All The 2010s Are Dead Now

I can’t pen it down correctly, and I cannot think about it without feeling nervous. I’ve written a couple of things down over the past few months trying to get the right amount of material for a perfect decade retrospective. However, I haven’t had anything valuable in mind until 2019 hit, because at whatever point in my life, whatever age, my body and mind grew up. This has made everything else I have ever done look obsolete.
This is my first decade alive.

Everything I’ve created, been caught doing, been archived and recorded as saying, been remembered as being responsible for and so on from 2010 to 2018 can no longer be directly accessed, but it’s floating around somewhere and there’s an intangible sense of dread that I feel when I remember it. I don’t own the things I dumped onto the Internet as a child anymore. None of it is lost to time; it’s been recorded against my wishes. There’s YouTube videos, Skype logs, voice recordings, unfinished projects, unsaved videos, lost content, disgusting little things, snapshots of abuse, mistakes that lasted for too long, seeds that were planted and sprouted too quickly, too much being pushed along, yet something interesting was happening to me that, without a doubt, I have to celebrate in retrospect. I have had two computers this decade. The one that stood by me for the first half, an iMac containing things I don’t want to think about minus a search history that tells an incredible story about my childhood, fell down in utility in 2015 for a computer running Windows 7 which I’m typing this on. I’ve had just as much of an interesting development on this computer as I had on my iMac. I cannot separate the fact that the 2010s have been the first decade within which I was truly alive from the more rational fact that I have spent more time on the Internet than I’ve gone outside this decade. This year, I’ve worked desperately to figure out whether the Internet is a utopia or a dystopia, and I’ve also come to the conclusion that the question, a long, feverish postmodern philosophical quest that led me to jump over a couple of hurdles and as if by magic feel incredibly stupid as soon as I realized I was thinking about it too hard, was making me perceive it as both. I unfortunately knew so little from the start of the 2010s as a literal child that as I mimicked imageboard etiquette to get by and moved across websites, I suddenly made no sense to communities that filtered everything through identity politics. I was curious, not exactly innocent, but I blindly stepped foot in these places with logic that I could only describe as “If a friend’s a friend of a friend, they’re all nice, right?” It was a good few days to be wrong about mutual interests equating to mutual decency, and a couple of bad years to be forced to spend time with people who I was scared of, not interested in, confused by, unable to share empathy with, and who I was abused and neglected by. But tough shit; missing evidence. Something that for me had the same impact as a physically violent breakup for an adult was just a fragmented digital vignette coming one after another, and my memory of the Internet remains an assembly line of cheap repulsive souvenirs made in poor taste to commemorate tragedies that hit the news. Even worse is the fact that not all of this is going to make sense. I learnt to write coherently this year although I’m probably jinxing it for the future by saying as such, but I see things too closely, with too strong of a focus, too much mental transference and too much free association for it to sound interesting to even myself. I lost many things becoming a girl on the Internet, including my ability to remain a boy after I had been used as a boy, but letting the boy in my mind slip away was worth giving myself a pat on the back and a trophy for. I nearly got away with it because the boy slipped away under circumstances that could’ve killed me. The 2010s could be the decade of gender, the decade of creativity, the decade of trauma, the decade of sexuality, the decade of arrogance, the decade of radicalization, the decade of mental illness, the decade of video games, the decade of online culture, the decade of individualism, the decade of decadence, the decade of the avant-garde, the decade of solidarity, the decade of survival, the decade of identity, but it was just a decade. That kills every drop of human effort, doesn’t it? The 2000s had its own quantity of incredible change, whether beautiful or brutal, but it was just the 2000s. This was just the 2010s. Like Federico García Lorca in “The Goring and the Death”: “At five in the afternoon. / It was just five in the afternoon.” I feel like a ghost. Like Burial sampling Communion (1989) at the start of “Come Down To Us”: “Excuse me, I’m lost.”

Everything did happen so much.

