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West-coast tech was still on the whig progressive narrative and battling the techlash as it is today (though that seems like an irrelevant sideshow now) but I can't remember what throughline the NYT was carrying. Or the Economist. Or FT. I have a sort of narrative amnesia.
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What did they tend to derp on about? Davos? Inequality? World is flat? Can't boot up that headspace at all now.
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I think they talked a lot about hipsters and millennials and the recovery from GFC. The general branch people thought we were on was recovery --> get those pesky Europeans back in shape after fumbling Greece and stuff.
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Islamic terrorism (remember OBL was killed in 2011 and ISIS was just taking over from Al Qaeda) was still big on the radar I think. It's pretty much fallen off the radar entirely since then.
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The 3 big narratives I was paying attention to in 2011-2014 were probably: tech-SV-TED, NYT-globalism-Davos-QE, and South Park. In peripheral vision, there were the the then baby grand narratives of crypto, NRx, Occupy, China. Climate change was slowly looming larger.
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2011-14 feels a but like 93-97 (which was exactly my undergrad period), a sort of limbo time that got totally forgotten in the light of what happened next. Back then, the internet was still a sort of force in the shadows, not the center of the universe.
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1993-97 and 2010-14 were both branch prediction errors. You could see a minor branch developing but reasonable people bet that it would stay minor, and focused their attention on the historical branch that currently had the most momentum. Which turned out to be a dead end.
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If you were to write a sweeping history of say 1980-2020, you'd dismiss these 2 periods in short footnotes, besides noting smugly that almost nobody took the possibility of a sharp historical pivot seriously, though most people noted the possibility.
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Remember Krugman in 1998 declaring the internet's impact would be no greater than that of the fax machine? I think that's when he lost the bulk of his credibility. It would have still been an acceptable sentiment in say 1996. By 1998 you had to be clueless to think that.
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