The Terribad 2000s

The 2000s weren't all that bad, but believe me when I say that they (and the Internet back then) certainly wasn't the wonderland many people tend to contextualize it as. Let me do my best to explain.

On small websites like those hosted on neocities, nekoweb, and similar sites, many fondly over-romanticize the past, particularly the 2000s. This is awkward, especially when a (small, but significant) portion of the people with this nostalgic mindset were quite young at the time and might not have gotten the full picture. If you were born later in the 1990s, you might’ve missed some things, or even if you’re older, like me, you might forgotten some bits, or simply been blessed with different experiences. This is why I’ve decided to list five reasons the 2000s were terribad, and explain each in lingering detail.

Some of these are internet-centric, but not all, and most were symptomatic of larger problems within society at the time, most of which persist in new forms to this day. As you might expect, this section contains some disturbing references to gross things. These include the failures of parents to protect their children from predators, and other things that contributed to genuinely negative digital experiences that reached into the “real” world...

Runaways

Our parents really shot themselves in the foot when it came to trying to protect us from ourselves or whatever. When I joke that I ran away to America Online as a kid and never came back, I mean it to a degree.

Today, the media speaks of millennials as an “entitled” and “immature” generation on and off, usually whenever student loan debt relief comes into the news cycle. These talking points are vestigial pieces of older propaganda from the 2000s. Back then, many people used even earlier high-profile incidents like the Columbine High School massacre to argue that the the youth (ie, millennials) were deeply troubled, “at-risk,” and thus in need of constant supervision or intervention.

This spawned the boom of the “troubled teen” industry. This included many abusive, cult-like institutions where teenagers were sent to “scare them straight” (in, most tragically, many senses of that term). It also included movies, books, and such targeted at parents (and the teens themselves!) about how dangerous it was to be young, and how risky everyday youth experiences might be. We also had pop psychologists ready to blame societal ills on this or that rap or death metal song.

Amongst all this was the vague implication that if only we’d remember Christ Jesus or something, we’d be less “at-risk” for drug use or shooting up a school. Who could forget She Said Yes, after all, the classic (true!) story of a girl who, after years of downward spirals, discovered Jesus only to be viciously martyred at Columbine? Or any of the self-help books on our teachers’ shelves. Or any of the teen journals Beatrice Sparks had managed to “discover” and publish over the years, warning us about drugs and the occult from a Christian perspective?

I won’t speak too much about these aspects of the millennial experience because they weren’t part of mine. At least not as much. I grew up in a secular home, though there was significant religious pressure at school. I wasn’t really considered an at-risk teen because I never had much opportunity to get into trouble. Some of us, like me, had to deal with pushy helicopter parents either way, of course.

What did we do, as millennials who didn’t quite fit in, when this got to be too much? I myself couldn’t very well run away Ghibli-style because such things aren’t real. I also couldn’t exactly make a break for it IRL (see: the helicopter aspect). Hence, running away into the internet.

This was perfectly possible back then because, unlike in today’s world, our parents usually knew much less about the internet than we did. My mom couldn’t monitor me on AOL Instant Messenger because she didn’t know what it was. She wouldn’t stop me reading age-inappropriate fanfics or talking to the wrong people in fandom spaces, because she had no idea those things existed, and no chance to learn.

This kind of technological generation gap allowed an escape, but it also put us in danger at times (see: later entries on this list - the internet has never been safe). If our parents had been less adversarial, less suspicious, this might not have happened. IRL helicopter parenting is never a good thing, but the way all restrictions seemed to disappear once I’d logged on was, in retrospect, just as bad.

The infantilization of millennials, of course continues even decades later, largely because it suits the dominant economic narrative at times, and also because people are settled into it. Right now, the discourse mostly revolves around how “childish” we were to expect a living wage after college. I don’t know. C’est la vie.

"LOL SO RANDOM"

We laugh about how we laughed about it, and we’ll probably laugh at laughing about laughing about it later, and so on and so forth, as trends go. Of course, at base, it really was just another silly meme (before we used the term meme, of course). I guess a sociologist would argue we had some deeper initial reason for it, but this article isn’t about that.

In the mid-2000s, the “random” jokes wore thin for a lot of us. Jokes without punchlines aren’t really that funny ultimately, and punchlines without jokes are just punches. Trends take a while to die, or shift trajectory. After a while it almost felt like “random” was a legit raison d’être for some (mostly very online) holdouts, though?

