What was it you wanted?
Tell me again so I'll know
What's happening in there?
What's going on in your show?
What was it you wanted
Could you say it again?
I'll be back in a minute
You can get it together by then
- Bob Dylan, "What Was It You Wanted?"
The media ecosystem of the 2000s was an oddly comforting place in retrospect. Culturally, no one yet spoke about the divide between the analog and digital eras, both spheres harmoniously coexisted. In the early 2000s I was going to community college and working part-time jobs. At home we had DirectTV, which I sometimes miss, it was still a time when having hundreds of channels available amounted to a luxury.
I might begin the day by flipping to the Bloomberg Channel. All those charts, numbers, and graphs were like looking into the fabric of reality itself or a command center from a techno-thriller. I never had much understanding of those graphs and what the talking heads were saying, but it looked cool. SportsCenter on ESPN provided endless highlights, non-stop daily drama and baseball fields and basketball courts. Football weekends during the fall felt like events of historical importance. In the evenings you might flip over to TCM to take in classic cinema or even later at night go to IFC and catch Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai or Primer. On PBS, Charlie Rose brought intellectual conversation to night owls like me. And there was Late Night with Conan O'Brien reinventing late night comedy for a new generation. This world was fractured and mediated, but I felt some connection.
Without internalizing it, I was getting a tapestry of the early 21st century. Bloomberg and CNBC tracked market forces and trends. SportsCenter turned sports into high drama. TCM brought cultural literacy through classic cinema, while IFC highlighted indie voices. Charlie Rose allowed one to join the elevated conversations on the state of the world. While Leno and Letterman were already in elder statesman mode, Conan felt revolutionary - an encyclopedia of 20th century comedy. Obviously, some of this is nostalgic but also a realization that my media diet was imperfect.
Now a few decades later, I ask myself: Am I losing the plot? The hyper-fragmented atmosphere of the 2020s has upended my sense of place. With a childhood in the 1980s and heading into early adulthood during the 1990s, there was a sense of progress that was often encouraged by pop culture. The promise of the Civil Rights Movement. The Space Race. Apple Computers (the 1984 ad). The End of History - pundits wrote about it constantly. That state of mind never left me, but its foundation is cracking.
The world is now completely transactional. You must market yourself for a proof-of-concept culture. It's a bad time to be an idealist. And people are adapting. New rules are being made, new values are being rewarded.
Living in the 1990s I had no idea what the future would look like, I certainly knew history wasn't over, but not what living through a cultural shift would feel like. What I never saw coming was the separate reality phenomenon, the "I do my own research" type of world.
I've looked for explanations of this feeling. Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism remains a powerful analysis of how a mass society drifts away from truth and shared realities. Arendt was writing at a time before social media, but the mechanisms described are similar. The communication breakdown of the present, and I don't even just mean between different political spheres, makes for a maddening and dull world. Implicit in Origins of Totalitarianism is the notion that real reality can easily be manipulated in cynical ways. And technology has made it much easier, as countless think pieces have described at length.
It's not paranoia, but disorientation I feel. It's easy to let a messianic complex take over, the persona of the last sane man. You know, just like the movies, the protagonist with a conscience sees the truth and then takes down a nefarious power structure. I risk becoming a bad movie trope; the result of watching too many paranoid thrillers. Reality never works like that. Mature people understand this and live accordingly.
But in a world of algorithms, - I must pose the question to myself. Is my sense of reality sound? Did I choose the right information bubble? Is there a correct bubble? Is reality an arduous quest for unquestionable knowledge? Am I simply repeating dogma from a defunct worldview? Because I feel the vertigo lately. It's like you left the chessboard and someone moved the pieces around. Or maybe it's a growing sense that most people just see reality differently and behave accordingly.
You might say, "Well Eric, just read these books by the leading academic authorities on the post-truth world and compare the perspectives, read your Orwell, it will all make sense." Maybe. I'm not saying these detailed and thoughtful books have nothing to teach me, they no doubt would have much to teach me, but how do all these books influence the ecosystem of Wal-Mart or McDonalds? Do these erudite books translate into REALITY? You might learn more about reality by spending an hour at Wal-Mart or grabbing lunch at a McDonalds rather than excessively annotating the tome of an academic.
Well, you might say, 'Eric, now you're being anti-intellectual." I'm just saying I don't have time to read all the god damn books and hopefully with luck come to a final understanding of REALITY! But I can scrutinize my own beliefs, maintain flexibility and even change my mind. There's been nearly a full century of scholarship on the catastrophe of modern wars and genocide, but nothing is changing. A podcast with the "How We Got Here" format unveiled in 50 one-hour increments might shade in a few blank spaces on the lead up to Ukraine War but it will only lead to more questions.
When I teach history sometimes, on the first and last day of class, I often ask students to write a short piece about what history means to them and always get the achingly familiar, "We must learn from history to not repeat the mistakes of the past." Besides the banality of the notion, those words now in 2026 play like the HAL 9000 saying, "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."
The 25th anniversary of 9/11 is coming up. My memories of the weeks after the attacks are mostly of driving to work or school. Talk radio commentators begging people to get behind the president, debating which countries to bomb, making the inevitable comparisons to World War II and how the "War on Terror" would be the ultimate existential test for the new generation. At the grocery store I worked at, the manager began a meeting by saying, "it's time for America to start kicking ass and taking names." Followed by applause and fist pumps. In my early 20s, I could sense the culture shifting but had no idea where it was all leading.
And now 25 years later everything seems even more unmoored. My grasp has diminished, but pundits still explain things with certainty, Substack writers offer alternate (non-mainstream) takes and lifestyle advice, while culture writers post long pieces on how everything is broken with movies and pop culture with titles like, "Why Everything Sucks Now." The world I described earlier of Bloomberg, SportsCenter, Conan, late-night movies which all promised continuity, even progress, evolved into a media landscape that's bloated, boring, and ephemeral.
Sometimes I wonder if I will fall into a phantom zone of reality that feeds me everything I want to hear, finally believing I found the truth of REALITY. I will confidently write on this medium I now have all the answers. I've read all the right books. I know all the best sources. I've done my own research. I now know why everything went wrong. I'll just be repeating talking points. Or what I fear I'm doing lately, just parroting obsolete ones. In any event, the world became something I never saw coming.
