This story is taken from the winter 2025 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally from December 5. Order a copy of the magazine here.

The year 2000 was heralded by apocalyptic visions: nuclear meltdowns, financial ruin, planes falling out of the sky. Due to a minor timekeeping quirk in contemporary computer systems – known as the millennium bug – people believed that, when the clock chimed midnight and the calendar ticked over to 2000, computers would mistakenly think we had time-travelled back to the year 1900. Because of our growing reliance on digital technologies (even then), it was feared that this could have far-reaching implications, from malfunctioning home appliances to the breakdown of the global economy and energy infrastructure. These fears wouldn’t come to pass, but digitally mediated disasters were looming just over the horizon. Political upheaval, economic turmoil and a spiralling climate crisis would alter the world around us, but other events – namely, a new technological revolution – would have an even more fundamental effect on our experience of reality. From inside this emerging consciousness, it would be difficult to see the actual changes taking place, and hard to remember what life used to be like in the old world. One challenge would rise above the rest: how do we navigate, and make sense of, this new reality?

Fast-forward 25 years, and we still haven’t found the answer. We live in an age of unparalleled uncertainty and seismic shifts. Our societies are trapped in a state of “polycrisis”. Rolling climate disasters, fuelled by human greed, have put us on a fast track to the “post-anthropocene”. Politics is “post-truth”. And no one – not politicians, artists, philosophers, scientists or writers – seems able to explain how we got here, never mind where we might be headed. All we know is what we feel: that these are historic times, the end of an era, a tipping point between the past and the future. Even Francis Fukuyama, the political theorist who in the 90s claimed that the triumph of liberal democracy had ushered in the “end of history”, has begun to cast doubt on his own theory – as have young people across the globe, their faith in the dominant political system faltering more than ever before. 

It’s impossible to mention every notable event that has led us here across the last 25 years. But, broadly speaking, the events can be broken down into two categories. Some – like two commercial airliners crashing into two of the world’s tallest buildings, or Black Lives Matter activists setting a police station on fire, or a 16-year-old Swedish girl condemning the UN – are simply things that happened, the stuff that history is made of. However, some events have wormed even deeper inside our brains. They’ve changed the way we understand and pay attention to the world and, in turn, helped shape the landscape of humanity’s possible futures. Over the course of the 21st century so far, they have also provided the basis for a radical shift in where power lies.

THE ATTENTION REVOLUTION

Of all the events that have fundamentally rewired our brains in the 21st century, the founding of major social media and content-sharing platforms – Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok – is perhaps the most obvious. Never before have we been subjected to so many thoughts, feelings and images from other human beings. Never before have we seen just how weird things look inside other people’s heads, or the extent of our commonalities. This has had some upsides. Would the Arab spring have spread so far without the grainy footage, captured on ubiquitous cameraphones, that proliferated across video-sharing sites? Maybe not. Subsequent protest movements, such as Occupy, BLM and Extinction Rebellion almost certainly wouldn’t have taken off the way they did without these technologies – even if activists often failed to translate digital attention into meaningful, real-world change. Meanwhile, memes have emerged as an entirely new artform, condensing information and emotions in new and inventive ways.

On the other hand, there’s The Algorithm. Beginning in 2009 with Facebook’s tailored news feed, introduced to Instagram and Twitter in 2016, and “perfected” in TikTok’s For You page, social media algorithms have, almost unanimously, exploited our evolutionary impulses for the worse. Converting attention into profit and power, they have hijacked our brain’s reward systems, ruined our attention spans, flattened cultural discourse and driven political polarisation. Though, to be fair, they’ve also delivered us some videos of cute animals. 

There’s a part of social media that operates on a much deeper level, to the point where the word ‘media’ almost feels inadequate

To understand the radical shift in the information landscape since 2000 – what we now know as the “attention economy” – you have to consider two overlapping stories, says media critic (and one half of theorist duo New Models) Lil Internet. The first is fairly linear and easy to trace: attention-grabbing media steadily intensifies “from a few TV channels to cable, to the internet, to your laptop, to something in your pocket 24/7”. Take adult content creator Bonnie Blue, who this year had sex with 1,057 men in a single day, breaking a world record and promoting her wildly lucrative OnlyFans. This is a fairly linear escalation of trends in traditionally-mediated porn: the gangbang, taken to its memetic extreme. The second trajectory is more difficult to describe. “There’s a part of social media that operates on a much deeper level, to the point where the word ‘media’ almost feels inadequate,” says Lil Internet. “It’s something far more cybernetic.” That is, it creates a feedback loop between people and machines. “It changes us in ways that are difficult for us to consciously notice, that operate beneath the part of us that feels autonomous and in control of ourselves, how we think and what we believe.”

