2014 was the last year we had a culture

There, I said it. 2014 was the last year we had a culture, but why that year? While it happened to be that Musical.ly, the app that would later become TikTok in 2018 (via a merger with ByteDance), was also released that same year, TikTok was more so a symptom of a larger trend rather than the cause of what actually changed.

It seemed during the period of 2011-2014 that civilization might have had a local peak in terms of relative freedom in the world, but more importantly, the general feeling of what actually felt like a culture.

During those years you could have still gone to visit a place like Russia or Ukraine without having to overly consider your decision even though events like Euromaidan had occurred, something that in the world after the Russian military invasion of Ukraine has become unthinkable. Europe had yet to experience the 2015 migrant crisis which triggered mountains of dialogue around immigration into the continent and the general political turmoil arisen from that happening alongside the exiting of Britain out of the EU in 2016 via Brexit that had yet occur in the UK. The American public had also largely moved past the grievances of the Afghanistan War, the economic turmoil of the Great Financial Crisis had finally waned into the background and the election of Barack Obama in 2008 had marked general optimism for the wide majority of the country that America was turning over a new stone, thus finally upending the national guilt of its Atlantic slave trade past upon electing its first African-American president. This was mostly an unquestioned dogma that was never really brought to the fore until the election of Donald Trump in 2016, which will be returned to later.

Culturally, this period was unique because it bridged the transition between the world before and after the smartphone, thus, in a sense, giving you the best of both worlds as a superposition between both epochs.

The pre-smartphone world was a very different landscape to the world of today. The distribution of cultural goods was centralized exclusively through the living room television on weekdays and the brick-and-mortar movie theater on weekends. For many teenagers the movie theater became the place you had your first kiss and most definitely was on the shortlist for a first date location. When a new film was about to release, either you’d hear about it on the radio, driving to or from school, or through an advertisement on TV while it was humming in the background somewhere in the household. Upon release, the film's shock waves propagated equally upon all corners of the land, and the synchronization of culture worked nearly as efficiently as an atomic clock that kept ticking without ever missing a beat.

Unlike the world of today, content was scarce, as one could only rewatch the same episodes of their favorite cartoons until they felt physically sick to their stomach and needed to literally go outside and “touch grass,” as we colloquially say now. One hour of television was usually filled with what felt like 20 minutes of advertisements, something that not even the most egregious of YouTube videos today can compare with. Most of the time, you were channel-hopping between Disney Channel, Cartoon Network, and Nickelodeon, hoping that when ads were playing on one network, you could arbitrage your time swapping to another network in hopes of minimizing time spent watching advertisements. When the normal fix of kid shows wasn’t fulfilling the itch, you’d end up jumping over to Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, or even History Channel when desperation really kicked in, usually sometime in the middle of summer or winter breaks.

Even though there were plenty of movies to watch, you’d either have to go in person to Blockbuster to rent them or wait in the mail to get the disc from Netflix. Yes, at this time Netflix was primarily a movie-renting service for discs rather than the streaming service that we know and refer to as today, however, even in the early days of the streaming service there wasn’t much noteworthy content to consume thus renting disc remained popular for quite sometime until Netflix had its breakout hit with the in-house production of House of Cards in 2013. Unlike the short-form TikTok-styled content of today, which can be consumed haphazardly, watching a film requires some semblance of an attention span, usually with the preparation of popcorn, a meal, or a snack alongside an undivided multi-hour-long time allotment dedicated solely to the film.

The early internet was also a radically different place than the one of today. Before Reddit, online communities hadn’t centralized onto one larger banner but rather were scattered across a litany of tiny forums all across unknown, eclectic websites. Getting viruses on your computer was a frequent occurrence, especially if you had a PC running Windows XP. All it took was a single click on the wrong link, and your computer would’ve been hijacked in moments. Vlogs hadn’t become the mainstay they are today; thus, when people posted videos of themselves online, there was an innocence and curiosity to it, most evident in the first YouTube video ever published, that simply does not exist anymore in modern vlog content. Much of that has to do with the expectations of the modern YouTube algorithm and the demands of building an experience towards servicing the mass market at large, but nevertheless, all these phenomena in the aggregate contributed significantly to the vibe of the pre-smartphone world.

