The Dream of the 2000s Is Dead

Kristen Felicetti considers Colette Shade’s “Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything.”

By Kristen FelicettiSeptember 6, 2025

• Cultural Studies

• Memoir & Essay

PINK VELOUR TRACK SUITS and cybercore on TikTok. Films set in the early 2000s that function as period pieces. The return of Warped Tour. Ever since the 2020s began, Y2K nostalgia has been everywhere, but when exactly was the Y2K era? It’s usually agreed that it began in the late 1990s, when we were looking to the new millennium with a sense of technological, financial, and political optimism. The question is when it ends. Many mark 9/11 as the end of that era, the moment when seemingly everything started to go wrong and from which we’ve had no relief. Others extend it to include a few more years, ending vaguely in the mid-2000s.

In her new book Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future that Never Was) Colette Shade’s thesis is that the Y2K era ended not with 9/11, nor in 2003 or 2005, but in 2008, with the Great Recession. On the book’s brilliant cover, shiny bubbles represent the two bubbles that bookend the era, the dot-com bubble that took off around 1997 and the housing bubble that collapsed in 2008. They also allude to the futuristic aesthetic of the Y2K era (like an inflatable silver chair Shade mentions in the book’s first sentence) and bring to mind one of the most popular cable programs of the late nineties—VH1’s Pop-Up Video, where pop-up bubbles annotated music videos with trivia and irreverent commentary.

Pop-Up Video isn’t mentioned in the book, but MTV’s Total Request Live is, as are a wealth of other identifiers of the era: Smash Mouth, Discmans, AOL Instant Messenger, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Ludacris, Paris Hilton, The X-Files, Eminem, iMacs, You’ve Got Mail, the Strokes, South Park, LiveJournal, low-rise jeans, JNCO jeans, Nelly, Fiona Apple, and butterfly hair clips. A mere mention of any of these has the Pavlovian ability to boomerang any millennial back to the comforts of their childhood. I’m one of those millennials, and the question I often find myself wondering is whether I’m overromanticizing Y2K merely because it happened during my formative teenage years or whether there is actually deeper historical significance to this era, and examining it is the key to understanding, well, as the title of Shade’s book says, everything.

In the book’s introduction, Shade debates this same question, acknowledging that “so much of our yearning comes from our sense of foreclosed possibilities, from our aging bodies, from our accumulated bitterness about careers and relationships and money and death.” This is true of any aging generation, yet the difference between a millennial looking back on their youth and a boomer doing the same is that baby boomers did so during a time of relative economic prosperity and political stability. After reaching the same age millennials are now, many boomers had spent the last two decades advancing their careers, growing their stock portfolios, buying homes, and having families. Conversely, millennials entered the workforce during, or in the wake of, the Great Recession, and due to student debt and slow economic growth, they have often postponed marriage, homeownership, and having children. And if they’re having kids, they’re bringing them into a world where the climate crisis is escalating and school shootings have increased dramatically since Columbine in 1999. It’s not only our aging bodies that have declined: economically, politically, and environmentally, things have gotten measurably worse in the last 20 years. Not just for millennials, of course, but for everyone.

Shade references a 1997 Wired magazine cover that had the cocky headline “The long boom: we’re facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?” It’s laughable how wrong that was, but back in 1997, that was the narrative everyone was peddling. Millennials perhaps felt that narrative most acutely because we were in school and it was baked into our education. Any struggle for equal rights (the Civil Rights era, the suffragette era) lived only in the heavy history textbooks we carried around in monogrammed L.L.Bean backpacks. Racism was over, sexism was over, even war was over and a thing of the past. Other popular sentiments at the time: capitalism was great, and the United States was the best country in the world, the country where everyone hoped to immigrate to pursue the American dream. Why wouldn’t the next millennium continue more of the same? I still remember the elementary school teacher who told our class it was likely that, by the time we were adults, we would all be taking vacations to outer space. There was so much silvery hope that I understand what Shade means when she says that looking around at the present day “makes [her] want to reach for a tube of body glitter” in a futile attempt to return herself, and the world, to that place of promise.

So much of that promise was an illusion, of course. In the late nineties, racism and sexism were certainly not over. Politics were simply out, or weren’t cool to talk about. It was an era of prosperity—why would you kill the party by bringing up structural inequality or social justice?

Shade has a lot of affection for the years of her childhood, but like anything one has true love for, there’s no depth to that love if it isn’t also accompanied by serious critique. Readers looking for only escapist fluff or nostalgic BuzzFeed listicles about Y2K artifacts may not like the reality check she is handing them. Across 10 essays and an introduction, Shade is here to say plainly that “we lived dishonestly” in the Y2K era because we arrogantly believed we could ascend into the future while leaving history behind. And far from being an innocent or simpler time, the period from 1997 to 2008 was laying a lot of the groundwork for our world today.

