In Defense Of A Decade: Why The 2000s Matter

The poor 00s. The ink is barely dry on the January 1, 2010 early editions and here we are rushing to wash our hands of the grimy, greedy failures of the last ten years. CNN called it an "ugly decade." The New Yorker put it somewhat more poetically, labeling it an "orphan decade," that "no one wants to own, or own up to."

Yet there is something that these analyses miss, which is the incredible importance of the new mindsets and tools that have been gestating for the last ten years. The 00s were the decade between the 1950s and 1960s that never happened, and the transformation of the coming teens will be its direct offspring.

First, it is important to recognize the ugliness of the last ten years. I think our collective psyche is pitched pretty sharply down based on the last 15 months or so of economic turmoil, and the fact that the upstart president we elected has not been able to wave the magic wand to make it all better again. In that state of mind, we look back at the rest of the decade and see the blight of terrorism and war. Our mouths sour with the acidic taste of government power that manipulated truth and public perception, and that stretched the Constitution to its own ends. Our shoulders slump at the seemingly inescapable greed of anti-consumerist megacorporations that get to dictate the terms of their existence seemingly regardless of how they behave.

With those glasses on, it's easy to begin looking for the pitchforks.

I think, however, that trying to map some of where we've been in the last twenty years onto American history might help us take a slightly different perspective.

The 1990s, the first decade, by the way, in which I was generally conscious of a reality outside my diapers, shared much with the 1950s - at least on the surface. America was coming off a victory that put us in a position of extreme global power. A new world order shaped around the American idea was proclaimed, and an economic normalcy based around expanded consumer purchasing power was the name of the game.

Yet in each case, the world outside the US looked far different than the rosy post-war picture presented. The 1950s saw the forgotten war of Korea, as well as the earliest of American involvement in Vietnam. The last gasps of the colonial system churned as indigenous populations - many of whom had been enlisted in the World Wars - clamored for their independence. The 1990s saw the complete breakdown of many of those post-colonial countries, and the rise of civil war, genocide, and failed states. Indeed, the 1990s felt to many like the decade where the big dreams of the 1950s colonial independence movements failed entirely.

Inside America, the 1950s and 1990s shared a sort of tinsel consumerism. If the 1950s was the decade of Mad Men, Madison Avenue, and the new nuclear family, the 1990s was the decade of irrational exuberance (and subsequent consumer debt). Of course, in both cases, the patina could only barely cover a deep and growing disquiet about the state of things; a gnawing question about the vision of meaning being sold on the cheap in outlet malls and advertisements.

But the 2000s were not the 1960s. The difference between them is, for me, the crux of what made the 2000s special.

As has been eulogized ad infinitum, the 1960s were the decade that the collective discontent spilled over into the streets. The catalyst of the Civil Rights Movement - driven by a disenfranchised, brutalized population - gave context and strategy to a series of social movements that went to the core of mainstream middle class discontent, as well.

The same people who tend to eulogize (and exalt) the 1960s have been some of the loudest critics of the shape of activism in the 2000s, which they see has somehow less legitimate because it doesn't have (ostensibly) the fervor, passion, or commitment of their own imagined triumphs. Of course, the shape of those triumphs is pretty well up for reinterpretation considering their decade ended in more Nixon and we traded a Bush for an Obama...

And that's exactly the point. If the 1950s and the 1990s were a gestation period for discontent, and the 1960s an explosive response when it boiled to the surface, the 2000s were instead a gestation period for the next (set of) response(s) that doesn't really have an easy equivalent in history.

The playbook of 1960s activism was relatively limited, if done pretty well. It was basically about collective action, civil disobedience, and public displays of alternative force. It was social movements for an era in which the modes of distributing messages were controlled entirely by the powers that be and the theater of protest was as important, in some ways, as protest itself. As I mentioned before, it was also a playbook that was shaped by a Civil Rights Movement that had no choice but to become militant.

The playbook of activism in 2000s is so diverse that it doesn't even all consider itself activism. This is in part because the would-be revolutionaries of today grew up with the histories of the 1960s, and from 40 years later and a place of emotional objectivity, it's easier to get past the nostalgia and cut to what worked and didn't. We see an anti-war movement that, while romantic, burned out in a haze of its own indulgence and let Dick Nixon get the presidency (and bomb Cambodia). We see a Civil Rights Movement that, while making incredible progress, was unable to undermine the structural economic inequity that persists today.

The lesson has not been to discount the power or success of these social movements, but to simply recognize that their particular methods are only one piece of the puzzle, and that the tent of people who want to be a part of changing the world may be bigger than they thought.

I believe that the 2000s were the decade in which the infrastructure for building alternative models for disrupting the status quo really came to the fore.

At the core, the new openness of information and the power of distribution platforms are the twin engines expanding the nature of how individuals self-organize. Whereas the 1950s and even the 1990s saw the dominance of crafted, one-to-many messages through TV and magazines, the 2000s were all about the rise of social media that turned every content consumer into a content producer as well.

Although much maligned, Time's naming of "YOU" as the 2006 Person of the Year will, I think, be validated by history. You have never had so much power as you have right now to consume and shape conversations about anything that matters to you. You have never had better tools to organize your sentiment into action.

The "You" that we learned about in the 2000s was not just you the social media activist however, it was also you the entrepreneur. Because in the 2000s something remarkable happened. An industry which had been completely overwhelmed by irrational speculation and in which a bubble had burst saw an immense resurgence. The importance of the new generation of internet startups is not just about the tools it gave you to organize, but the aspirational model of innovation and disruption that it demonstrates for young people.

At the leader of this pack is Google, a company that touches daily life so frequently as to become normal background noise. It is a company that has a combination of scale and youthful disruption that I can write plausibly about it's ability to shift telecom, one of the most protected industries in America. Google is young enough that 23 year old coders can still look to its founders as role models, and the impact that has is hard to calculate. Silicon Valley is certainly the one place I've been in the last year that seems to be attracting optimism rather than depressed gloom.

The amazing shift that's happening now is that the model of the internet has opened young people to the possibility that they can build new organizations that disrupt the status quo. Whether they're nonprofit or for-profit tends to matter less than the fact that the power to create lies in your own hands. That is the true driving spirit behind the rise in social entrepreneurship, and why I spend so much of my time on this blog talking about young people.

Indeed, the 2000s was the decade that a generation came of age. My generation, the Millennials, are between about 18-30 today. That puts us at between 8-20 ten years ago. The ten subsequent years gave us a national moment (September 11th), a caustic divide (the Iraq war), a sense of national debt (Katrina - not to mention dozens of global issues), a complicated villain (W.), a world of new first hand experiences (rising rates of volunteerism and study abroad), a unique characteristic (the new social architecture of digital connection), a complicated hero (Barry), a potentially world ending Sword of Damocles (Climate Change) and finally, an economic recession that is forcing us to dramatically reconcile the meaning we want in our careers with the tough economic reality.

From all of this, I think we have a sense of growing up, and an increasing comfort with the idea that what we see is what we get, and it's more and more our turn to step up to the plate.

Of course, we face great challenges. We feel like we have an expanded tool kit, but we're still learning to reconcile a customizable, individual world with the need for collective action. But when I look at my generation - or at least the people who believe they must make a difference - I see not disquiet and fear, but a sense of ownership and optimism.

If the New Yorker thinks that no one wants to claim the 2000s as their own, I'm ready to claim it for the Millennials. Not as the decade in which we made our mark, but the decade that reminded us why we must make our mark, and hopefully, the tools to do it.

(Photo: Meddy Garnett)