The primary takeaway of this period was stability, something that in the cultural environment of today seems like a luxury. People knew where the content was coming from, who was making it, and there was never a whiff of skepticism towards the validity of what was consumed, except maybe by homeschooling mothers who, at the time, were a fringe demographic that no one ever really considered in the mainstream. In fact, being called “homeschooled” was typically a trope for being uncultured and or antisocial.

When did this all change? Anyone with eyes and ears living today would use anything but the word “stable” to describe the cultural landscape we find ourselves in right now. It seems that the entering of Donald Trump into the presidential election in 2015 became the primary flashpoint where this feeling of stability had begun to falter. One of the major watershed moments within the Trump era that broke this holding pattern was when he referred to the MSM (mainstream media — CNN, MSNBC, NYT etc.) as “fake news”. It was unprecedented at the time because of the hegemony those networks had over the culture, and was mostly said in response to the unfavorable comments directed at Trump by the MSM. From this point onwards, political innuendos started to splatter in your face, whether you were watching film, sport, or TV, as politics had decided to put the common man in its crosshairs regardless of whether or not you were seeking it out. Before this point, the blast radius of politics was mostly constrained to MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, newspapers, and the ballot box. My only reference to politics as a kid before the Trump era was a classmate pointing at a bush saying, “Look right here, here is the president, President Bush,” which triggered a chuckle that even the teacher found amusing. Now I’d imagine that same teacher would probably sit the student down and say, “We don’t talk about politics at school”, because of what the political climate has become. In this era before Trump became political, he’d be referenced solely as an unserious playboy or you’d see people in jest imitating his famous line from The Apprentice saying, “you’re fired,” something now unimaginable today.

What made 2011-2014 so special then? You still had the relative feeling of stability of the old culture and its distribution channels, but there was also general excitement around this new paradigm of the smartphone revolution taking shape, such that no one knew what final form it would arrive at. People used to wait in line for the latest iPhone, and having the latest iPhone used to be a status symbol. During the 2012 London Olympics, you couldn’t go a single hour while watching the games without seeing an advertisement for the Samsung Galaxy S3 at the time, as Samsung had spent 4.3 billion dollars in advertising that year. You’d frequently see phones with shattered screens in public because people hadn’t updated their behavior to reflect carrying around an expensive handheld device, or you’d see huge gashes into the phone’s glass from their car keys because people hadn’t learned to isolate their phone from their keys into separate pockets.

There was no belligerent politics making its way into music, film, or culture in any meaningful way. Music videos used to be a big cultural phenomenon, I remember. Go find some popular EDM songs from this era, for example, “Spectrum” by Zedd, and you’ll notice the messaging was superficial and simple. It was simple in-the-moment vibes that never got interrupted by political messaging via songs like “This is America” by Childish Gambino. No one would watch a music video and ever ask themselves, “Are there any microaggressions present, or is there enough representation by underrepresented demographics?”

Nowadays, I can’t remember when was the last time someone sent me a music video to watch, nor can I remember a single instance of a music video growing truly viral in the last five years. The first thing that came to mind was the cultural phenomenon of Taylor Swift, so I decided to take a look at her most recent video, “The Fate of Ophelia,” only to discover the video has only 244 million views, which seems quite paltry given that her video for “Love Story” from 2010 is over 800 million views. Obviously, this comparison is apples and oranges, as both videos were released in two very different contexts in two very different internet landscapes, but that being said, a fundamental vibe shift has occurred. Upon this realization, I decided to ask people I know a simple question of “When was the last time someone sent you a music video?” and nearly every answer was “I don’t remember” or a time frame of around ten years or later. Probably the simplest explanation for why this occurred is that before Spotify and Apple Music became the default distribution channel, the primary way of consuming music was via radio, iTunes, or through the YouTube music video itself. An alternative explanation for this phenomenon, beyond the change in distribution channels, is that TikTok-styled short-form content has completely saturated the demand for expressive, choreographed audio-video productions, thus rendering music videos redundant and insolvent. Regardless of the exact cause, this only further corroborates the fundamental vibe shift that’s occurred.