2010–2015

I am lucky I was able to find entertainment in the time before puberty. It was a little prescient to find myself watching content that, in a mode that I found myself, young and old, writhing in a strangely conceived, limitless free trade polyglot pit that a couple of smart people decided to call “neo-Dadaism”, “remix culture”, “plunderphonics”, “détournement”, and other terms. I stuck around knowing one of its forms was always called YouTube Poop. At this time, the site was already falling to pieces. I couldn’t trust the government at all, and I didn’t like pop music and movies either, because I believed in the New World Order. I got copyright strikes around the time the FBI killed Megaupload and the Stop Online Piracy Act was about to take effect. Something both utopian and dystopian was taking place. We were having a good time and laughing in the face of authority, but there was a fog permeating this period of niche micro-history that made us all feel like criminals suspended in an unsettling, theatrical mode of society. It was Silicon Valley’s dream gone bust, and the only escape I had was 4chan. Something Awful just wouldn’t have made sense to me. I was always and have still always been a nomadic, obnoxiously loud and overhyped living being. I still like getting too excited over dangerous things, but it’s not going to be as funny as it used to be when it starts hurting good people (This proved true in 2016.) With that in mind, I liked conspiracy theories proving to be somewhat real in aggressively cynical processions through imageboards to YouTube videos to Facebook walls when I was 10 years old, and I want a lot of that energy back. On another hand, YouTube Poops were distillations of a fetishistic interest in the same mysterious sources of mockery (primarily Link: Faces of Evil and Hotel Mario, CD-I games that dropped when Phillips were aiming for big bucks with state-of-the-art yuppie-era decadent tech) that could infinitely be expanded on and churned outward in an almost poetic form. It made some sense to my parents because they were bewildered, but it doesn’t make as much sense to my plain old American friends overseas in a world where our media is now being freely edited before we can tamper with it ourselves. Unless they grew up with it, in which case they recognize that it was all surveillance-era, all during the Obama administration: the most begrudgingly stupid, comical utopian time for the Western world. The birds are singing! Isn’t it beautiful? He did nothing for us except make America feel technologically stronger but morally empty, which is why YouTube Poop was about resorting to bricolage (Deleuze & Guattari, as much of a shmuck as I am to cite them, say it’s the schizophrenic’s strongest mode of production in Anti-Oedipus) at a time of forum detritus, scattered nerd culture and hikikomori bullshit. It was leading anxiously up to a bizarre sequence of global events that would take place after puberty did its worst; that was just me, but as the writer of this clunky behemoth of a thinkpiece, am I not the world? We were all the world, pretending in an Internet-enhanced make-believe manner that we were all charitable to each other. It was late 1990s Third-World-sploitation all over again, but the West still reigned supreme from the eyes of people who grew up with memes before total global surveillance, the kind of memes that were on one hand for the common human being, and on another for people who had completely lost their minds. I was living young and free in a time where Obama was an Antichrist with drone bombs under his sleeves, and although I was made to not understand anything political in the real world because I appeared to be too young, the idea that things were too alright to not be wrong under the surface was influencing the content I was consuming. I loved anything that was furiously loud, energetic, self-destructing, but that also could not be presented in a museum or in an academic thesis. Games without frontiers. Micspamming in Garry’s Mod and Team Fortress 2, glimpsing in admiration at “Ventrilo Harassment” videos that came before the sophisticated burden of the online messaging service Discord, which extinguished all this energy in a flash. All of the utopian guerrilla noise trying to thrive under a dystopian wasteland became a bubble that popped. I held onto it like a child always does after it had fallen apart, been buried and forgotten, and even frowned upon in the months to come.

Then again, starting at the firing gun of mid-2013, I was so impressionable that it landed me at one of my fates. On the Internet, I got circulated and traded to a certain someone who then spent three years sexually abusing me. The Skype logs are tainted, and are like reels of film yellowing and gaining a more nauseating miasma each time I remember they exist, yet the image is dissolving too, and I believe myself less and less the more I try to remember if it had truly happened or not. It was teaching me that I was transgender, but that’s something I always cherry-pick from the experience whenever I think hard about it for too long. What remains is the fact that I had so little of an idea of what was happening to me, and that I was so unaware of the pain I had been confused by and shrugged off that I was able to see it as a positive experience for years afterwards, until I came to terms with the fact that it had traumatized me. It had instilled a few complexes in me, and strengthened the fetishistic nature of my phobias. It paled in comparison to the period afterwards when I was then being sexually abused in the flesh, lasting for a year or so. Something was changing in synchronization with the modern world. It wasn’t like after 9/11, where America tried to play innocent, or after the London 2012 Olympics where Britain became a skeleton putting a decaying fleshy hand up to any idea of its own decadence. The Internet had succeeded and failed, and it was splitting in half as its users tried to hail it up in an age of sociopolitical terror. It was a schizo dialectic. I wouldn’t have been able to express it like this at all in 2018, nor 2017 or 2016, and essentially this is a mode of expressive language that I have only recently managed to feel comfortable with. The only form of arts I had as a kid were raw video editing, noisemaking and spam-linking. Guerrilla art-forms that refused to be defined except when repeated, when remembered fondly and given a new meaning by journalists making up buzzwords. I would look back on them fondly if they were not all lost to the Internet. I wish they had been lost to time instead. All the stupid videos I made in Windows Movie Maker and iMovie went back into the Disney Vault for good. I won’t even bother prying them from Google’s cold hands. The content itself is colder, emptier, bleaker. Now, though, I need to think about how worse the people in power were. We’re not seeing time going in cycles, that’s a fallacy. The two halves of the 2010s are true Marxist history, like in the 18th Brumaire, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But it’s like what he says elsewhere in that work too, a mirror to the first half of the 2010s in the moment before everything was blown apart, yet still before any of us were radicalized; “the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory. It does its work methodically.”

