The World Ended In 2007

Or rather, the world as we knew it - or even further, the world as it should have been.

You see it everywhere, it's not just me bellyaching about it - the masses, young and old, wish to return to the culture, technology, aesthetics, feel, and "ways" of the olden days.

Everywhere you look though, it's always 2007.

I've yet to see even one person say 2005, or 2006, or 2008, or 2009 - or so on and so forth.

Definitively, I see this as some kind of evidence that the great shift - the great "displacement" of our collective trajectory - occurred in 2007.

Well, what was different in 2007 as opposed to now?

Let's take a gander at some of the major events that occurred in that year, as well as some statistics.

In 2007, just less than half of American Adults had high speed internet access - extrapolating this towards the youth of those days, I would assume that less kids were online or had access to the internet.

In other words, in America specifically - the majority of the country was still firmly rooted in reality.

The only real links to "the outside world" were going out and interacting in it - or the boob tube (cable TV).

Cable television of course, at the time, was king. Speaking from experience - you would tune in on a Thursday night and watch all the new shows and premiers and whatnot - so that on Friday at school or work you could talk about it with your buddies. It was a synchronized experience, and if you missed that week's episode - tough shit. Maybe it would air next week before the new episode - if you were lucky.

There were no streaming services. There were video rental stores, but already the seeds of their demise were being sewn by companies like NetFlix. NetFlix in these days operated mainly via mail-in video rentals - as internet speeds for the common man didn't really allow for an unlimited consumption of streamed, decent quality, videos.

I digress, NetFlix existed, but the common man didn't give a shit.

Video games, while they were inching into online territory with services like Xbox Live, and little pieces of DLC here and there - were still primarily offline experiences. Couch Co-op still rained supreme, and the entire game was expected to be accessible on the disc when you popped it into your console.

Handheld consoles still existed, and for the most part, they were exclusively for games. The PSP had a web browser and the capabilities to play music, watch videos, and read news from an RSS feed - all of these things were massive 20 years ago - especially when the news got ahold of this and found out that 12 year olds were using the public wifi at the library to look at boobs.

Those were simpler times, again - I digress.

Controversies still existed, and much like nowadays - they were often blown out of proportion by journos and activists with something to gain, most of the time money.

One of the most egregious shifts - at least in the realm of video games - is that in 2007, the consensus was that it was the Conservative, Republican, Christian, crowd that was trying to take video games away.

Jack Thompson was always in the news, trying to sue Rockstar Games and other developers who made M-Rated games - specifically advertised to adult gamers. The constant stream of controversies did make games like GTA, Bully, Manhunt, Call of Duty, etc. more popular - and from that we got an entire generation of edgy, dark, brooding, over-the-top, games, where a great deal of effort was put into pushing the bar as far and as fast as possible. Just ten years prior it was unthinkable that anyone would be swearing in a game, now you could swear, deal drugs, kill civilians, beat up whores, kiss men, the whole nine yards - it was a different time entirely.

I will interject here to say that, the bar for what is and isn't "controversial" has become so out of whack in the last few years that I don't think there's going to be a properly mainstream "controversial" game for a good, long, while. Also, because of digital distribution, there's less of a "difficulty factor" in pushing the bar if it can still be done. I will tie this back in to the preceding paragraph.

Controversies, boycotts, and letter writing campaigns against games, songs, movies, etc. eventually caused a few notable examples of companies - mainly stores like Walmart, Toys R' Us, etc. - to pull some games off of their shelves, greatly kneecapping sales figures.

It is strange to see that - while the people writing the angry letters, demanding action from the distributors, and seething endlessly at the "offensive elements" of some games, movies, etc. have changed - this still occurs to some degree in digital marketplaces in the modern day.

George "Dubya" Bush was our President, and nobody really liked him - at least if you go by what the TV and internet said. I can't recall the opinions of the older generations, but I can say that I live in a heavily Republican area - and a good portion of the people here who voted for Donald Trump, or Ted Cruz, or Ben Carson, in 2016 - voted for Obama in 2008. That alone should illustrate the older generations opinions on the Bush regime.

As for the youngsters - everyone listened to Green Day, and Newgrounds was filled to the brim with games where you could beat the ever loving shit out of Bush with impunity - in many comedic and over the top ways.

I will say, politically, there was a lot more fun to be had with "duking it out" over our differences.

Back then it was all about song parodies, and making flash games, sometimes combining the two, maybe taking a bong rip for Saddam when the news broke about him and putting the video online - maybe drawing Naruto up against Al-Qaeda decrying the continued "fucking around in the Middle East where we don't belong".