HUMANITY’S CYBERNETIC TURN

An example of this change can be seen through MrBeast, whose YouTube channel has more than 449 million subscribers. In a document leaked in 2024, the content creator – real name James Stephen Donaldson – laid out a 36-page guide to going viral, filled with charts and graphs drawn from YouTube data. On X, he has described how he A/B tested video thumbnails and found that a certain facial expression – a closed-mouth, teeth-baring, gun-to-the-head smile – improved watch-time, so now he’s edited that face into all of his thumbnails. The result is an alien image, plucked from rock bottom of the uncanny valley. “The expressions, the colours, the absurd Photoshopping... no human would make an image like a MrBeast thumbnail,” says Lil Internet. “It’s vulgar and repulsive, and it feels that way because it’s the aesthetic of a machine.” 

With the rise of generative AI, these kinds of alien artefacts have only multiplied. Given the speed and ease of their generation, the number of AI-created images (many of them meaningless “slop”) is bound to overtake human-created images in the near future; “dead internet theory” speculates that most of what we see is already bots and deceptive algorithms. Maybe, deep down, we don’t even want to notice this trend towards the cybernetic, or to see how inseparable we’ve become from the technologies that were supposed to set us free. These fears also run in the opposite direction. When it was revealed that British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica harvested personal data from millions of Facebook users for targeted political advertising – influencing the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz as well as, allegedly, Brexit – many users were less concerned about the details of the security breach, and more concerned by what the technology revealed about our inner lives: how transparent we appeared in the eyes of the machine. Were we really reducible to a few data points? Our behaviour prophesied via neatly written algorithms?

No human would make an image like a MrBeast thumbnail

In 2025, British adults spend an average of 7.5 hours a day staring at a screen. More than 5 billion of the world’s 8 billion people use social media. Already, we are living in an “augmented reality” that was inconceivable at the turn of this century, which means the design of these systems – their affordances, limits and incentives (what Lil Internet calls their “physics”, as fundamental as gravity) – really does matter. The people who have thrived in the last 25 years are those who understand those physics instinctively. MrBeast. Bonnie Blue. But also some of the most powerful figures of the 21st century so far, like Barack Obama, who was declared the “first social media president’” when he took office in 2008. In the run-up to his election in 2016, Donald Trump demonstrated a similar affinity for cyberspace as it evolved into something even bigger, more complex and more polarised. For some, Trump the meme became inseparable from Trump the man. “We actually elected a meme as a president,” read one comment on the anonymous image board 4chan. When he was sworn in for his second term in 2025, he stood alongside the industry’s biggest titans. “In the 90s, they described the world wide web as an information superhighway,” says Lil Internet. “But ultimately it’s an emotional superhighway.” Trump understood this better than most. The businessman, who built his career on false hype and elaborate facades, knew that the truth of an image or piece of information is secondary to how it feels. Its vibe.

FROM TRUTH TO VIBE

Like the James Webb space telescope’s images of the early universe in all its vast and surprising complexity, the endless vistas of social media, big data and AI have shifted our perspective on what it means to be human in the 21st century. In the anthropocene (a term popularised in the year 2000), we’ve come to regard humanity itself as a sublime and terrifying entity. In 2010, the philosopher Timothy Morton coined a term for this kind of entity: the hyperobject. The hyperobject is unimaginably massive, too big and/or multidimensional to fully comprehend. As a term, it offers a way to think about the many unfolding phenomena we face in the 21st century: global warming, pandemics, casualties of war, all the plastic in the oceans, all the microplastics in our testicles and brains. These are all things that might touch our lives in passing, but we lack the cognitive ability to grasp them in their entirety. And yet we’re being asked to try, 24/7, by the people and organisations that speak through the devices in our pockets – devices that might, sooner or later, be physically linked up to our brains, that already are linked to our brains and bodies via the ghostly mechanics of adrenaline and dopamine.

Most of us are familiar with the effects of living in this new, augmented reality: a sense of constant, underlying, paralysing angst. A continuous feeling that something is off. Nadia Asparouhova, author of Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading, suggests that we shouldn’t be surprised by the failure of our primitive brains to come to terms with the world as it appears to us in the 21st century. “There are an infinite number of problems or social issues that we are tuning out at any given time,” she says. “I don’t think there’s some perfect world where we’re 100 per cent tuned in to every single thing that is happening right now, because it would just be so overwhelming.”

