The year of 2016 itself was okay for the most part, and in some respects I'd call it the last decent-to-good year. But during the year it was popularly described as "The Worst Year EVER!!!" and a "year of unexpected and insane events" both politically and culturally.
This aura of negativity was impossible to ignore, and whats notable is that no previous year had this vibe (no one was ever calling 2013, 2014 or 2015 "the worst year ever"). That negativity carried forth from 2016 and coloured every year afterwards, with 2017, 2018, 2019 all being worse every passing year, and the world getting bleaker and darker.
Since 2020 it's just gone into overdrive. We've reached peak "Clown World" and peak "Depression World" too. Just what the fucking hell is going on? This is all happening since 2016. I'm starting to believe that the world ended in 2016 and we shifted into the alternate Nightmare Timeline that wasn't supposed to happen.
crazy to think that 2012-2017 was the same amount of time as 2017-2022, they just feel so radically different
Isaac Adams
Yep. It's seriously fucked up and I just can't handle it.
To me it's like everything 2015-and-earlier was the Real World, the world that made sense. Comparing 2000 to 2015, or even 1995 to 2015, is basically the same world, just with changing technology. But the fundamentals of the world, human society, our values, and how things worked, didn't change in that time.
But since 2016/17 it's seriously like everything has been fucking flipped on its head. Nothing makes SENSE anymore god damn it. I feel like I'm living in a fucking simulation designed to torture me.
the obvious catalyst was the trump presidency, but this popular dissatisfaction with the western establishment had been building for decades, since Nixon and Clinton laid the foundation for the destruction of the uneducated middle class.
I don't believe this was any big conspiracy or anything, they were just doing what the smartest people in the world were telling them to do at the time, but the result was the majority of people in the western world seeing their standard of living steadily decline for decades and being largely ignored by the political and educated classes who were benefiting from these policies
it was inevitable that eventually someone would come along and capture these disaffected voters, populists have been doing it since ancient roman times, we just got incredibly unluck with the one that came along
there are of course so many intersecting factors at play around the world, the ressurgance of china and russia as great powers, the utter stagnation of europe, the corruption of money in politics, the rise of the internet and sophisticated targeting and how it has been used to divide us in the post-truth era. trump was right when he said he could shoot someone in broad daylight and his supporters would still cheer him.
at the root of it all in my view is the influence of lobbying on the US government, the supreme court doomed us all when they ruled campaign donations were protected under the 1st amendment.
Noah Bailey
It goes beyond just politics though, or "red team vs blue team" shit.
I'm not even American and yet I feel the post-2016 shift very profoundly.
In my personal life: >mental health started to crumble from late 2016 onwards >started acting out in dangerous ways >fucked up my grades at university, barely graduated >became NEET >lost all my friends >lost my entire sense of identity and "who i am" >lost all hope for the world
In the wider world: >we went from a stable world pre-2016 to an utterly chaotic hellworld post-2016 >constant bad events in the world now. wars, economic crises, insane leaders, pandemic >extremists took over everything >wokeists on the left and racial-nationalists on the right poisoned every single discussion >social media fucked everyone's minds up >nothing feels comfy anymore >whole world feels really bleak, dark and unforgiving
Andrew King
>simulation designed to torture me Its called a simulacrum. Its working.
Cameron Green
Autism comes in stages user
Parker Cooper
Can you actually refute any of the things I'm stating have happened, or are you just going to insult me?