Coachella was once a cultural centerpiece of the world as it began going global in this period, as it was in 2011 when the festival was first live-streamed on YouTube. Due to the success of Coachella, there was an excitement towards music festivals as a whole, with other notable examples being Tomorrowland and EDC; however, with the key difference being that when you’d see images of said festivals on your Instagram timeline, you felt a genuine happening and fomo that today is simply not present.

Dating apps like Tinder (released in 2012) were also around in this period, but dating apps hadn’t yet become the de facto way of meeting people, as those apps were still a novelty rather than a necessity. Tinder was actually still a usable app in this period because it had yet to be overrun by spam bots, and its reputation hadn’t been tarnished by publicly documented claims of harassment, which eventually led the way for Bumble and later Hinge to come to the fore.

Even traveling was fundamentally a different experience in this time period. The world was small enough to travel anywhere, as Google Maps in your pocket could mostly guide the way, but it still felt big enough that going to the Grand Canal in Venice or the Trevi Fountain in Rome didn’t make you feel guilty for committing yourself to a tourist trap. Influencers en masse hadn’t completely cornered the traveling market by documenting every nook and cranny that could be visited on this planet; thus, there was convenience without overcapacity, but also still novelty without the completely automated doomscrolling of today.

When attending Coachella during this period, you couldn’t just doomscroll while you were at the festival. Back then 3G/4G cellular communication technology (4G hadn’t started rolling out until 2012) couldn’t support said density of people in such a small area, so your phone was pretty much useless while at the festival. You genuinely had to live in the moment, but you did have your phone as a backup once leaving the festival grounds. As mentioned earlier, it was a beautiful superposition of two opposing epochs, one entering as the other was leaving

The core theme describing this era was that “experiences” hadn’t yet become a commodity; thus, this is why when you saw images, pictures, and videos of Coachella on your Instagram timeline back then, it brought you fomo unlike today. All these “experiences,” be it music festivals, dating apps, or traveling, have all just been reduced down into another transient object that gets discarded as quickly as they’re created. Quite literally, a transfiguration of doomscrolling becoming reality itself.

Doomscrolling didn’t just magically arrive once smartphones were released into the mainstream in 2008, but rather, there was a sequence of technologies released thereafter that brought this brave new world into fruition. The first iPhone was released in 2007, and the first Android was released in 2008. Generally, smartphones between 2008-2010 were quite bad to use as the technology simply had not matured enough yet. The early smartphones genuinely took effort to use; GPS functionality was mostly a hit-and-miss, where most of the time you either needed a MapQuest printout as backup or prayed and hoped that your phone’s GPS wouldn’t randomly bug out when en route to the location. For example, the iPhone 4, one of the most pivotal devices of the smartphone revolution, had a critical design flaw referred to as “Antennagate,” where cellular connectivity could have been blocked out depending on how the device was held. In response, Apple created this “bumper case” that ameliorated Antennagate and gave a free case to all iPhone 4 users.

One of the primary features you used your phone for was the web browser, as benchmark videos demonstrating how fast a phone can open a website relative to other devices were once quite popular. It would sometimes take up to 30 seconds or even longer for the page to load, and back then, most websites were not mobile optimized, so you were relegated to pinching and zooming quite often when using and navigating between pages. You couldn’t just use your phone on autopilot; there was friction and effort all around you, like in the early days of any nascent technology. People would “scroll” the app store of their respective device, looking for novel apps to download, as there was actually a point in time where it’d be more likely to see someone playing a game like Angry Birds on their phone rather than scrolling. In the early days of the smartphone, scrolling the timeline wasn’t a smooth 60 FPS experience either, as it wasn’t until 2014 that the Instagram app on Android had a major rewrite and started to have smoother scrolling.

