UTC)For whites, the hipster and "emo" aesthetics are clear markers for this decade. More mainstream whites have moved away from khakis and adopted "distressed" boot-cut jeans and mass-produced fake thrift store ringer tees from Abercrombie and American Eagle.
For blacks, the predominate style is the XXXXXL white t-shirt that looks like a dress; and in wintertime its the black quilted jacket. Blacks are especially afraid now to move out of that comfort zone for threat of being made fun of. It's hard to imagine that only 15 years ago blacks were wearing multi-colored hoodies and red denim shorts.
In terms of music, the industry manufactured their own backlash to the Britney/98 Degrees pop music of the late 90s by bringing in safe and accessible punk (Good Charlotte, Sum 41) and emo (Fall Out Boy). There aren't necessarily fewer rock listeners, but the public's attention is no longer focused on a handful of guitar heroes as in the past, but among jam bands, indie rock, misc genres.
Black music is now more stripped-down and less melodic (see anything produced by Lil Jon, Timbaland, or the Neptunes). In the 80s you had new jack swing with lots of interested Gospel-y extended harmonies and heavily layered drum programming. In the 90s you had a kind of continuation of that but there was even still much melodicism in the more up tempo songs.
-henryperri
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 12:58 pm (UTC)I also wonder if you don't ahve a phone how you connect withkeep up with people/friends/family as you are living in different countries. through email?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 01:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 04:08 pm (UTC)when i upgrade to a wifi phone (soon), my skype will always be set to "maybe available".
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 01:14 pm (UTC)The decade, for me, has been like this:
Graduate university.
Teach English in Taiwan. Study literature in Japan.
Come back to England in terror at what awaits and find that the employment scene is, well, really not my scene - a culture where I don't belong.
It has also been the decade when ecology is and has to be a serious subject. Earth is really dying.
It is also weird for me to reflect on this, but it's also the decade in which I first had books published. Much of the actual material was written in the nineties, though. Books are so slow. Or publishers are, anyway.
I can't find much in the way of new music, at all, though. There may be reasonably interesting individuals, but there's no inspiring new sound.
Books - The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas. My Work is Not Yet Done by Thomas Ligotti.
Film - I'm sure there must be something that impressed me.
Television - definitely Six Feet Under.
I'm afraid it's rather thin.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-30 05:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-30 08:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 01:18 pm (UTC)That is all I can say- the rest of the decade has been spent by me being a teenager, which means I noticed nothing around me and can say nothing about it.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 01:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 01:34 pm (UTC)I grew up in the New York City area, so what I've seen is ... new "urbanism" - everyone wants to be in the city, white people from Wisconsin have taken over downtown Brooklyn, and rural/West Coast culture is pushing against the regional dynamic (especially on the economic level). It's pretty strange.
The good? The cementing of the global community - look, we're all sharing ideas here, and it doesn't matter where we live.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 03:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 02:24 pm (UTC)The thing is, it seemed there would be a real change: the mobile phones would be a useful tool, not another way to show how rude people can be in cinema or in the theatre! The fact of private universities grew like mushrooms would mean that we could hope the real average of knowledge among citizens would grow or, at least, some kind of civic attitude would rise. And so on.
The 2000’s are showing the collapse of that high hopes. I’ve been watching this levelling by the easiest means, a homogenization through the shortest expectations. While in the rest of Europe there some paradigms that can be discussed, here, there’s an accommodation to a certain statu quo and an individual absence from the public participation and discussion either we’re talking about war in Iraq, the European parliament or some local cultural policy: the number of people participating in public acts against war is absolutely reduced, we have a huge percent of young people carrying an university diploma that don’t know how to write a CV, there are more cell phones than inhabitants, TV collects all the garbage produced for the past years around the world, the shopping centres organize cities, the multiplexes destroyed the traditional cinemas, etc.
Sorry for this comment’s size but the main idea is that the 90’s, especially because of the EU effect seemed the final hope for get rid of this 50 year dictatorship we had but, in the end, the 00’s show only a caricature of what it was meant to be…
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 03:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 03:20 pm (UTC)For me the 90s are defined by just about everything bad. They were crap. The bastardization of the word "alternative", Nirvana leading the world into it's pop-grunge phase (whether Kurt Cobain was a genius or a tard, what followed was certainly serious 'tard[n]ation).
As the nameless 2000+ decade comes into it's own, I find it to be bringing rebirth of the boiled down extremes. Instead of PCism and muddled grey colors, we have more warriors on the side of evil (such as george bush), but also more inspired creatives. It's the repolarization that seems to happen when things get bad. People show their colors, and as much as it sucks, it's good as well.
This is only my statement on America though, China for instance, I would have to say something entirely different. They're still in what the 80s. Similar to the American 80s anyway.