Each essay follows a similar form. Shade, who was born in 1988, and grew up in a middle-class suburb with liberal parents, shares a specific anecdote from her youth and then zooms out to place that topic in its wider historical and economic context. Memories of visiting her uncle, a start-up investor who got rich in the nineties, is a jumping-off point for talking about the dot-com bubble. Giggling in middle school with a friend over the sexually explicit lyrics of Ludacris’s single “What’s Your Fantasy” leads to a larger discussion about the rise of porn consumption, mainstream porn aesthetics, and celebrity sex tapes that ran against the purity culture of the time. And in the essay “Larry Summers Caused My Eating Disorder,” Shade theorizes that the era’s lean beauty standards, as epitomized by shockingly thin Russian models, were the direct result of a global rise of neoliberal economic policies, particularly in post-Soviet Russia, where Larry Summers and his fellow Harvard Boys helped oversee the country’s disastrous push toward privatization.

At times, I felt confined by this format. It’s not that Shade’s it-was-American-led-global-capitalism-all-along argument isn’t correct; it’s that things can get narratively repetitive when this is always the reveal. Maybe a few essays that were more chaotic (like the era itself) or less tidy in either the writing or structure would have given the book the electrifying charge I sometimes longed for. On the other hand, I liked that Shade wasn’t trying to do an exhaustive retrospective of the whole period. Unlike other books that have centered on decades, this one contains no filler essays waxing poetic about esoteric pieces of pop culture, nor blanket attempts to generalize Y2K for everyone, or even for every American millennial. This is Shade’s Y2K, told in a taut 250 pages, and she is specific about how she experienced it. And in those specifics, millennial readers will either relate or diverge, based on their own experiences and demographics, which vary widely within the same generation.

For example, I’m Asian American, born in 1985, and grew up with conservative parents, in a conservative middle-class suburb, all of which informs the significance I attach to 9/11 and what came after. I do stick to the prevailing belief that 9/11 ended the Y2K era and began a new one. The fact that it happened toward the end of my high school years, and therefore coincided with the end of my own childhood, probably influences why I feel this way. Aesthetically, however, I do like how Shade uses 9/11 as a bisector of the era, because it neatly distinguishes two different aesthetics that have often been lumped together—the silvery cyberpunk look that was popular around the turn of the millennium and the gaudier McBling aesthetic of the mid-2000s. Those two aesthetics mirrored the pre-9/11 hopeful optimism and the post-9/11 delusional doubling-down. And ultimately, whether you consider that doubling-down of everything—those years in which, as Shade notes, Americans became “meaner, stupider, more violent, more conformist, more childish, more materialistic, more racist, and more vindictive”—to be a new era, or the second act of the same one, it’s mostly just splitting hairs. I also enjoyed how she referenced the weird millennial tendency to view Aaliyah’s plane crash as a foreshadowing to it all.

What’s more debatable is Shade’s claim that “The Y2K Era—1997 through 2008—was defined by the conviction that politics were no longer relevant” and that it took the 2008 financial crisis for us to unanimously realize that we needed to care about politics. Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Occupy Wall Street, and other progressive movements did appear after the Great Recession (some, like Occupy, were a direct result of it), but a major political movement in the early 2000s was the opposition to the Iraq War. For many older millennials, it was the start of challenging the narrative we had grown up with. To see the post-9/11 treatment of Muslim Americans was to realize that racism was far from over in the United States, and when we watched newscasters report the bombing of Iraq like it was a celebratory event, it was the first time we seriously questioned both the American government’s choices and mainstream media coverage.

In the essay “They Misunderestimated Me,” Shade discusses the Iraq War protests primarily in the context of something she calls “The Template”—liberals’ belief that applying outdated models for progressive change will stop injustice, followed by their moral outrage when those same models fail to work. When neither the press nor protests nor the legal system stopped the election of George W. Bush (twice), or the election of Donald Trump (twice), liberals, instead of examining why, indulged in smug coping strategies like making fun of Bush’s and Trump’s speech patterns and intelligence, or creating cringe merchandise like pink pussy hats or anti-Bush/anti-Trump children’s books for adults.

Shade cites the origins of The Template with liberal boomers like her parents, who created it from the political struggles of their own youth (the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the Civil Rights Movement). And while it’s not entirely generational, most of them are still clinging to The Template even long after their millennial children have abandoned it. This is also why I see the opposition to the Iraq War as politically significant. Many leftist millennials began their political journey as liberal Democrats—mocking Bush, voting for John Kerry, voting for Barack Obama, voting for Hillary Clinton—but, by the late 2010s and early 2020s, had shifted to being socialists who held the Democratic Party to sharp critique.

