The Whiplash Decade
The Least Influential People of the 2010s
They think they mattered. They did not. Here’s why.
This piece is part of The Whiplash Decade, a package on the wild ride that was the 2010s.
Congratulations, America! You’ve survived the Twitter decade! How does it feel? Pretty shitty, right? We opened this decade with the first black president passing comprehensive health care reform. We end it with Donald fucking Trump as president: Jailing kids and clumsily attempting to blackmail half of Eastern Europe and handing war criminals his finest participation trophies. It’s been a real ride! A horrible, horrible ride.
There are so many people to hold responsible for America’s coming death. I can blame Trump, naturally. I can blame Barack Obama, whose misplaced faith in norms proved both contagious and fatal to democracy in its own right. And he still has that faith! You asshole!
I can blame Hillary for blowing 2016. I can blame all of the social media titans who let white supremacists run amok online, apologized for it, and then quietly came around to embracing alt-Nazi hate speech as an optimized business model.
I can blame you. Look at you now. You could be figuring out a way to genetically engineer humans that can breathe…