Well, whatever.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 03:35 pm (UTC)The About Me Decade
Date: 2006-08-29 04:54 pm (UTC)Maybe it's generational, but I'm the reverse on the tech stuff - I saw nothing in the dot com boom for me other than hours of HTML and Javascript and never ending hardware upgrades, but in the Web2 and mobile era, there are more opportunities for more people. There are more free tools that are easier for non-techies to use (Wordpress, Linux, Firefox, Flickr), and there are more free resources (Youtube, Wikipedia, the Internet Moving Image Archive). Hardware (still and video cameras) are reaching the tipping point in terms of it being nearly impossible to obsolesce things (since practical improvements on image quality will be negligible in newer models), which may further democratize film and photography. And the mobile boom in the South ("3rd World") is affecting global society in unprecedented ways (Philippines, Japan, &c.).
But the big lie about the social web, as you've nearly suggested, is that it's social. This decade is about soft vanities, about putting on shows for one's self. Not the "Me" decade but the "About Me" one. Our audiences of 15 (or "Top 8"s) want us to notice their shows as much as they notice ours, want to do bloody remixes, or have their reply to our post bubble up to the headlines on Technorati, too. Being friends with everyone on myspace reverses into just rewriting my "About Me" page seven times a day, or posting yet another batch of self-portraits taken in a new mirror.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 05:29 pm (UTC)So what are you emerging from Momus? or what do you think the art world sees you emerging from?
I can't speak for myself yet because I feel like the full force of this decade in my personal journey is still, uh, emerging... but it's been fascinating so far.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 05:36 pm (UTC)momus-centric
Date: 2006-08-29 06:09 pm (UTC)in the same way, your experience with reality tv in the 90's (i also watched the original real world, but have found that when i ask people about it, they either never watched it, or might not have been old enough to be aware of it!!) doesn't make the reality experience for those people watching now any less "valid" for them, in fact it defines their decade.
momus-centric is just as bad as america-centric.
b(r)ooker
Date: 2006-08-29 06:13 pm (UTC)2. someone has put up all the episodes of charlie brooker's Screenwipe series on youtube (http://youtube.com/profile_videos?user=xthemusic), if anyone's interested in checking it out.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 06:39 pm (UTC)On a different note, this thus far regrettable decade has managed something spectacular: it has multiplied the potential for vast improvement. It is hard for genius to succeed in a wild decade like the 60's because of the "competition". In a dull decade like the 00's, perhaps the stage is being set for some otherworldly pleasure.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 07:24 pm (UTC)Very true, but it was that competition that gave us some of the greatest music.
Though sadly, it also destroyed some of those who helped create it.... And in that regard, the zeros do in some way have the stage set for someone to cause a shift, since there isn't any destructive force.
John Cage, the beatniks, and Elvis came about in the 1950s, a relatively calm decade in comparison to the 60s. Punk rose out of the boring 70s, in turn transforming into the post-punk of the 80s and 90s.
I predict that the next wave will come out of this decade.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 10:17 pm (UTC)A good example of what I meant about competition and the 60's is that amazing bands (there are dozens of similar baffling examples) like Kaleidoscope (the UK one) failed utterly and the people involved were largely ruined by the experience, even though their music was better than almost all of the bands that "made it" - some of them amazing acts in their own right (and we haven't had such a large group of amazing pop acts since then).
Another good example is Leonard Cohen, who made better albums than guys like like Donovan and Bob Dylan could muster in their entire lifetimes - and they made some fantastic albums! The big LC is largely overlooked by people looking back.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-30 06:58 am (UTC)I see what you mean though. Van Dyke Parks' debut solo album post-Smile (Song Cycle) was hailed by critics but did not sell at all. There was also Curt Boettcher's The Millennium and Gary Usher's Sagittarius, two fantastic LA studio projects that have yet to recieve any real recognition.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 06:59 pm (UTC)I don't think VH1 is gonna want me on I Love the Noughties.
And I just remembered something called the Strokes. They had some really great haircuts. Didn't they die in a terrorist attack on VocalProcessor-Con '02?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 07:21 pm (UTC)...when America jumped the shark...
graywyvern
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 07:38 pm (UTC)I've had my first job working at a supermarket, and realized, like the nine-year-old Brian Eno, that such a thing is unacceptable for me. With my free time, I've re-discovered lost passions, as well as new ones. I am now acting on those passions, and seeing where they will take me, for better or worst, and it'll be worth every minute, because I know I will emerge anew in the end.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 07:39 pm (UTC)This might begin to explain why we're all on livejournal (and so obsessed with it)....flickr, livejournal, myspace, youtube, 43things, diaryland, eharmony, friendster, etc are among the generation of web sites for those who want to flirt with voyeurism a bit and in search of connections. We all want to upload our photos, diaries, videos, lists of favorites for everyone to see, to find out who is similar to us or interested in us, who will pay attention and validate us, who will date us or send a mix CD.