And the cartoons made in Adobe Flash posted on Newgrounds, my God! Where would any of us have been without them? All the assets, the parodies, the subjects, the pop culture that was being manipulated, the lives that were being encroached, that beautiful dancing dust, the light shining through that dust, the artifacts, the audio codec compression, the early Flash keyframing. The endless night. I think I’m not sounding lucid enough here, hold on. There’s limited capacity for online culture. Break through. I know I can do it.

2015–2019

Without real introductions or proper beginnings I’m lost. I might be running out of writing energy, but there’s some way to explain this micro-historic exponential growth and I can find it. I think of a quote from a strange French poet named Charles Péguy in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition:

[… that which concerns problems themselves:] Suddenly, we felt that we were no longer the same convicts. Nothing had happened. Yet a problem in which a whole world collided, a problem without issue, in which no end could be seen, suddenly ceased to exist and we asked ourselves what we had been talking about. Instead of an ordinary solution, a found solution, this problem, this difficulty, this impossibility had just passed what seemed like a physical point of resolution. A crisis point. At the same time, the whole world had passed what seemed like a physical crisis point. There are critical points of the event just as there are critical points of temperature: points of fusion, freezing and boiling points; points of coagulation and crystallization. There are even in the case of events states of superfusion which are precipitated, crystallized or determined only by the introduction of a fragment of some future event.

The progress from 2015 to 2019 leading up to the impending new decade, the 2020s, is a parallel to Y2K in some form. I was obsessed with Y2K as a child, and now I’m seeing a real equivalent to Y2K blossoming (three times the charm) where rather than a Hollywood apocalypse or a gooey quicksilvery aesthetic, it takes place as a triumphantly ironic (in ideal and not in nature) consciousness shift that we have contributed to and helped accumulate the resources of. I still don’t entirely have the right words for it, but I hope the fragmented nature of this section will provoke something in me for the future. The Kairos, the “opportune moment” and yet still the time and place of this world, is strange, furious and explosive. It has given us opportunities to try and change the world for the better, but it’s all become so complex. What I can at least hope for, at this point in my writing where I’ve lost most of my energy and my interest, but where I also don’t want to lose my own Kairos, is that none of this will be disappointing. I don’t want to disappoint myself for hoping for too much, so I’ll make it simple: this was not my decade, nor was it really anyone else’s. This is another incredible decade that can’t help but pique us with curiosity towards the future. Looking around the corner and trying to make eye contact with the future is impossible. If we can make estimates about the future, at least they’ll exist. At least we can signify the future, and create signifiers in whatever scale we imagine they would deserve. I want everyone that I really like to survive and prosper. I can’t channel it into something stronger, because I still don’t have the right words. But this article as is should serve not just as an artifact of my late 2010s writing style, but a memoir to the 2010s that I will try to cherish and improve.

The 2010s contained the time in which I truly started living. My childhood is a blur that I have neglected. It’ll come back in some nicer form, but I am stuck here, present-time-facing, vantage point slowly moving forward, approaching multiple strings of memory at once. The way I write could be inadequate too: I use too many words, it’s all logorrheic. I write too poetically, I deserve to be a poet instead. I can’t write well in meter, free verse is too postmodern. There’s something else that I will find in the 2020s after all the energy I have devoted towards reading in 2019 and experiencing solid pain for years beforehand. This could be an introduction to all of it, or I could still force it to remain as a decade retrospective. At one point I wanted to simply write my decade retrospective like this: one sentence, “Union-busting killed journalism.” Blank pages signifying silence would conclude the article. But I’m here now with something I wrote in a short span of time, because I write with my Kairos in mind and nothing else. It will either find an accepted use or be transformed into something less tedious to keep up as a writer and/or journalist.

I wish everyone the best for the 2020s, especially 2020 itself. Remain calm, recognize that we are at war, and start making the best out of the people we live with and the things we do. And don’t abuse power.

Postscript

It’s a little early, but here are songs.

“This Year” by The Mountain Goats
“Come Down To Us” by Burial
and “They Returned To Their Earth (For My Christ Thorn)” by Current 93