Goodbye, 2000s, you shitty decade.
by Jeff
9/11, eight years of George W. Bush, two new wars, economic collapse, and you killed George Carlin. Fuck you, 2000s. Seriously.
On the other hand, you elected a black dude, proved the Internet as an incredibly powerful tool for freedom and democracy, birthed the private spaceflight industry, gave us the Large Hadron Collider, the Mars rovers, iPhones, Avatar*, and you killed Robert Novak.
What are the high and low moments for the naughts, in your opinion?
* I mention Avatar only because I expect it will get the credit for moving 3D into the mainstream.
Um, how exactly? I agree the 2000s saw many cool Internet-related advances (Wikipedia, WordPress, various Google things), but how did we prove anything about freedom?
Iran? The Obama campaign? Citizen journalism?
What about Iran? A bunch of Westerners changed their Twitter avatars green. So? What changed? And Obama’s hardly the first to harness online political clout – wasn’t it Howard Dean who started really getting into MoveOn.org (and yes, I’m aware that was in the 2000s)?
Yes, the Internet is a powerful tool for freedom and democracy, but I don’t think we’ve really seen real proof of that yet. Suggestions, yes. But not proof.