I saw it used to justify really weird, often mean-spirited things, especially on the internet where people faced little consequences for their “randomness.” Looking back, yes, there was the “I made you a cookie but I eated it” type of randomness, the cuteness-heavy, earlier, wholesome kind, but that was the first to get parodied, the first on the chopping block. It was also something something more hmm hmm associated with girls more than uhh well anyways…

Once the meme-ness of it went away, it had all become ironic and harshly so. The randomness stayed, though. All that was left was performative cruelty. I’d wager a fair bit of people who were initially taken with the concept because of its potential in that direction stuck with it for that reason.

Once websites like 4chan and its satellites entered the equation and there really weren’t many consequences for “random” bad behavior online, such things became a veritable spectator sport for some people. A lot of the quirky memes we might remember (even fondly) from back then actually had pretty sinister origins or histories with seeds like that. For example, if you know anything about where it comes from, “Consequences will never be the same!” becomes a significantly less funny, less random comment.

This showed up alongside the “hehehehe I’m RANDOMLY doing something as a SOCIAL EXPERIMENT to see how people react lol!” memes, especially online. The “random” experiments could range from “I’m putting a tampon with fake blood in my hair (but not for attention, I swear!)” to “I’m going to aggressively harass a random kid online for having acne in his pics or whatever, because I need to know how he’ll react, for, uh, science.”

By the end to the decade, they tended mostly towards the latter. Nowadays, whenever I hear someone say “random,” “for the lols,” “social experiment,” etc online, it’s almost always some situation where they’re just a bully justifying their behavior with mental gymnastics. Again, jokes without punchlines get dull after a certain point, and punchlines without jokes are just punches.

Fanfic as Sex Ed? UGH!

Raise your hand if you “learned about sex” from fanfiction in any way, shape, or form. Keep your hand up if this gave you weird (wrong) ideas. Did you ever ask why?

When I was about fourteen, I’d come to the sudden realization that most of the “totally hawt” fanfics I’d been reading about Scully finally investigating Mulder’s butthole were probably authored by people my own age. People who had zero knowledge of sex, just like me. I think that marked my disenchantment with the “two characters bang” genre, though I made exceptions later if it was well-written.

This would’ve been a total non-issue if I’d actually gotten much sex education at school. Don’t get me wrong - in fifth grade we attended a general class on the, ahem, mechanics of reproduction. We didn’t discuss safety much, any real facts about STDs, or the intricacies of consent, or anything like that. In high school, though, we did, in fact, have one of those infamous “you’re a crumpled piece of paper!” assemblies as part of our “abstinence-only” continued sex education.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the concept, it’s a “demonstrative” technique meant to indicate that a person somehow suddenly becomes worthless (or just worth less) after having premarital sex. At my school, the lecturer took a piece of paper, crumpled it up, and said something like, “Even if you smooth it out, the creases remain - it will never be the same, just like you! If you have premarital sex!”

We realize now, as sensible adults, that this is a silly argument - we’re never the same day after day regardless, and the world doesn’t collapse if you have sex without a ring. Back then, people actually thought it was compelling enough to repeat, though. In some iterations (not at my school, but others), the “piece of paper” was a cupcake and the host of the assembly would actually lick the cupcake to prove “nobody wants it once it’s been licked,” just like us, if we’d had premarital sex…

Interestingly, there was one (1) “out” gay male at my school during this time period. He joked that he wanted to “skip the assembly” since it didn’t apply to him. This was, after all, prior to gay marriage being legalized, so clearly he operated under the assumption he wouldn’t have been able to “save himself for marriage” anyways. He didn’t end up skipping it, of course, and weirdly had good humor about the whole thing.

I had an ultra-close friend who was on the swim team, so I’ll just call her Swim. She was on a large dose of Benadryl during the assembly, which made the whole thing super-interesting. The legendary Hatman didn’t appear apparently, and doing large doses of Benadryl is horrible, but hey, it was one way some people responded to being presented with this utter circus of bullshit.

Domain Scene Camzone

Nobody wants to talk about this, but it was a thing, and a very disgusting thing in retrospect. I’ve never once seen anyone on neocities or another one of these “nostalgic for the little web” hosts talk about this. I’m sure there’s someone somewhere who remembers it, but nobody’s discussing it, maybe because it was so creepy. Did you experience it?

We wax nostalgic these days about the mid-2000s when many teenagers had their own domain names, featuring blogs, pixel art, and more, very vaguely like the neocities sites of today. I was one of these teenagers, having been gifted a domain name for my sixteenth birthday. It was very exciting to move from the sporadic free hosts to my own webspace.

