(SOUNDBITE OF BACKSTREET BOYS SONG, "LARGER THAN LIFE")
ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
In the late '90s, the future looked so bright, didn't it? We had pop stars in music videos dancing with robots in space.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LARGER THAN LIFE")
BACKSTREET BOYS: (Singing) All you people, can't you see? Can't you see?
LIMBONG: We had a president talking about all this extra money we had lying around.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BILL CLINTON: We expect the 1990 surplus - 1998 surplus to be about $70 billion.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LARGER THAN LIFE")
BACKSTREET BOYS: (Singing) Makes you larger than life.
LIMBONG: And this new thing called the internet promised a new age of interconnectivity that could unite us all. Of course, we do not now live in a techno utopia. Instead, by 2008, unemployment was up, the housing market was collapsing, and we were mired in a global war on terror. The writer Colette Shade calls these years, from '97 to '08, the Y2K era in her new book "Y2K: How The 2000s Became Everything (Essays On The Future That Never Was)", and she's here now to talk about it. Hey, Colette.
COLETTE SHADE: Hi, Andrew.
LIMBONG: So this book is much more than just millennial nostalgia (laughter). You know, there's - you map on, like, Y2K aesthetics onto sort of an economic argument. But before we get to that, why did you pick these years specifically?
SHADE: So I picked these years because these were the years where Americans - and I write as an American - saw themselves as not being political subjects any longer. And what I mean by that is that by 1997, you had a couple of years of the dot-com bubble inflating. You had this broad sense of optimism about the economy and technology. And there was this sense that all of these old political struggles that had happened in the past - be they against racism, sexism, economic inequality...
LIMBONG: Russia. Yeah.
SHADE: Yeah. Russia, labor versus capital, all kinds of wars - all of these things had been solved, and all we really needed to do was sit back, relax, invest in the stock market and log onto the internet. And then 2008 really punctured that because the economic consequences of the Great Recession actually undermined the American way of life in that regard. So because so many people lost their jobs and lost their homes, they could no longer say, my primary goal in life is to go shopping and be a homeowner, and so they started to search. And some of that searching brought people to more progressive politics like Bernie Sanders, but it also brought people to Trump and to conspiracy theories like QAnon.
LIMBONG: You know, I think a lot of people would consider 9/11 to be either the end of an era or the beginning of a new one, but in your book, it acts more like a hinge point. I think that's fair to say. So how did 9/11 influence this Y2K era?
SHADE: 9/11 did not fundamentally change this understanding of the role of most people in America, in the sense that - what were we told to do as our patriotic duty after 9/11? It was go shopping. It was get down to Disney World. And then we were told to buy all of these clothes that had American flags on them and put flags everywhere and put flags on our cars. And really, that wasn't ultimately that different from the shopping- and pop-culture-centered lifestyle that was going on before 9/11.
LIMBONG: In the book, you talk about a number of artifacts from the Y2K era, some of which are still around, like Starbucks. Another cultural artifact that I'm really interested in is the H2 Hummer. And you talk about it as a way of addressing our attitudes towards climate change. Could you read part of the sections on page 145?
SHADE: (Reading) The H2 summed up an entire way of thinking about the Earth and Americans' place on it - about the future and Americans' duty to it. The Hummer was an SUV without apology, without the fig leaves of safety ratings and seating capacity occasionally proffered by its more respectable peers, the Suburban, the Ford Expedition, the Chevrolet Tahoe, the Jeep Liberty, the Toyota Highlander. The Hummer's design and colorways were a flashy celebration of profligacy and violence. People who drove Hummers did so because they knew all about climate change, and they didn't give a [expletive].
LIMBONG: If that's how we saw one side of the climate change debate, how did we, as a culture, see the other side - the people who drove Priuses or something?
SHADE: Yeah. Priuses were seen as a way to ally yourself in - yes - this budding culture war. Climate change, instead of being seen as this existential problem that we should all work together on, was seen as this - again, a consumer question of, are you a Hummer buyer, or are you a Prius buyer? - not, how can we all work together to find a common solution to this problem that imperils all of us?
LIMBONG: I think every generation thinks it is unique in some way. And so how did you gut-check yourself while writing this book and ask, like, was this actually significant, or was I just 15 at the time?
SHADE: Yeah. No, that's a great question. And I think that a big reason why I chose the form of the personal essay is that it allowed me a sense of uncertainty that I returned to throughout the book. I don't necessarily know how much of my yearning for the Y2K era is just nostalgia for being a teenager or being 10 years old and how much of it was that things really were better.
However, there are actual measurable statistics that you can use to say, by X measure, things have gotten worse - for example, the cost of housing as compared to inflation or the severity and frequency of climate change-related extreme weather events, though all of those things have gotten worse in a measurable way. But of course, when you talk about something like music, which - and to be clear, I'm not arguing that, oh, the music I had as a kid was better than...
LIMBONG: Yeah (laughter).
SHADE: ...The music today 'cause there's lots of great music today. But I think that something like that - then you get into dicier territory because, I mean, that's all very subjective.
LIMBONG: Yeah. That was writer Colette Shade. Her book "Y2K: How The 2000s Became Everything" is out January 7. Thanks, Colette.
SHADE: Thanks for having me, Andrew.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE KILLERS SONG, "MR. BRIGHTSIDE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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