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The first installment in a three-part recap of the 2010s.
Read more about this serieshere.
Unemployment hadpeakedat 10 percent in October 2009, and would not return to precrash levels until2017.
Companies like Uber, Amazon, and TaskRabbit promised newfound freedom and flexibility to the formerly jobless.
For the Americans just coming of age, these years of privation created habits that would last into adulthood.
Also thrivingwere what became known in the parlance of the time as the one percent.
As with Germany in the Weimar era, with economic disaster a new hedonism was in the air.
(The haircuts, too, were similar.)
Only now, the vibe was a little brawnier than Brecht.
Music of this period reflected the apocalyptic air.
Social media was a creation of the aughts.
The new generation of social networks would be native to smartphones.
This shift brought forth new business incentives.
Countless more found celebrity on a smaller scale.
On YouTube, vloggers amassed successful followings by speaking to viewers as if they were trusted friends.
Twitch, launched in 2011, introduced the concept of the celebrity gamer.
Beauty and charm had always mattered in society, but now those qualities were monetizable like never before.
Even the upper heights of the A-list felt the shift.
The literary world was not immune to these changes.
Shortly thereafter, the citadel of masculine literary genius was stormed.
Instead of zooming out, the eras new writers zoomed in.
Finn) who were resorting to gender-neutral pseudonyms.
The shift from universal to personalized experiences was also being felt in the world of screen entertainment.
The ripple effects of this decision would be felt in Hollywood for the rest of the decade.
In the longer term, the move put streaming services in direct competition with the networks.
But not just yet.
Among young people,traditional television viewership declined precipitously.
But there were exceptions.
Both were wildly popular, with social metaphors mutable enough to be claimed by left and right alike.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe andGame of Throneswere, in tone, not much alike.
(Even when half the living beings in the universe disappeared in an instant, the wisecracks remained.)
(In both cases, it helped to have read the books.)
When did this era end?
Sometime around 2013, when the colors of my memories shift from sparkling and metallic to muted and desaturated.
(Compare the music videos forScream & ShoutandWrecking Ballto see what Im talking about.
)Matthew Perpetua, too, pinpointed in that years hitsThrift ShopandRoyalsa backlash to early-10s hedonism.
Those conversations will have to wait until part II.Everybody get up.
For a brief period of time, I recall women being very into drawing fake mustaches on their fingers.
Events to come would prove that those anxieties were only the tip of the iceberg.
Remember the six months in 2012 wheneverything had spikes on it?
