It used to be so normal for people to smoke cigarettes everywhere. Old photos of NBA games and boxing had a blue haze – you can look this up. You used to be able to smoke in airplanes. When I was a teenager, I remember smoking at Starbucks and McDonalds, which had ashtrays and smoking corners in Singapore in 2007. People used to smoke cigarettes on airplanes. Fun fact: there are still ashtrays in airplane lavatories even though smoking has been banned, for harm reduction purposes.
2006-2016 “was a time of optimism”. (Not exactly.) TEDtalks. Citizen journalism. Progress on feminism and LGBT rights. Growing pains for internet communities as they became more civilized. Tolerance for a certain kind of bullying went down, though since then you could say a different kind of bullying went up. (Latest: a couple of girls mocked another girl from the background of a video, and allegedly tiktok got those girls fired.) 2013. Suey Park. Cancel Colbert. BLM 2020. Trump winning was a big shock. Covid was a big shock. Crypto was a strange mess. NFTs – even the big brands and celebrities were getting in on it. Metaverse hype.
2009, Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky
Slutwalk 2011. Gamergate. Anita Sarkeesian. 4chan vs Tumblr. Internet history thread. Something Awful. Kickstarter. Patreon. Rise of YouTube. Egirls. Onlyfans. Linktree. “You have won the internet, sir.” type reddit comments.
2013 Oreo Superbowl
Singaporean elections, blogosphere, twitter, PAP, #SGelections.
Now Twitter is owned by Elon Musk, something feels weird. It’s never quite been the same vibe-wise. Trump used to tweet. John Mulaney’s “horse in the hospital” story.
The rise and fall of Louis CK. #MeToo. Weinstein. Epstein. The Fappening.
“You’ve come a long way, baby.”
Google Glass. Google interview questions. Pre-youtube blogosphere. Tim Ferriss. SethGodin. Lifestyle design. Jane McGonigal, “happiness hacking”. Leo Babuta. Digital coaches, move to Bali and sell ebooks, that’s been going on a while, there are some old ribbonfarm posts about this I’m sure. Outsourcing to India, Philippines, Tech media narratives. Story of Buzzfeed. Jonah Peretti, brother of Chelsea Peretti, wife of Jordan Peele. Syrian refugee crisis. Ukraine tiktok girl.
Stickdeath.com. Early atheism. Dawkins and Neil Tyson and so on. Sarah Haider, ex-muslims. It used to seem edgy, now it seems mostly cringe to even care or talk about it, it’s not quite relevant anymore. “God Is Not Great” talk by Christopher Hitchens is one of the top vids at Talks at Google. 10% happier. So Good They Can’t Ignore You. Mindfulness.
TRP recommends therapy now. Therapycoded invalidation. Everyone goes to therapy now. That’s broadly maybe correlated with some kind of progress, but it’s hard to say for sure, isn’t it? It’s probably never been better to be a woman or minority– but what about Roe v Wade?
People mostly seem to just become irrelevant over time. But idk. Salman Rushdie got stabbed. Shinzo Abe got assassinated. Leaders used to get assassinated more. Bombings, unrest, ? etc. The big difference is that we have more realtime media coverage of things now. Emmett Till, Rodney King, black history… I must apologize for my ignorance but consider the average American knowledge of Southeast Asian politics. Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos – great atrocities, but also lovely ordinary people just trying to live their lives
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Those who died, Steve Jobs…