Luis Perry
>Prelude: O.J. Simpson Trial (1994-1995) You might think I'm retarded for bringing this up, but please let me explain. This was the origin of the 24-hour news cycle, and it also foreshadowed many similar events pertaining to race relations (Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, etc.) >Phase 1: 9/11 (2001) This should be pretty obvious, but it was the beginning of the forever war in the Middle East. The Patriot Act came into effect, which essentially legalized mass surveillance and proved that people care more about feeling safe than being free. >Phase 2: iPhone & Social Media (2007-2008) Smartphones and Web 2.0 dumbed down the Internet to the point where the average normie actually felt comfortable using it. Consequently, there was an influx of new users on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Naturally, I think you can probably recognize why this is a bad thing. >Phase 3: Occupy Wall Street (2011) This is the missing piece of the puzzle that a lot of people don't quite understand. It is important to recognize how the movement collapsed. What initially started out a protest about wealth inequality and class warfare eventually devolved into a beta test for international feminism, racial justice, and basically every Tumblr-tier ideology you could possibly imagine. A few years later, this line of reasoning made its way into colleges and universities. Presently, these cancerous ideologies have institutional legitimacy and power. >Phase 4: Black Lives Matter (2012-2014) O.J. walked so that Zimmerman could run. But in all seriousness, the way that mainstream media handled these events was absolutely sinister. Long story short, BLM starts to gain traction and now race relations are arguably worse than they were since the Civil Rights Movement. >Phase 5 : Donald Trump (2015-2016) Trump's presidential campaign was way more culturally significant than anything he actually accomplished as president. To be continued...
pretty much the trump wave pushed everybody far left or far right and everything in between is ll you are clearly a nazi on the other side of my political agender ll now you cant say or watch people doing stereo-typical accents without people thinking ll omg so racist ll I just like edgy and dark humor but fuck me I still consider my self left politically on most issues but also see a few conservative points doest not make a fucking nazi, stupid arse SJWs go back to tumblr
Tyler Gomez
The bible is right. Even the movies are about what is happening. Good vs evil. Evil is afoot. My theory is that evil will hide in the early stages, and then try to take over after it has developed.
Any Forums absolutely peaked with the election season that year. Bernie vs. Hillary for the democratic nomination and Trump vs. everyone else for the GOP nomination. And the Trump vs. Hillary generals were fucking glorious. Miss those days.
Isaiah Reed
Yes.
life went down the shitter starting in 2016 and continuing somewhat linearly year by year until 2020, where it just goes "FUCK ME UP MANG" and here we are
Ryder Long
So what happens now then? Do we go back to normal at any point or is this just it now? Neverending insanity and calamitous world events until the end of time?
I just can't take it anymore man. I want the real world to come back.
Liam James
>Phase 5: Donald Trump (2015-2016) I think it's important to differentiate the person Donald Trump from what he actually represents. To the average voter, he was a way of expressing dissatisfaction with the current SJW paradigm that was beginning to take hold in institutions of higher learning and trickling down to corporate advertising and marketing. A vote for Trump meant a vote for stepping back from the global system, whereas anyone else meant more interdependence, more globalism, and more complexity. Again, that's simply what his image conveyed, and I want to emphasize the distinction between Trump the politician and what he actually represents. >Phase 6: Orange Man Bad (2016-2020) This is when normie social media went into maximum overdrive. I think that people legitimately went insane because reality was conflicting with their Whig view of history and progress. "It was her turn!" they said. "She won the popular vote!" they said. There were emergency conferences at tech companies like Google about how they needed to do better as a company to ensure something like this would never happen again. This is when the mass censorship really started to come into play. YouTube, which was always pretty gay and retarded, somehow managed to get worse because of new rules and guidelines about hate speech. Remember, this is because of the institutional power of the ideas that managed to sink the Occupy Wall Street movement. >Phase 7: COVID-19 (2020-2022) Remember when we needed to thank our healthcare heroes for doing epic dances on TikTok? Regardless of your stance on how deadly the virus is or if the lockdown measures were justified, I think it's pretty obvious that there were certain key ideas that were being pushed via social media and the mainstream media (which are essentially the same thing at this point). There were so many catchphrases and slogans that suddenly appeared overnight. Flatten the Curve. Build Back Better. The Great Reset. To be continued...
I think it's interesting how far back you've gone with this and I can certainly see what you mean with many of these explanations.
