Seduced by the New...

What Next...2010

A Decade of Culture

2000
* Y2K doesn't end the world. Instead, the dot-com bubble peaks, then bursts, wiping out $5 trillion in market value of tech companies.
* The ILOVEYOU virus spreads across the world and Vermont makes it legal for same-sex couples to declare love in civil unions.
* The final Peanuts comic strip is published after creator Charles Schulz dies.
* The preliminary draft of the Human Genome Project is finished.
* The American Legacy Foundation launches "truth," considered the most successful anti-smoking campaign in history.
* Al Gore wins the Presidential election. Wait, he loses.

2001
* September 11th devastates the world.
* Kofi Annan wins the Nobel Peace Prize.
* Wikipedia launches, forever changing the face of human knowledge.
* The Netherlands becomes the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage.
* The Prius becomes an icon of the mainstream green movement.
* Apple introduces the iPod, revolutionizing music culture, and a new generation of white-earbudded youngsters takes to the streets.
* The world's first self-contained artificial heart is implanted.
* George Harrison dies, leaving only two living Beatles.
* Halle Berry becomes the first black female actor to win a major Academy Award. She cries a lot.

2002
* Ashton Kutcher inflicts trucker hats on the world.
* Bush decides to fix the fact that only a fifth of high school graduates have mathematical proficiency by signing the No Child Left Behind act, a mathematical catch-22 requiring that 100 percent of schoolchildren score above the mean.
* Creative Commons releases the first set of licenses, championing a new breed of copyright law for creative culture.
* NASA discovers water ice on Mars.
* The Queen Mother dies at the age of 101.
* Norah Jones's Come Away With Me becomes the most successful jazz album in history.
* American Idol debuts, unleashing a new era of reality TV celebrity.

2003
* The Human Genome Project concludes, having sequenced 99 percent of the human genome to 99.99 percent accuracy.
* Darfur is declared in a state of humanitarian emergency.
* The Concorde makes its last commercial flight and the last Volkswagen Beetle rolls of the production line.
* The United States and United Kingdom invade Iraq, beginning the most socially, politically, and culturally controversial war in history (you know, from some people's perspective).
* Barry White, Johnny Cash, and Nina Simone leave music culture better than they found it.
* Italian bandits pull off the biggest diamond heist in history.
* Martha Stewart goes to prison, and makes a poncho.

2004
* Mark Zukerberg launches Facebook from a Harvard dorm room, and later proceeds to drop out and become a billionaire.
* Justin Timberlake cups Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction on national television.
* All the cool kids have Gmail invites, and the world gets a foxy new favorite open-source browser.
* Banksy walks into the Louvre and hangs a smiley-face Mona Lisa.
* The Da Vinci Code takes over the world and keeps an entire industry afloat.
* Accounts of Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse jab a dagger in the public eye.
* The finale of Friends marks the end of a TV era.
* Morgan Spurlock spends 30 days eating McDonald's food, supersizes the nation's awareness of fast food's ills.
* John Kerry loses the presidential election as Michael Moore premieres Fahrenheit 9/11 at Cannes to a 20-minute standing ovation, the longest in the festival's history.

2005
* Al Gore releases An Inconvenient Truth, awakening a generation to our ecological responsibility.
* The United States and Australia are the only two countries not to sign the Kyoto Protocol.
* Hurricane Katrina devastates New Orleans, and oil prices skyrocket.
* YouTube breaks the dawn to a new age of entertainment.
* Live 8 aims to make poverty history with 10 simultaneous blockbuster concerts around the world.
* Lance Armstrong wins an unprecedented seventh consecutive Tour de France title before retiring.
* The One Laptop Per Child program introduces the $100 laptop, offering self-empowered learning to the world's poorest children.
* The Colbert Report premieres and the Pope dies (unrelated).

2006
* Merriam-Webster makes Google a verb.
* Michael Pollan writes a book, and gives us constructive indigestion.
* Warren Buffet donates more than $30 billion, 83 percent of his wealth, to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, making it the largest charitable donation in history.
* Saddam Hussein is hanged for crimes against humanity and Slobodan Milošević dies in his cell in The Hague, where he is held for the same.
* Pluto is no longer a planet.
* Microcredit pioneer Muhammad Yunus receives the Nobel Peace Prize.
* The TED conference makes publicly available two decades of talks by the world's greatest minds.
* Wii like to play.

2007
* Apple introduces the iPhone and a new era of personal computing begins.
* Sydney completely shuts off its lights for an hour in a political statement against climate change.
* Tay Zonday covers the web in Chocolate Rain.
* The first gay rights bill is brought to the House floor for a vote.
* Twitter launches. No one notices.
* The final book of Harry Potter becomes the fastest-selling book in history with 11 million copies sold in 24 hours.
* The Writers Guild of America goes on a strike against decades of unfair compensation by studios.
* Radiohead releases In Rainbows as a pay-what-you-will album download and enters the Billboard Charts at number one, making a bold case for a new music industry business model in the age of free.

2008
* The price of a barrel of petroleum hits $100 for the first time. In a tragicomic bout of irony, Big Three auto execs fly private jets to Washington, D.C. to beg for taxpayer bailout funds.
* Bill Gates retires, leaving Microsoft for philanthropy.
* Michael Phelps wins a record-breaking eight Olympic Gold Medals in Beijing.
* Heath Ledger dies, and many declare him the James Dean of our generation.
* Lehman Brothers, the largest dealer in the U.S. Treasury securities market, goes bankrupt.
* More than 131 million people race to the polls, the highest number in American electoral history. Hope, Change, Obama.


2009
* The Large Hadron Collider tries to find the God particle.
* Twitter blows up, illustrates the power of citizen journalism in Iran's presidential elections.
* Obama receives the Nobel Peace Prize to a global mixed reaction.
* Swine flu is declared a global pandemic.
* The Charter for Compassion offers hope for a transnational, transreligious global community.
* An airplane lands on the Hudson and everyone lives.
* Michael Jackson's death breaks millions of hearts and, nearly, the Internet.


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