That's something else worth mentioning, the only faction in The Middle East was Al-Qaeda. ISIS didn't exist in any noticeable capacity until after the death of Osama Bin Laden - who was still at large in 2007. You see, ISIS broke off from Al-Qaeda and then just sort of fucked around for a few years until 2013. I digress. There were also plenty of Newgrounds games where you got to kill Bin Laden.

There were only really two major opinions on The Middle East - which was a big political talking point in the decade-long wake of 9/11. The only acceptable stances were "We should leave The Middle East entirely" or "We should destroy every terrorist, and bring Democracy to their masses". Somehow - there has also been an inversion on which sides promote these individual ideas nowadays - sort of. There are still factions in both parties that want to keep fucking around, but more often you see younger Republicans calling for a new age of Isolationism - while there are younger Democrats calling for more intervention, specifically to protect certain states like yemen and palestine.

Politics has always been a mess, to say the least though - it was a lot more clean cut and "civil", I would say, back then. I would blame the descent into madness, riots, bloodshed, etc. specifically on rabble rousing by the media and social media. Algorithmically driven mobs, frightening stuff.

Speaking of - algorithms just didn't exist.

It was all about "hits" - if someone so much as had a passing glance at something you made, you were credited for it with virality - retention based media did not exist, and everything was still created by people, not calculators that can strategize.

Demographically speaking, in-between 2000 and 2010 - America was over 70% White. Down to somewhere between 55% to 60% in 2025. As such, racial issues didn't normally permeate the news cycle. This changed in Obama's second term, primarily because the Democratic party had a meeting, and realized that they could build a broad coalition of everyone that wasn't a White, Christian, Heterosexual, American - and ensure a large modicum of victory nationwide.

In other words, there was not really a financial or political incentive for a piece of media or a celebrity to be shouted down as "racist", even if they made a joke about brown people.

This is why Jeff Dunham was so popular back then - same thing with Gabriel Iglesias.

The country didn't really occupy itself with race - because many of us were on the same page. That page of course was "There are people in the Middle East who have attacked us on our own soil, and we must destroy them" - this is the mentality that got Dubya elected twice.

Computers were slower, bandwidth speeds were slower, but everything just sort of worked.

Back then it was taken into account that whoever was looking at your website was doing so on a very limited piece of hardware, so you had to pull some punches.

As such, optimization was something that everybody felt the need to learn.

In modern times, optimization has become a dead art form, practiced only by the few faithful to the old ways. Developers of all stripes have exported the problem onto the consumer - if it can't run on their system, it's a "them" problem, and they should be compelled to spend money and upgrade their system to consume the unoptimized slop.

This design philosophy has carried over to video games nearly 1:1.

In 2007, only an estimated 20% of the world, mostly the first world, was online.

This is opposed to 68% last year, with more third world countries gaining access by the day.

In other words, the squabbles between nations, the blood feuds and border skirmishes, the changing of maps by war and expansionism - these were all problems that the common man didn't care about, and that first world, American, corporations didn't feel the need to "pick a side" in.

We were blissfully ignorant, and I would argue that many wish to return to that blissful ignorance - because whether they wish to admit it or not, they don't really care.

I don't really care either for what it's worth.

I've been sort of all over the place with this one, but I would like to nail down one event here and now that I believe set us off the right course and onto the wrong course - one that we're still trying to course correct from.

The iphone.

The first iphone - which was really the first widely available "smartphone" - or "everything device" as I've taken to calling them - was released in June of 2007.

It's addition of wifi connectivity and an internet browser allowed for the common man to permeate the internet in a way that he never could.

All at once, all of the carefully crafted and maintained forums, imageboards, communities, etc. saw a major influx of mobileposters - much to the chagrin of many of those users.

This was made worse by the portability of the iphone, and how addictive using it was.

As time went on, gradual, this would prove to be one of the most substantial dominos in the shifting tide of just who was using the internet. This was the start of websites catering towards mobile users over desktop users, as well as catering to the normals as opposed to the freaks who built the foundations - and it's all been downhill from there.

I think sometimes about how sin first entered humanity through an apple - there in the Garden of Eden when Eve was tempted, and ate of the forbidden fruit.

And now I'm thinking about how the world that we could've lived in ended in 2007 - when humanity got ahold of a different apple.

Just some food for thought, sorry if I rambled too much with this one.