Momus is first out of the gate with a summary of the 00s, what he calls a "mister narrative of the decade"...a one-man master narrative.
Other things that looked dead or dying this decade: I personally stopped going to the cinema. Why sit behind someone's head in a fleapit when you can download all you need to see and project it at home? Copyright effectively died, overtaken, de facto, by events on the internet. Magazines and newspapers ended the decade looking very unhealthy indeed, although books seemed strong. Young people got a lot less interested in cars, leading some to label Japan a post-car society. Detroit pretty much collapsed. The polar ice caps melted rapidly; climate change is a fact. Banks -- having invented what they thought were clever ways to spread risk around, and play with planet-sized sums of entirely fictional money -- looked pretty shaky.
Embedded in Momus's post is a video called Rise of the Rest, the title of which was borrowed from Fareed Zakaria.
From the video:
In ten years, the number one English speaking country in the world will be
USAIndiaChina.