Maybe I don't have the best account of things, as I was born in 1996, so most of what you write is regarding stuff that didn't have an impact on me. I don't really remember 9/11 happening, and the 2000s was a very calm decade for me as a child.
But what I do have a good account of is the early 2010s, the time period in which I came of age, adolescence to young adulthood. And I remember it really as a very peaceful time. The War on Terror, as I understood it, felt like it came to a conclusion in 2011 with the killing of Osama Bin Laden (who was the #1 villain, basically the Adolf Hitler of my generation growing up). The 2008 recession was waning and we were recovering slowly but surely. The mood of the early 2010s seemed to be one of optimism, where after dark events happening in the 00s people were now hoping for a brighter decade, and it was coming to fruition. Most people didn't pay attention to politics in the early 2010s, and our leaders were boring-but-stable types like Obama and Cameron.
I remember OWS and how it all came crashing down, and at the same time remember first becoming aware of "SJW" types from Tumblr circa 2011/12. I remember the earliest precursors to "Gamergate" type ideology being formulated on Any Forums circa 2011/12. The difference is that back then, people thought the Tumblrinas with their *phobia accusations and misogyny/raycism screeching were just freaks that we could make fun of. But post-2016 they completely took over the western world and gained institutional dictatorship. No one saw that coming 10 years ago.
Brayden Bailey
I'm not American so I wasn't entirely tapped into the whole Trump thing, and I was never a supporter of his.
My problem with Trump is I believe very firmly he just made all those issues worse. SJWs were just freaks we laughed at on the internet circa 2014/15. But post-2016 SJWism morphed into "wokeism" which gained full institutional control over the western world.
I'm not even American and yet I personally witnessed the effect that Trump's election had on several people I personally know, both friends and acquaintances. Among many people it seemed like Trump caused a galvanising and a radicalising effect, whereby they were utterly HORRIFIED by Trump coming to power, and so to combat it, they felt they had to embrace all the SJW-adjacent beliefs and methods of thinking that they previously mocked. I literally saw friends of mine turn from normal, funny, chilled-out people circa 2015 to circa 2020 becoming absolute stereotypes who couldn't stop ranting about politics and how X or Y thing was "bigoted" in some way.
You mentioned BLM and adjacent movements a few times and it's very interesting because, while OJ was before my time, I vividly remember the Zimmerman incident and the debate around it. But I see it as a profoundly disturbing comparison which illustrates the drastic changes that took place over 8 years. When Zimmerman happened in 2012/13ish I remember friends at school debating it with some taking the side that he was guilty, others that he was not, but everyone generally respectfully discussing it and not accusing each other of being "racists" or what have you. Fast forward to 2020 with George Floyd and subsequent incidents like Kyle Rittenhouse it was like there was zero room for debate. You're either radically uncritically pro-BLM, or you're branded a total nazi racist who needs to be ostracised from society. How did that change so much in just 8 years?
Aaron Watson
Yeah honestly I'm lucky enough it seems like I have an ok future ahead of me but it seriously feels like I'm catching the last helicopter out of nam or something
Brandon Fisher
>Comparing 2000 to 2015, or even 1995 to 2015, is basically the same world No. You weren't even born in 2000.
These retarded threads are a psyop that has no semblance to anything and the year everything "ended" keeps getting newer and newer. Notice how that post even has the audacity to compare 1995 to 2015 while posting yet another stock image of a wojak. There's nothing even remotely similar between the two, they belong to entirely different eras. But that's not the point, the point is these retarded threads exist just to fuck with your sense of time and to keep bumping up the "these were the good old days" bullshit further and further from the time things were actually good. You want to know what the last good year was? 1999. We're way past our shelf life.
But again - the only thing that matters is for you to know these threads are an actual psyop and you'll see them across the Internet. Effectively every post with pepe or wojak variation is usually a bot, shill, spam or simple trash.