Confronted with the scale and complexity of the 21st century’s crises, people respond in different ways. Some retreat into nihilism and doomscrolling. Some hide away in small, highly localised corners of the internet, like animals in a “dark forest” who are afraid to make a sound in case it alerts a nearby predator. (The illuminating work of the Dark Forest Collective traces how this has driven the cutting edge of contemporary discourse into increasingly niche and shadowy parts of the web, via group chats, newsletters, podcasts, livestreams and in-person events, a trend that reflects the fractured feeling of our lives.) Others turn away altogether from the yawning uncertainty of the future, yearning for a past that never existed – or at least one in which individuals felt they still had some control over what the future could be.

So far, the art and culture of the 21st century has been defined by this relentless nostalgia: reboots and spin-offs, pastiche and homage. The late critic Mark Fisher diagnosed this cultural sickness in 2012. “Troublingly, the disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live,” he wrote in Film Quarterly. Maybe this is why real life today carries a similar sense of stuck-ness or circularity. After years of “woke” politics and culture, which made significant strides for women’s rights and representation, gay marriage, trans rights and race relations, the pendulum has swung back the other way: trans rights are once more under attack, nations are walking back their climate commitments, racists and anti-abortion activists are gaining political power, and young content creators are idealising the “trad” lifestyles of 1950s housewives. This isn’t only a success of right-wing, neoliberal storytelling, it’s also a failure of imagination on the part of the “progressive” left. To borrow another term from Fisher, the last 25 years have seen the “slow cancellation of the future”. Instead of charting a new path through the 21st century, artists and politicians offer only to mitigate the disasters that are – inevitably! – headed our way. Humanity is on the defensive.

In the second half of the 2010s... we were stuck in emergency mode; avoiding disaster had become the central focus of life – Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading

THINKING IN THE FUTURE TENSE

In Antimemetics, Asparouhova describes a feeling of hopelessness and dread that dominated the late 2010s and the early 2020s. “We were stuck in emergency mode,” she writes. “Avoiding disaster had become the central focus of life.” But we are breaking the cycle as we move into the second quarter of the century, she adds. Humans haven’t actually stopped imagining new futures – ideas just circulate in a different way in 2025 than they did in the 2000s or 2010s. Doom and despair still dominate discourse in the “memetic city” of mainstream social media (they garner most attention, after all), but the physics of the dark forest work differently. There lies a “shadow city”, where a “diverse ecosystem” of complex and substantive ideas is allowed to take root and bloom. How might they alter our perspectives and bleed into the physical world in years to come? Who is best placed to navigate this new environment? As Lil Internet suggests, the answers to these kinds of questions depend on how well we’re able to articulate our communication technologies in the near future – be that algorithmic social media or the cybernetic feedback loops of AI – and render them understandable to their users. “It’s extremely necessary to communicate to the public how these systems actually work,” he says, “and so far we aren’t accomplishing it.”

In 1968, the sci-fi author Arthur C Clarke wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Right now, many of our most prevalent technologies feel this way. AI and social media algorithms are discussed in almost mythical or religious terms, coinciding with a turn towards actual religion after a rapid decline from the mid-2000s to 2020. Memes create “mind viruses” that influence IRL behaviours. Elections, personal scandals and even political assassinations are surrounded by rumours of dark magic. Is it any surprise, though, that our focus is shifting back to this less tangible, more vibe-y kind of thinking: magic, manifestation, prayer? The new technologies and rationalist experiments of the 21st century were supposed to usher in an age of enlightenment. But in many cases, they’ve only revealed the extent of what we don’t know about the universe around us. Endless streams of alarming information in our news feeds have left us feeling more clueless than ever. Dating apps have failed to illuminate what makes human relationships tick. AI has eroded our sense of what makes humans human in the first place. The old “real” world – a world we could truly believe in, understand and act upon with a sense that we were helping to usher the future into being – has vanished. Perhaps all we have left to rely on are gut feelings, intuition, ancient folklore and modern mythmaking.

To answer a question posed at the beginning of this essay, maybe the key to coming to terms with the last 25 years, and navigating the century to come, can be found by embracing the magical, miraculous nature of a world beyond our understanding. But we must also treat culture – our words, actions and images – as if it really can change the world, even if the precise mechanics of cause and effect get lost in the loop. This requires a leap of faith, which isn’t always easy when it feels like the world’s going to end. But so far, apocalyptic thinking has got us nowhere, so it seems worth at least trying the alternative. Do you want to believe?

This story is taken from the winter 2025 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally from December 5. Order a copy of the magazine here.