Discussion about this post

User's avatar
P.E. Moskowitz's avatar

Great piece! Weird to think I've been in this industry for this long.

One thing I'd add is the labor aspect: part of the reason all these sites became unprofitable is because they actually had to PAY people for content. Now that TikTok, YouTube, et al have figured out they can cut out the middle man of news/entertainment sites by having people do those things on their platforms for free (with the hope of one day being sponsored by an underwear company or whatever), there's no need for actual W-2 labor. :(

Expand full comment
Robinson Meyer's avatar

Great post. I tweeted this when Quinn said his thing … then I deleted it because I didn’t want to seem churlish … so now it’s going to be an over-long blog comment, which definitely isn’t a churlish medium … but how much do you think the alleged lack of recent nostalgia/“decade thinking” is due to a lack of clear names for the decades themselves? As in, it wasn’t obvious what to call the two decades from 2000 to 2020 until recently, and even then the ‘accepted’ name for each decade has changed a few times.

In America at least we’ve kept changing what we call the 2000s. During the decade itself, we called it the ‘two-thousands,’ iirc, but then after 2010, that didn’t really work anymore — it wasn’t clear if you were talking about the previous decade or the entire 21st century. So sometime later we settled on the Aughts (or just “the Bush years”) and now Zoomers also talk about y2k, I guess. Meanwhile the British call them the ‘Noughties,’ which is horrible.

Then the 2010s were unsettled too. We didn’t standardize on ‘the twenty-teens’ as a name until like 2014 or 2015, I feel like — during the few years before that, if you referred to the ‘teens,’ it wasn’t clear if you were talking about the present or the future, literally because the years 2010, 2011, 2012 did not end in ‘teen.’ (Around then, we also went from saying the names of years as ‘two-thousand-eleven’ to ‘twenty-eleven,’ too … this has been totally forgotten … I don’t have a theory about it.) So it wasn’t until 2017 or later that you could refer clearly and unambiguously to ‘the 2000s’ and ‘the 2010s.’

If this is true, then the return of the '20s would seem to decisively resolve the problem, but between Covid and US-China and everything else, 2020 is such a clear break in history anyway that there’s not gonna be a way to isolate the variable.

Last thought but I do wonder if this lack of clear '00s and '10s decadal names is a persistent trait of the English language, and not anything inherently wrong with our century. So instead countries tend to generate names for that part of the century — so you get the Regency era in the UK for the beginning of the 19th century or ‘the Era of Good Feelings’ in America. And thinking back to AP US History or whatever, didn’t it feel like the period from 1900 to 1914 was a little undifferentiated, just one big boring ‘Progressive Era,’ at least until we got to WWI, then it was 1920 and we were off to the decadal races? Anyway thanks again Max I’ll take my answer off the air.

Expand full comment
51 more comments...

No posts