The smartphone wasn’t really technologically ready for the mainstream until the iPhone 4, which was released in 2010, and it didn’t reach its final form until the iPhone 6, which was released in 2014, a size and form-factor that’s pretty much identical to any modern phone you might hold today. In the early smartphone days, there was a huge variance between the form factors, such as devices with landscape hardware keyboards, i.e., HTC G1 or Motorola DROID, devices with vertical keyboards like the Blackberry Torch or Palm Pre, alongside wonky devices like the Sony Xperia Play, colloquially referred to as the “PlayStation” phone. The iPhone 4 was the first Apple product with the Retina display, making text extra crisp on screen, but it also had a 5 MP camera which was quite the step up relative to other devices at the time except for say the Nokia N8 which had a 12 MP camera, however, that device and ecosystem never became the iPhone that we refer to today. The quality, but more importantly, the ease-of-use of the iPhone 4 camera really helped lead the way for photo-first platforms like Instagram to enter the mainstream, as the iPhone 4 had become the most popular camera on Flickr in 2011, a photo-sharing platform used mostly by professional photographers for sharing pictures. It also coincided that camera shipments peaked worldwide around 2010, right as smartphones started to pick up major steam in adoption, as it was also in 2012 when the smartphone market broke through the 50% threshold among US customers.

Beyond the hardware, which made all this possible, it was the underlying software platforms that truly transformed civilization. Instagram was first released in 2010, but it remained an iPhone exclusive until 2012, when it was made available on Android. However, in the early days of Instagram, the timeline was still chronological, meaning you were really only ever seeing content from your immediate friend group. Using Instagram in the early 2010s felt a lot more intimate in terms of proportion as it wouldn’t take much effort to start noticing sequential posts you’d seen from the previous day, reminiscent of how you’d re-watch TV shows in the pre-smartphone era. If you wanted to seek out new information, you had to manually press the “explore” tab (a feature that wasn’t released until 2012).

The fundamental change actually happened in 2016 when the algorithmic timeline was released and made the default option. It was in this moment that content distribution was de-localized from your immediate friend group, and now in retrospect, probably where the seeds were sown for the polarization and the cultural fracturing we’ve arrived at today. It was also in that same year that Twitter (later renamed to X) introduced the algorithmic timeline via the “For You” page, whilst also making it the default option.

It was not just the algorithmic timeline(s) of Instagram and Twitter that brought this change, but it was in 2010 when Netflix unveiled a streaming-only plan, which played a major role in reorienting the distribution of content away from the TV. Other notable video-streaming platforms were Hulu, which was released in 2007, Amazon Prime Video, released in 2011 (originally released as Amazon Unbox in 2008), and HBO Now in 2015. Spotify made it into the US in 2011 but hadn’t released an algorithmic newsfeed via the *Discovery Weekly *feature until 2015, and later the Release Radar feature in 2016.

What made the era of 2011-2014 so different is that the same relative proportion and size of the internet of today was available, but without the algorithmic newsfeeds of today. We were still relatively consuming more or less the same content at large, but with just a smidge of more personalization, whilst sharing the same underlying cultural primitives. The algorithmic clusters weren’t entrenched enough yet to make ourselves culturally isolated and ultimately unrecognizable from one another. Nowadays, you’ll probably have more in common with someone in the same algorithmic cluster than in your immediate geographic proximity.

There is a reason why these algorithmic newsfeeds all popped up around the same time; there were developments within machine learning that made it possible to build image and text classifiers whilst updating the models in real-time across the scale of a social network the size of Instagram or Twitter. Technologies like word2vec (2013), represented text in a vector space thus making text-first Twitter algorithmic timelines possible alongside AlexNet (2012), which transformed computer vision via deep learning, paving the way for classifying images, thus making the Instagram algorithmic timeline possible especially after future iterations such as ResNet (2015) for more accurate classifications and XGBoost (2016) for ranking and making user predictions for said content at scale. Other notable technologies were Docker (2013) for deploying reproducible lightweight containers, Kafka (2011) for streaming user events (likes, comments, etc) in real-time, Kubernetes (2014) for managing and scaling containers in real-time, and TensorFlow (2015), which greatly reduced the barrier of entry for using and deploying said training, deploying, and iterating ML models at scale.

