“The fifties were boring. The sixties rocked. And the seventies—oh my God, they obviously suck. Come on! Maybe the eighties will be radical.”
The joke plays on the audience’s foreknowledge of the actual 80s, and I like it not just because it’s said by one of my childhood crushes in one of my favorite movies, but because there are plenty of real actual academic theories based on (essentially) decade changes, from the Strauss–Howe generational theory to cyclical theory.
Besides, we all know decades have vibes. That’s why Dazed and Confused, a movie famous for having a meandering plot, no plot at all really, works so well. And if decades have vibes this logically implies that, within decades, there are years that represent certain vibe shifts. As Charles Schifano recently wrote:
Annie Ernaux, who was twenty-eight in 1968, encapsulates the narrow sensation nicely in The Years, stating that “1968 was the first year of the world.”
Annie Ernaux may have been right; perhaps, in a way, she’ll always be right. But for us, for our decade, for our current vibe: what year was it established? When was the decade-defining great vibe shift? What was the first year of our particular world?The answer is actually rather clear. For whenever I now see a graph plotting out something by years, my eyes now jump to a certain date: 2012. And, more often than not, there is evidence of some kind of fulcrum there. Others have also started to take notice as well: 2012 was a “tipping-point” year.
Such a year can mean a lot of things. Some tipping-point years are cultural, like 1968 (the Tet Offensive, MLK assassination, Robert Kennedy assassination, Civil Rights Act, Star Trek airs the first interracial kiss, all of which established the vibe of the coming 1970s). Other tipping-point years are economic, like 1971. In fact, there’s even www.wtfhappenedin1971.com which lays out chart after chart showing how there were sudden disruptions of long-running economic trends in America. (...)
If the cultural revolution of the 1960s was followed about a decade later by an economic shift in 1971, one has to wonder if history will repeat so obviously, with Biden playing the role of Jimmy Carter, having followed up a president, Nixon, who had articles of impeachment filed against him. Perhaps this is the recent “vibe shift” people on The Social Media Platform Formally Known as Twitter have been referencing, which is essentially just an exhaustion of the debates that started in 2012.
Surely, things must be more complicated than these decade theories, no? Of course. Obviously so. As a level of analysis they are nearly mystical. But if you had used this model of [cultural revolution → inflationary period→ lasting economic and cultural malaise] back 2012 I think you’d have a claim to near-Nostradamus levels of precognition. And that third stage would predict, much like the post-1971 world, a coming permanent change in long-standing economic trends (followed, potentially, in the 2030s with the return of Big Hair, leg warmers, and cocaine).
by Eric Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective | Read more:
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I still stick to my prediction that American society is slowly calming down from the unrest of 2014-2021. But as new rounds of protests erupt across the nation and Senators are wrestled to the ground and masked unidentified government agents rampage through workplaces and communities looking for “illegals” to arrest, it’s worth remembering that the decline of unrest can be very slow and bumpy. Thus it was in the 1970s, and thus it is today.But why is American society so unsettled in the first place? Something clearly broke in our society in the early 2010s. Watching TV or reading books from before that time feels like looking at a fresco or a mosaic of a vanished golden age — a country that had its problems and disagreements, but which basically worked. A country that almost no one seemed to doubt was a country, and should be one.
What broke that healthy nation? In a post last year, I argued that a perfect storm of events — the housing crash and Great Recession, the rise of China, racial diversification, and the rise of smartphone-enabled social media — all came crashing down on America at the same time:
I think that story is right, but I don’t think it explains why America was especially vulnerable. Many other countries suffered from the global financial crisis, faced the rise of China, experienced tensions over immigration, and struggled with the introduction of social media. To give just one example, you can see a lot of the effects of smartphones — on attention spans and learning, depression, suicide, etc. — in other countries, not just the U.S.
And yet the U.S. seems to have been uniquely wounded by the last decade and a half. Where other rich countries have mostly resisted the rise of authoritarian, demagogic leaders, the U.S. is stuck with Trump. American culture wars seem particularly pernicious and intractable. And America has suffered a particularly severe decline in the degree to which people trust institutions: (...)
By the 2010s, if you looked at a detailed electoral map of the U.S., what you saw wasn’t really red states and blue states — it was red countryside and blue cities. The cities were more prosperous than the countryside, which led to the GOP becoming the party of the working class and the Democrats becoming the party of the affluent.
But although we worried about political bubbles, this system seemed to work just fine. A hippie in Oakland and a redneck in the suburbs of Houston both fundamentally felt that they were part of the same unified nation; that nation looked very different to people in each place. Californians thought America was California, and Texans thought America was Texas, and this generally allowed America to function. (...)
Red America and Blue America became echo chambers that helped to contain America’s rising cultural and social polarization. They helped us live with our ideological diversity, by forgetting — except during presidential elections — that the people who disagreed with us still existed. It was a big country. We could spread out, there was room for everyone. As the man says in Robert Frost’s poem: “Good fences make good neighbors.”
And then that all came crashing down. In the 2010s, everyone got a smartphone, and everyone got social media on that smartphone, and everyone started checking that social media many times a day. Twitter was a dedicated universal chat app where everyone could discuss public affairs with everyone else in one big scrum; for a few years, Facebook structured its main feed so that everyone could see their friends and family posting political links and commentary.
Like some kind of forcible hive mind out of science fiction, social media suddenly threw every American in one small room with every other American. Decades of hard work spent running away from each other and creating our ideologically fragmented patchwork of geographies went up in smoke overnight, as geography suddenly ceased to mediate the everyday discussion of politics and culture.
by Noah Smith, Noahpinion | Read more:
