Twenty years

The first version of this blog went live on 2006 June 12. Lately it’s mostly been a place where I record what I read during the week, but I hope to start writing actual posts again someday soon. (Thank goodness for summer.)

Here’s an off-the-cuff list of things that have happened since I published the first entry. I know I’ll have forgotten things.

Personal

• Most importantly, I met and married the love of my life, Annie.
• I’ve moved four times and started four jobs.
• I switched from a private coed school to a private all-girls school to a public school, and spent a year as an adjunct at a community college
• My mother passed.
• My nieces and nephews became adults.
• I gained a grand-niece.

Political

• The United States elected its first Black President, a man of intelligence and dignity.
• The United States elected (and re-elected!) its firs reality-TV President, a man of incoherence and vitriol.
• There was a global pandemic, which killed upwards of 7 million people worldwide, including 1.2 million in the US.
• Resulting from the pandemic was global instability and economic turmoil, including the worst inflation in four decades — the political fallout of which might yet kill liberal democracy.
• We returned, almost, to the Moon.
• The United Kingdom walled itself off from the European Union, for reasons that boggle the mind
• Russia invaded Ukraine twice, succeeding the first time but receiving an ongoing education in the resilience of a free people in the second.
• The United States* deposed the head of Venezuela in a surgical strike and then tried, unsuccessfully, to do the same in Iran.
  • * More than ever, it’s hard to equate the actions of a presidential administration to the actions of “the United States”, which barely are anymore.

Culture

• The Internet went from wonder to infrastructure.
• Smartphones revolutionized popular usage of the Internet and World Wide Web.
  • The addition of a camera to everyone’s pocket stands as the most important innovation for civil liberties, even as the addition of a geo-tracker to everyone’s pocket looms as a potentially dystopian tool of control.
  • Smartphones turned out to be the accelerant that turned the dim sparks of social media into a nonstop raging inferno, with implications for our politics, culture, and education that show no sign of abating.
  • Putting phones and social media together has wrought significant changes in the attention span and empathy of many people.
• Streaming video completely disrupted television and cinema, leading to a burst of chaotic creativity in the performing arts. Streaming music completely upended the music industry and broke all the old models of how music is produced, distributed, discovered, and paid for.
• Some developments in geek culture:
  • Disney bought all the franchises.
    • In Marvel, it crafted a sprawling and mostly satisfying cinematic mythos. All of the MCU happened since I started this blog.
    • In Star Wars, it produced three increasingly disastrous debacles, a sequel trilogy that derailed the franchise. But on the small screen, it found mostly success.
  • DC proved it can’t really handle the big screen but did well on television.
  • Star Trek saw six new series, from the amazing (Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds) to the solid (Prodigy, Starfleet Academy) to the … not-so-amazing (Discovery, Picard).
  • Person of Interest went from premier to conclusion, and remains the best popular treatment of the implications of AI