00s Quotes

I was often fatigued by the city, its bad breath belching through vents in the pavement, a guy testing his cell phone ringtones on a packed subway.

THE PRAISED GENERATION HITS THE WORKFORCE Are we going to have a problem finding leaders in the future? You can’t pick up a magazine or turn on the radio without hearing about the problem of praise in the workplace. We could have seen it coming. We’ve talked about all the well-meaning parents who’ve tried to boost their children’s self-esteem by telling them how smart and talented they are. And we’ve talked about all the negative effects of this kind of praise. Well, these children of praise have now entered the workforce, and sure enough, many can’t function without getting a sticker for their every move. Instead of yearly bonuses, some companies are giving quarterly or even monthly bonuses. Instead of employee of the month, it’s the employee of the day. Companies are calling in consultants to teach them how best to lavish rewards on this overpraised generation. We now have a workforce full of people who need constant reassurance and can’t take criticism. Not a recipe for success in business, where taking on challenges, showing persistence, and admitting and correcting mistakes are essential. Why are businesses perpetuating the problem? Why are they continuing the same misguided practices of the overpraising parents, and paying money to consultants to show them how to do it? Maybe we need to step back from this problem and take another perspective. If the wrong kinds of praise lead kids down the path of entitlement, dependence, and fragility, maybe the right kinds of praise can lead them down the path of hard work and greater hardiness. We have shown in our research that with the right kinds of feedback even adults can be motivated to choose challenging tasks and confront their mistakes. What would this feedback look or sound like in the workplace? Instead of just giving employees an award for the smartest idea or praise for a brilliant performance, they would get praise for taking initiative, for seeing a difficult task through, for struggling and learning something new, for being undaunted by a setback, or for being open to and acting on criticism. Maybe it could be praise for not needing constant praise! Through a skewed sense of how to love their children, many parents in the ’90s (and, unfortunately, many parents of the ’00s) abdicated their responsibility. Although corporations are not usually in the business of picking up where parents left off, they may need to this time. If businesses don’t play a role in developing a more mature and growth-minded workforce, where will the leaders of the future come from?

Once again, it seems MI6 has moved location to exclusively service Bond wherever he goes on the planet. The other 00s must absolutely hate him.

Long-term observers of video games will remember that they went through something of an identity crisis in the mid-'00s, during which they were continually trying to ape films, as if the creative apex of the video game form was to be exactly like a movie... It took a good while for games to emerge from this phase and realise that they didn't actually have to be like film; that they have their own ways of telling stories, their own ways of getting into your head. Dark Souls didn't start that counter-movement, but it was a hugely persuasive example of it.

Long-term observers of video games will remember that they went through something of an identity crisis in the mid-'00s, during which they were continually trying to ape films, as if the creative apex of the video game form was to be exactly like a movie... It took a good while for games to emerge from this phase and realise that they didn't actually have to be like film; that they have their own ways of telling stories, their own ways of getting into your head... An especially interesting aspect of Dark Souls' story is that it could only be told through a video game, making it almost unique. It tells us very little through the mediums of text or film, and vast amounts through context, exploration and environmental storytelling that simply would not be possible in any other format. Nowadays it's widely regarded as a masterclass in interactive narrative design, despite the fact that any given player could bypass the story entirely if they weren't inclined to investigate.

Long-term observers of video games will remember that they went through something of an identity crisis in the mid-'00s, during which they were continually trying to ape films, as if the creative apex of the video game form was to be exactly like a movie... It took a good while for games to emerge from this phase and realise that they didn't actually have to be like film; that they have their own ways of telling stories, their own ways of getting into your head... ...An especially interesting aspect of Dark Souls' story is that it could only be told through a video game, making it almost unique. It tells us very little through the mediums of text or film, and vast amounts through context, exploration and environmental storytelling that simply would not be possible in any other format. Nowadays it's widely regarded as a masterclass in interactive narrative design, despite the fact that any given player could bypass the story entirely if they weren't inclined to investigate.

ON JULY 1, 2006, Cory Booker officially took office as the new mayor of Newark. He’d gained fame in the late ’90s as a city councilman who would sleep in a tent at city housing projects, hold hunger strikes and live on food stamps, patrol bad neighborhoods himself and physically confront the dealers holding down their corners. His victory was the first regime change in two decades, and it happened only after six years of near-bloody battling between the young, charismatic, light-skinned, Stanford-Yale-Oxford-educated upstart and the old, grizzled, but equally charismatic incumbent. The tension between Cory Booker and Sharpe James had been national news for most of the ’00s. The 2002 election, which Booker lost, was documented in the Oscar-nominated Streetfight, which between talking head interviews showed intense footage of the predominantly poor, black constituents who ardently supported James’s altercating with the working-class whites and Puerto Ricans who fought for Booker and his eloquent calls for public service and revitalization. The documentary was a near-perfect picture of a specific place and time: the declining city at risk of being left behind, the shoulder-height view of the vast number of problems in play, and the presentation of two equal and opposing paths forward whose backers were split almost definitively along socioeconomic lines. The 2002 election had been beyond combative; a riot nearly broke out when Booker showed up at a street basketball tournament that Sharpe James was already attending, and James called Booker “a Republican who took money from the KKK and the Taliban . . . who’s collaborating with the Jews to take over Newark.” When James—who was constantly being investigated for various alleged corruptions—won the election by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent, his victory seemed to cement Newark’s representation of “permanent poverty,” a culture of violence and corruption (at least if you subscribed to the New York Times).

Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. Here is what's odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past—the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s—looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History.” Kurt Andersen, “You Say You Want a Devolution?,” January 2012