Now that the stage has been set, let’s take a step back and ask ourselves what major event happened in 2016? It was the election of Donald Trump. Obviously, it would be silly to then conclude that Trump won the election solely because of algorithmic newsfeeds, but it’s no secret his social media presence played a pivotal role in his 2016 victory. If his campaign team determined that 2015 was the perfect time to run for president because of the emergence of the algorithmic newsfeed, that line of reasoning would’ve been a stroke of genius, but as an outsider to that inner circle its impossible to know.

Trump didn’t just emerge out of a vacuum; there were other cultural events that led up to the tension in the 2016 election. Most notably, the ones that come to mind are Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin, all of which brought back the conversation of prejudice and systemic discrimination towards how the African-American community was treated by law enforcement, which thus shattered the euphoria the country had initially felt after electing Barack Obama in the first term. However, there was the other half of the country that held a different opinion towards law enforcement, which emerged into the “Blue Lives Matter” movement in response to “Black Lives Matter” and, most notably, the Ferguson Riots of this era.

Shortly after the titanic event of Donald Trump’s election, the virulent anti-Trump sentiment became part of the culture, and once that happened, the unwritten rule of making culture a politically neutral quantity vanished, thus in effect bringing an end to the very premise of culture at large. This was probably only accelerated by the Me Too movement of 2017, which cast shade around the entertainment industry given the prominence that Harvey Weinstein had in the industry. To add more fuel to the fire, the Jeffrey Epstein incident and the controversy surrounding him only cast further doubt into our elite institutions that already had waning influence.

Other events, such as Collin Kaepernick choosing to kneel in protest of systemic discrimination upon the national anthem playing at the beginning of a football match back in 2016, turned football games into a political jousting match rather than an outlet for the common man’s monotonous drudgery, which only helped to further spoil the cultural landscape. Whatever thread of a culture we might have had after the Trump election and before 2020 must have fully severed into a national divorce after the political showdowns pertaining to COVID measures and all the political aftershocks from the 2020 BLM riots. The George Floyd demonstrations even made their way past the Atlantic, where people in European countries went to the streets protesting what they believed to be police brutality that hadn’t even happened on their soil, thus further providing evidence of “culture” delocalizing into a contrived machination. Consequently, America no longer feels like one nation united under God, but rather two cultures united by one economic zone and one military.

As to where we find ourselves now in context to the larger culture, listening to Spotify music and discovering music solely via the weekly Release Radar, I genuinely don’t know what music is popular anymore. The very idea of an American Top 40 is such a faint apparition now that its very premise no longer makes sense in the algorithm-first distribution channels of today. Very seldomly, I’ll be at the gym and hear a song that’s made it in my playlists blasting on the speakers, and I’ll scratch my head asking myself, “Did that song of all songs make it into the mainstream?” before realizing the gym playlist is probably just another Spotify playlist that is algorithmically generated, no different from mine. On the same thread pertaining to films, unless the movie goes uber viral, I’m no longer in contact with what films are being consumed because between the time spent driving listening to Spotify and the time on the internet there’s no opportunity for me to find out unless there’s a Youtube ad for a film on the YouTube mobile app playing before a video.

The last time I felt a cultural moment of unity and synchronization from the time before was with Game of Thrones, specifically with the intensity, fervor, and impact it had on the larger cultural conversation. Every timeline, be it YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, had explicit references to it the day after a new episode was aired, but more importantly, there were no explicit political references in Game of Thrones, and partly because of that, it was able to breach the meta. Momentarily, it was able to unite people into a larger storyline amidst the many other cultural battles happening in the foreground.

