Noughties

The noughties are over, but this is the first time I’ve come across an instance where there was so much apathy towards the end of the decade. I’m not old enough to remember the end of the 70s.

At the end of the 80s, there was a lot of excitement in the air, because the Berlin Wall had just fallen, and everybody felt that the world was never going to be the same again (they were right) but they just didn’t know how. Plenty of social theories about how the Western liberal democratic system had triumph, and how communism was on the ash heap of history, were bandied about.

At the end of the 90s, there was another mood of excitement. This time it was because it was the dawn of the internet age. (OK, it was 5 years after 1995, which was the year that most people had first heard of the internet.) The tech stock bubble was at its height – it would burst shortly after. We looked back at the end of a century, indeed the end of a millennium. Although nobody really talked very much about what the year 1000 was like.

Now? I saw an article from Time magazine, proclaiming the noughties to be one of the worst decades in recent memory. It probably is, from a western perspective. At the beginning of the decade, the US was the undisputed masters of the world. At the end, they are still the strongest country in the world, but it’s become inevitable that other countries will catch up. They’ve had 9/11, and then they blundered into Afghanistan and Iraq. Closer to home, they’ve had plenty of job losses and layoffs (these started in the 90s, but they continued on). China was either stealing everybody’s jobs or driving down the price of unskilled labour in the world. They had their Hurricane Katrina, and the trauma of seeing one of their most culturally significant cities become a third world disaster zone.

World wide, it was not a great place to be. We had the threat of terrorist attacks, although the threat is more overstated than real. I think you don’t really have to be worried about terrorist attacks unless you’re in the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent or Xinjiang. Most of the developed world is safe. (A few attacks on London, Madrid or even Moscow doesn’t change this.)

There were plenty of natural disasters. We had that Southeast Asian tsunami of 2004, which more or less wiped out Aceh. We had earthquakes in Sichuan and several in Indonesia.

We didn't have a lot of the financial crises that had taken place during the late 90s - Mexico, then Asia, then Russia, then Argentina then Brazil. But in 2008, we had one big blow-up, in the US and in Europe. That was serious.

Musically this was not a great decade. I had regarded 80s pop as a low point in music, and this is a decade which looks back favourably at 80s synth pop. There was the death of the album, courtesy of the MP3 / iPod revolution. I’m sure there’s some great stuff out there but it’s not getting out to the masses.

The fact that there were so many band reunions in the 00s just serves to show that a lot of older bands sensed that there was a vacuum to fill. A Guardian writer opined that he didn’t know what was more depressing, seeing the Pixies reform, and being a shadow of their former days (this is an exaggeration, but you probably understand that punk musicians are not at their best in their 40s and 50s), or seeing that they’re still better than all the new bands out there.

This hasn't been terrible for everybody. There are a lot of things happening in Asia - it was a pretty good time to be in Asia - rising standard of living and everything. But still...

The future? We more or less know the score. There's a combination of rising middle class, hungry for resources. Running out of food, running out of water, running out of oil. Climate change. Ecological disasters. Islands disappearing. Temperature's rising. Nuclear bombs in the hands of terrorists. Liberal democracy on the wane.

They've all talked about how they hoped that the next decade was going to be better - we'll see...