What nobody discusses nowadays? A lot of these sites including those run by minors like me featured a webcam widget. Not a still image of our face, exactly, but a sort-of-live image. How did this work? We’d set up our webcam, and it would take a still image at a set interval, perhaps every minute or so, and upload the image to the site. The site would then automatically refresh the image, usually using an iframe of some sort (if I remember right).

I say we, because yes, my site very briefly had this webcam feature, too. My mom bought me a Best Buy gift card one year, and I bought the webcam with it, if I remember right. While she knew I posted a photo of my face to my site, she was unaware of the culture surrounding it. I eventually realized that not just me, but every girl (because yes, we were almost all girls) who was part of this “cam scene” got sexualized, no matter how young we were. I was fourteen and received messages from men asking me to take non-nude fetish photos within weeks.

I never told my family how disgusting that was, and the adults within that community treated it as just a normal part of the “scene.” My site was mostly about manipulating images (anime, photos, etc) with Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop. I ended up ditching my webcam widget in a moment of sheer terror, as you probably guessed. Other friends of mine from those sites struggled with grown men stalking them across the internet, after all.

Even long after that, I’d make images, photo edits with pixels, etc, for the folks who ran the webcam sites, and remained somewhat within that community. I lurked a lot, and watched things go downhill for a lot of people. Some of the more popular “camgirls” (because yes, back then, that word was used to refer to clothed minors sometimes) ended up having horrible experiences moving into adult life.

I’m glad I didn’t stay long or dive too far into that culture. I remember Renée Stage in particular, of course. I hope she’s doing better now, but won’t look her up. I suspect there was a lot of overlap between this, the (very) early online influencer community, and the indie music scene at the time.

Patriotic Ontological Mystery

I’ve covered this quite extensively elsewhere, but I here refer to the manic patriotic obsession that quickly developed in the period between September 11th, 2001 and (roughly) the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The attacks themselves set off the wave, and the Iraq War, as a source of broader controversy, seemed to break the spell finally, leading to war protests and general mistrust of the Bush administration.

I remember people would hint at noticing how surreal it was getting, though people wouldn’t want to outright say it. I remember one kid commenting, during the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, that he wasn’t sure if he “wanted to watch the war in reruns, or live,” with a wink and a shrug, for example. We were all expected to rally around the concept of America, land of the free, etc, constantly, though, stand for the pledge, all that, and we did. I wasn’t going to argue against any of it, at least initially.

The school developed a rather intense obsession with World War Two during this time period. It was, of course, near the 60th anniversary of America’s entrance into the war. The choir sang songs from the 1940s, and the band played them, too. There were projects in various (semi)related classes focused exclusively on World War Two, as well. While they gave various reasons for this, it was clear we were supposed to draw a comparison between our current fight against the “evildoers” overseas and the battle against the Nazis. I was happy to participate in the parts of this honoring the living veterans of course, but wondered how they felt about the whole thing.

Even after the Iraq War began two years later, patriotism was a huge fixture of my public life. The very fact that my family was (historically, at least) Democrats in a heavily-Republican area caused some friction. Admittedly it was probably because of my family that I was skeptical of Bush’s motives for both invasions. I won’t pretend I came to those conclusions entirely on my own, though I was also influenced by how insufferable it was getting. Regardless, I ended up on the wrong side of things as far as a large portion of my peers were concerned.

I was frequently asked why I didn’t want America to “fight back” against people who “wanted to destroy the Bill of Rights in the name of their religion.” Almost everyone else at my school was a Christian of some sort, and there was certainly a religious aspect to their beliefs about American imperialism in the Middle East. I was already bullied, and this became something of a sticking point with that, too. There were a few other kids who also opposed the war, and we’d generally group together about that. A couple of us hated each other for various reasons, but we’d close ranks when we had to about the Iraq War issue.

This helped a little, but it quickly became apparent that the best way to handle the “against George W. Bush in a Republican area” was to just be quiet about it, so most of us did. It made sense, because neither us (nor, arguably, any of our pro-Bush classmates) were ready for any kind of nuanced political discussion.

The Best Parts?

Don’t get me wrong. Growing up as a millennial on the cusp of the 2000s was amazing in so many ways. I just wrote this to highlight some of my more negative experiences. Were yours similar? I may eventually write a different page (or perhaps simply append to this one) five reasons I enjoyed the 2000s, as well. I’m hardly indicting the entire decade.

Things are, after all, a bit of a melange. Not to mention that many of my experiences may or may not have been typical of younger people spending a lot of time online back then. A lot of people I’ve talked to seem unaware of some things (like the “domain cam scene”) but plenty have described a similar situation with fanfic, the issues of being presumed “at-risk,” and more...