Nowhere was this gulf between older and younger generations more apparent than during the 2024 election. Most leftist millennials were disgusted to see Kamala Harris proudly sharing her endorsement from Dick Cheney, the man more responsible for Bush’s War on Terror than Bush himself. Meanwhile, older liberal generations made desperate claims about Democrats needing to court moderate Republicans, hoping that maybe, this time, justice would prevail for their educated candidate, and then they were somehow shocked when the outcome was the same as the 2016 election, the 2004 election, the 2000 election.

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If Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything reminds us that much of the era was racist, sexist, homophobic, and, frankly, not quite as cool as we remember, there is one aspect of Y2K-era life that really does seem like it was better back then, and that’s the internet. Millennials experienced at least some childhood years without the internet, then started surfing the web from a slow dial-up connection in their teenage years, and as they grew into adulthood, the technology, platforms, and algorithms matured as well. Now, they long for the days when they weren’t so chronically online, when there were opportunities to genuinely disconnect or escape digital surveillance, and younger generations like Gen Z mourn that they never even got to experience life when everyone wasn’t buried in their phones.

In one of the book’s later essays, Shade describes how social media ended the toxic tabloid ecosystem that exploited Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, the Olsen twins, Lindsay Lohan, and other icons of the early 2000s. That technological shift cut the head off tabloids, but in its place, “several more grew back.” Our collective parasocial relationship with celebrities has now, of course, expanded to something arguably much less healthy: a parasocial relationship with our peers, or people we’re only a degree or two removed from. And for anyone in a creative industry, myself included, Shade compares our relationship with social media to Y2K-era celebrities’ relationship with the paparazzi. We hate it, we complain about it, and yet we need it, and continue to engage with it to promote our careers.

So how do we solve that problem? There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle, no hope of returning to the excitement of the early days of the internet. I doubt my own willpower to reduce my screen time, so I’m certainly not hopeful for some mass societal agreement to throw our phones into the sea. If change happens, it’s going to be the result of another economic or technological shift.

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter and made it X, people have left the platform, and with Mark Zuckerberg also aligning himself with Trump, Instagram is now facing its own exodus. And at the time of this review, Trump is looking for potential buyers to save TikTok. Disgusted with this potential tech oligarchy, and the product decisions that will result from it, people will continue to seek out other platforms. As social media becomes increasingly more fractured, it’s losing its usefulness as a tool for growing a career. Already, X doesn’t have the same microcelebrity-making power for a writer that it did in Twitter’s heyday, and we’re long past the peak era of Instagram influencers. That could potentially lead to a good outcome where we all use social media and our phones less, but without a platform to promote one’s work, it’s also adding more desperation to an already bleak economic situation for creatives. The gigs are drying up and artists can’t find jobs, or they’re underpaid, or companies are replacing them with AI. For all its negatives, social media allowed a greater range of artists to bypass traditional gatekeepers and connect directly to a global audience. If we see a shift to something else, I hope it’s not backward to a world where new gatekeepers call the shots and return us to a less diverse artistic landscape.

We’re already a couple of years into seeing that happen. “Politics are out again, just like they were when I was coming of age,” writes Shade in “Larry Summers Caused My Eating Disorder.” She admits to sharing that weariness of politics, and so do I. Recent social movements stirred up a lot of exhausting online discourse and punished a few bad people, without bringing forth enough actual structural change. Yet it’s equally frustrating to see things potentially swing back 20 years, and this time the apathy toward politics is often paired with pure nihilism, ironic trad cosplaying, or far-right edgelording. The thing is, even if these individuals get their wish and we return to the anorexic beauty standards and predominately white media of the late 90s, what won’t be returning for anyone is the Y2K era’s economic prosperity.

Shade cites a Susan Sontag piece published in The New Yorker shortly after 9/11, in which Sontag wrote that “a few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen.” At the time, Sontag was vilified for saying this, but the statement has aged well and underlies everything Shade writes about in Y2K. If we hold a mirror to the Y2K era, we may achieve a greater understanding of how the last 25 years have happened, and also realize that we don’t seem to be learning enough from it.

The 20-year trend cycle has already started to move on from the 2000s to the 2010s, but I wonder if this will be the year we finally see the Y2K revival end. If there was any illusion left that we could return to that era, an era that was itself an illusion, it’s over. Despite how measurably worse the last two decades have been, things seem to be headed in a direction where they could become even worse, and clinging to the comforts of my Y2K childhood cannot hide that reality anymore. In fact, clinging to our comfort as individuals, instead of being willing to inconvenience ourselves in ways that could ultimately lead to a greater quality of life for everyone, is precisely the problem. As Shade writes, “Nostalgia is a surrender to the world as it is.” If there’s any hope, it’s in nostalgia’s exact opposite—a collective refusal to surrender to the world as it is in 2025, and instead a resolve to demand something better.