10 Things I Hate About the 21st Century

I got mine. You got yours. Let's compare notes.

1. TALKING LOUD AND SAYING NOTHING. Look, I’ve got nothing against people talking to themselves. It’s where we get world religions, scientific theories, and probably most of the great song lyrics. I even sometimes enjoy deranged external monologues, like the guy who sat next to me on the F train complaining, “This place stinks from angels.” But this cellphone/earphone thing has gone too far. Everywhere you go, there’s someone behind you gesturing dramatically to the open air and practically shouting about some disappointing conversation they had the day before or their plans for the evening ahead. You can’t even hear street traffic in Manhattan sometimes. And don’t get me started about people hollering banalities at each other in restaurants and coffee shops. It ain’t Cicero you hear at Starbucks.

2. HAVING TO SUBSCRIBE TO EVERYTHING. In 2023, BMW decided to discontinue a policy charging customers a monthly subscription fee for heated car seats, because, ahem, some consumers objected the idea of paying features that were already in their cars. That’s nice. Meanwhile, Mercedes said they would continue charging drivers a subscription for extra-fast acceleration.

It seems like you used to be able to buy a product and not have to worry about someone sticking their hand in your pocket every 30 days. You bought a TV set, turned it on, adjusted your rabbit ears, and watched the Mets. Fat chance now. You need to pay for your monthly cable subscription along with your internet, and then an expensively sports package on top of that. And if you want to listen music, then Spotify requires your credit card number (and pays a royalty rate about $2.38 for every thousand streams to the artist).

It’s not just car companies and media companies who won’t let you be. Rugged and reliable old John Deere won’t allow you to repair the farm equipment you’ve “leased,” forcing customers to overpay for expensive fixes for their tractors and combines. On the office side, HP uses skeevy espionage-like practices to pressure consumers into subscribing for their printers and cartridges, “bricking” printers when you try to load third-party ink. Isn’t there a graceful way to say “it was fun while it lasted” and move on?

3. THE FACT THAT EATING BREAD AND DRINKING BEER CAN MAKE YOU FAT. I realize this is not strictly speaking, a 21^st century phenomenon. But it’s been bugging me lately, so I thought I’d mention it.

4. PRESENTISM. Defined by Merriam Webster as “an attitude toward the past dominated by present-day attitudes and experiences.”

Yes, the Founding Fathers included slaveholders. Yes, Abraham Lincoln signed the execution of 38 Dakota men, the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Yes, Jane Austen lacks revolutionary consciousness, Hemingway didn’t get women, and To Kill A Mockingbird has White Savior Syndrome.

All these things are true. But we lose a lot when we view history mainly through the filter of the present, as has been a fashion in academia from even before the start of this century. Dismissing the Founding Fathers as slaveholding hypocrites, as some students are taught to do reflexively, misses the idea that buried within the Constitution was the cynosure to overturn that repression. Trashing Hemingway wholesale means forgetting that he helped reinvent the American sentence for fiction and was a master of compression in his greatest short stories. And removing the names of George Washington and Lincoln from schools as the school board in San Francisco voted to do in 2021 is simply stupid. And helps lead to –

5. THE EROSION OF THE GREAT AMERICAN MIDDLE GROUND. Let’s not pretend we were all ever really that buddy-buddy. We had loyalists versus patriots in the Revolutionary War, Unionists and Confederates in the Civil War, hard hat rioters against Vietnam war protestors in the Nixon years, and so on.

But people would still sometimes talk to each other across the aisle. There were cultural successes that did not demand audiences choose a political side. And occasionally, there were even bills that passed Congress with bipartisan support.

Not so much anymore.

6. ZOOM. You can’t read the room on a laptop. You can’t observe body language or tell if people are in their underwear. You can’t tell a joke to a photo contact sheet or the Brady Bunch squares on micro-second delay. And you can’t run into somebody at the water cooler or bathroom door after the meeting to casually ask, “Now when the boss said, ‘let’s shove Dmitry out the window, did he really mean…?”