In the “old” pre-smartphone world, I never really had a strong connection to the mainstream culture as I’d describe myself as a child of the internet, but back then, solely due to the structural differences of how cultural goods were disbursed, I was naturally more in tune with what was happening at large. The key difference in the period (2005-2010) after social media had arisen via Facebook (est. 2004) and MySpace (est. 2003), but before the smartphone, was that you were given a binary choice: either you’re going to live in the real world, or you’re going to be on the internet. The smartphone presented us with the illusion of both, meaning you could be part of the internet while in the real world, and this seemed to function until the algorithmic timelines entered the scene. Now it seems that we’re left with neither, as we’ve deluded the experience of the real-world with the smartphone, but because the internet has become so commoditized, it no longer has the same distinction from the real world. The algorithmic timelines seemed to have flattened both the internet and the real world, such that there’s no more meaningful demarcation between the two.

As jarring as the zeitgeist is that we’re living in now, I’m not going to miss looking for your remote stuck in-between the couch, recording your favorite shows on the DVR so you can skip past the advertisements, using computers with spinning HDDs where you had to wait sometimes two minutes for Google Chrome to open, using laptops with batteries that only lasted 1-2 hours, finding new music on YouTube, moving mp3 files from your computer to your iPod, reading text messages written in shortened alpha-numeric prose such as “c u l8r” or overhearing Disney kids singing along to High School Musical while making references to *Frozen, Hannah Montana and iCarly, *but I will miss the simpler care-free energy of the 2011-2014 era that we won’t ever get back. This video here captures some of the lucid, in-the-moment energy I felt back then, speaking from the perspective of someone who grew up in SoCal and who spent a decent amount of time near the ocean during the 2011-2014 years.

Something important seems to have been lost. We were once able to appreciate things more so as they were, and during that period, there was less of an imperative to inject your worldview and ideas onto the thing before you. Back in 2018, there was a controversy with the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show because there was not enough inclusivity, particularly upon the representation of the female body relative to the rest of the female population. The few times I had watched it growing up, I was able to appreciate the beautiful women walking the runway and didn’t think anything more or less about it after watching it. You simply appreciated it for what it was, not in the subtraction and or detriment of something else. Here lies the problem: when everyone becomes the commentator, and everything must be filtered through some prism of ideology, eventually, something has to give, and anything incongruent with said person’s worldview must be flattened.

In this cultural environment, it doesn’t seem possible that something like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings could’ve become a cultural centerpiece without some group or faction publicly denouncing incongruence with their worldview. This only further demonstrates why the feeling of a culture has been lost. You can never recreate anything, especially a fragment of a “golden era” that you deem as now long lost, but you can build a better future and take inspiration from what you thought were the best parts from the time before. This is a good reminder to us all that the feeling of unity shouldn’t just be taken for granted, I certainly did back in that period, but that it actually takes genuine effort to maintain those periods of relative cultural prosperity. When these headwinds will finally pass, I hope future generations can be more cognizant and grateful when they’ll find themselves in periods free of internal conflict.

If there’s one positive takeaway from the algorithm-first world of today, is that it might’ve brought an end to multi-generational dark ages from ever emerging again, solely due to the compression of cultural half-lives, thus through the sheer velocity of idea turnover alone, maladaptive memes become purged from the cultural immune system before ever reaching critical mass. Taking a step back, this makes complete sense. A timeline is simply a collection of disappearing apparitions, for any unit of culture gets rendered valid for no more than mere seconds before gracefully being whisked away by your thumb.

While we may not ever get this feeling of cultural unity we once had, the emergence of AI-generated film could end up relinquishing the need for an institution like Hollywood for the creation of film, thus no longer needing to negotiate between the two factions. Rather than keeping this balancing act going between the two sides, content reflecting the values of each respective side can simply make its way into the fore.

This leaves us with an important question for this generational cohort and those to come: how can we create a culture that people want to return to and safeguard that isn’t comprised of vanishing apparitions entering-and-exiting your consciousness after mere seconds? How and where this will get built, I’m not too sure; however, the stakes have never been higher as the birth rate is as low as it’s ever been, and the political divide between the sexes is as great as it’s ever been. If we’re going to have any chance to turn this around, we’re going to have to get moving now. The time to generate is now.

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