Why did the world break in the early 2010s?
Geopolitical, economic, political, and technological factors.
A lot of Americans these days have the sense that the world they grew up in has been broken. And although people identify different years as the breaking point, it’s usually between 2012 and 2015.
For many, the key shift was the domination of bitter online politics over daily life:
There was a shift around 2015 where the "online" world spilled over into the real world and the way we view/treat each other changed. After 2015 things in everyday life started to go through the political lens. We started to bucket people and behaviors along the political spectrum, which was largely an online behavior pre-2015. We started judging everyone as left or right, or we walked on eggshells to avoid it. Before that, you knew your neighbor was Republican or Democrat based on their lawn signs, but it had little bearing on your daily interactions or behaviors. And it only seemed to matter every four years for a few months. Now it's constant and pervasive. And pre-2015 we had phones and social media, but there was more of a boundary, and most people would "log off" most of the day. The dopamine addiction, heightened by the polarization, was much lower. Only fringe message board and twitter posters spent their days arguing online, now it's everywhere, and there's no real boundary.
I also remember the moment it felt to me like the old world had broken. But strangely, it wasn’t about online politics at all. I was sitting in an Airbnb in Tokyo in March 2014, not too different from the hotel room I’m in right now, reading the news on my laptop. And I saw the headline: “Russia annexes Crimea.”
Russia had invaded Ukraine a few weeks earlier, but this headline stunned me. Not since World War 2 had a great power conquered and annexed part of an internationally recognized foreign nation. Russia’s action went against every principle of international sovereignty that had been created in the aftermath of that great war, with the help and assent of the Soviet Union. And it seemed very clear that President Obama and the European leaders were going to do basically nothing about this, other than to levy some ineffectual sanctions. Russia had called the bluff of the post-WW2 order, and now that order was gone.
What’s interesting is that this calamitous feeling — that the world I had grown up in was being swept away — wasn’t really related to wokeness, or Donald Trump, or social media, or any of the factors that people (including me) typically associate with the ruptures of the 2010s. But of course I felt those changes too, just a few months later — Gamergate and the Ferguson protests in the summer of 2014, and the rise of Trump a year later.
Looking back, it’s easy to see that the early to mid 2010s — the period between 2012 and 2015 — was a turning point in both American society and world events. Figuring out why is harder. As far as I can tell, it was a lucky confluence of several events — technological, economic, political, and geopolitical.
The geopolitical break
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