Yes, I know there are some good things about Zoom. The ability to convene meetings with people in Auckland, Peoria, and Kyiv seeing each other simultaneously. School girls too shy for the classroom raising their hands and speaking up to the screen. Construction projects assessed remotely. And working in a factory can suck. But is showing up to work on your laptop worth it, in terms of social alienation? The loneliness? The absence of mentorship, sharpening inter-office rivalries, and relationships with people you’d never hang out with otherwise? The endless days of people stuck in their bedrooms with the computer sucking the soul out of their lives?

As one young person told me poignantly, “You close your computer to finally end your day at some weird hour, then you look around and realize you’re still just in your room and haven’t been anywhere.”

7. THE END OF ROCK AND ROLL. The King is long dead. So are all the original Ramones. And half the Beatles. And the guy from Motorhead. Most of the Dead are dead. And a lot of the bands that are touring, like Lynyrd Skynyrd, don’t have anybody playing with them who was on the records.

For the second half of the 20^th century, this seemingly boneheaded genre kept evolving and adapting. From rockabilly and doo-wop, to the British iteration and Motown, folk-rock and metal, prog, punk, MTV, and grunge. But in this century, as far as I know, that reinvention has slowed.

So Danny & the Juniors were wrong, I guess; rock and roll will someday die.

You might say, good riddance! Rock was always too white, too male, too self-pitying. And 90 percent of it, like 90 percent of everything, was crap. Besides, Rap stole the King’s crown a long time ago – Beyonce, Kendrick, and Tyler, the Creator are taking the same spirit to a higher, more inventive, and less-strictly Caucasian place. And I actually think Taylor Swift is pretty good.

But it’s not quite the same thing, is it? The best rock and roll always sounded new again, even when it was the same three chords. It spoke to you in a certain way that rap, country and digital pop don’t. Maybe somebody’s still doing something raw and real in their basement or in a club outside Chicago (shoutout to my buddy Jeremy!), and I just don’t get out enough.

8. THE RISE OF ANTI-HUMAN, ALGORITHM-DRIVEN, OLIGARCHIC CAPITALISM. A recent Goldman Sachs analysts’ report asked, “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” That says it all, doesn’t it? (Thanks to two-time Pulitzer winner David Kocieniewski for pointing this out) https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html

You don’t need the full rant here. You know it all ready. The richest man in the world nearly succeeded in shutting down the federal government and depriving workers of their paychecks right before Christmas. Amazon workers piss in bottles to make their deadlines while the boss plans a wedding with a budget that would fund an industrialized nation for a year. And Sam Altman of OpenAI, among others, wants to make sure annoying regulations don’t get in the way of machines putting you out of a job.

9. THE TRIUMPH OF THE SUPERHERO. I liked comic books as much as anybody else when I was growing up. But then I discovered people got naked in movies sometimes. There were also more compelling things in the newspapers and on the streets. The first few Superman and Batman movies were perfectly fine, especially the funny ones with Christopher Reeve and Michael Keaton. But they weren’t the only kind of movies at the multiplex.

Nowadays, there isn’t as much choice. It’s no exaggeration to say most films in theaters are sequels or expansions of blockbuster franchises. I’ve been recommending Sean Baker’s Anora to people and hearing back, “yeah, how many hundred miles do I have to drive to see it?”

It’s commonplace to complain about short-sighted studio executives. But the truth is, the mass audience rarely shows up for quality films.

And that’s disturbing in ways that go beyond the world of entertainment. This is from Alan Moore, creator of Watchmen and V For Vendetta: “I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see ‘Batman’ movies. Because that kind of infantilization – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.”

Not that any such thing is happening right now!

10. GRUMPY CURMUDGEONS COMPLAINING ABOUT HOW THINGS USED TO BE BETTER. No explanation necessary.

I invite readers to suggest other examples I’m not thinking of.