I feel that life can be constructed in a much more personalized sense than ever before and we can create a world that looks and feels just like us (making "friends" with nameless and faceless individuals with common interests to us). It's just a false sense of security that we are relating to people and creating something in our community.
I think there is also a greater divide than ever between leaders and the people; creating wars, imperialism, political tension. Ironic that by reaching out globally through technology, people are realizing how much we are all the same, but there is no indication of this from world events. I think most people in America are feeling scared that the actions of our leaders do not reflect our needs or preferences. Maybe the White House needs to spend more time online.
2000s
Date: 2006-08-29 08:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 11:03 pm (UTC)In my world, the internet has dominated.
The net acts like a smoothing filter on the previously spiked availability of cultural products. If there are places with "more culture", they're less "hot" than they were before. Cultural entropy increases.
Which is why music is at is now: where previously it was possible for artists to mine their only marginally obscure forbears for inspiration, everyone's access to everything forces them now to loot the bodies of relative unknowns, creating bizarre little cliques of "inspiration" to compete commercially with the past. These "unknowns" - Beefheart, Olivia Tremor Control, J-pop, krautrock, Earth, "old school" hiphop, jump the shark so fast they're passe in the time it takes a few hundred people to torrent the "best album". Which is why people now listen to "Cambodian 70s pop" without mentioning the artist. So no one's totally clear how cool they are, but their coolness potential is quite high.
Most major music groups have "identification access points" - ways to customise your life with respect to the group, like bonus items in a video game. These include fashion items, internet forums, RSS feeds, political views, slogans, symbols, etc. etc.
The most popular acts are crude Frankensteinian works of synthesis - recording anodyne R&B vocals over the hook from a New Wave hit, with accompanying dance and sex symbol. Everything that ever sold a record, all on one plate.
And why politics is at is now: it's impossible to closely identify with party politics when your views become too nuanced from over-exposure to sound bites, scandal, opposing viewpoints, casualty counts.
The net also massively reduces the mean time required to act like you know something about something. As a result, you don't need to know anything much about anything, much less remember what you were talking about earlier. People are cyborgs now. One notices them to be more interesting conversationalists when they're online, with their real memories, than they are in "real life".
There are even fewer economic imperatives for the young white middle class. Many young people have enough wealthy connections (parents, friends) to participate in peer group activities without working, practically indefinitely, or at least until they're thirty or so. In this climate an "ordinary career" can almost be an act of rebellion. Getting over your own massive sense of entitlement is the cause of millions of early life crises.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-29 11:46 pm (UTC)And how has it suddenly become fashion-forward to earnestly talk about chakras while using words like "shit" in the same sentence? What is this neo-hippie movement?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-30 01:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-30 04:14 am (UTC)the 00's have brought us increased, and virtually constant, cheap and easy communication with everyone we know. and constant access to information - at least, if you're in a wealthy and stable nation. and even then, with cell phones being so widely available in sub-saharan africa, it's affected third world nations as well. everything is available to everyone, all the time. that either bodes the end of certain social barriers, or the beginnings of new and ever more impenetrable ones. both, most likely. i think the widespread availability of the internet and wireless communication has changed everything irrevocably, in a way that i don't think has happened since the dawn of television in the 1950's.
i think that, the impending ecological disaster of global warming and our dependance on fossil fuels, and the friction between the US/israel/the UK/etc and the rest of the world will define this decade.
culturally? i think it relates back to the information age spiel i just gave. everything is available to everyone all the time, so things are being combined and rethought and remade and reused and reinvented constantly. even 'revivals' such as freak folk, though based in a kind of 1960's hippie groovy folk ideal, bring in elements of vastly more things than just folk music and psychedelica. trends like emo and certain elements of mainstream hip hop are just lifestyles co-opted by big media and corporations to sell to the general public, in the same way grunge was, or new wave, or yuppie eagles crap, or late model hippie protest music, or pat boone singing little richard, etc etc. that shit always happens. what's interesting are what the people who don't wholeheartedly buy into that do.
i think the 00's are the decade where old social and economic boundaries started to blur, and where we started rethinking our previous modes of living. after 30+ years of relative calm, things are changing quickly - not always for the better, mind you, but change nonetheless.
did that make any sense?
oh! and i forgot one big thing: i think the fact that we've ignored the situation in africa - namely AIDS, and huge decades long conflicts in uganda, the congo, etc - will come back to bite the western world in the ass. very, very painfully. at least, i hope it does, so we fucking do something about it.
Saccharin & the War
Date: 2006-08-31 12:16 am (UTC)