Historic milestones don’t always line up with large round numbers on our calendars. For example, I suggest that the 1950s ended with the assassination of JFK in late 1963, and the rise of British Rock, led by the Beatles, in 1964. I also suggest that the 1960s didn’t end until Nixon resigned, and disco took off, in 1974.
It has likewise been suggested that the 20th century actually began with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the start of WWI, in 1914. While that and my other claims might be arguable, you might at least agree that there’s no need for historic shifts to align with two or more zeros on a calendar—and that in most cases they don’t.
So I’m here to suggest that the 21st century began in 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic and the fall of Donald Trump. (And I mean that literally. Social media platforms were Trump’s man’s stage, and the whole of them dropped him, as if through a trap door, on the occasion of the storming of the U.S. Capitol by his supporters on January 6, 2021. Whether you liked that or not is beside the facticity of it.)
Things are not the same now. For example, over the coming years, we may never hug, shake hands, or comfortably sit next to strangers again.
But I’m bringing this up for another reason: I think the future we wrote about in The Cluetrain Manifesto, in World of Ends, in The Intention Economy, and in other optimistic expressions during the first two decades of the 21st Century may finally be ready to arrive.
At least that’s the feeling I get when I listen to an interview I did with Christian Einfeldt (@einfeldt) at a San Diego tech conference in April, 2004—and that I just discovered recently in the Internet Archive. The interview was for a film to be called “Digital Tipping Point.” Here are its eleven parts, all just a few minutes long:
01 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_searls_01_001.ogg
02 https://archive.org/details/e-dv039_doc_searls_02_002.ogg
03 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_searls_01_003.ogg
04 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_searls_01_004.ogg
05 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_searls_01_005.ogg
06 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_searls_01_006.ogg
07 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_searls_01_007.ogg
08 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_searls_01_008.ogg
09 https://archive.org/details/e-dv038_doc_searls_01_009.ogg
10 https://archive.org/details/e-dv039_doc_searls_02_001.ogg
11 https://archive.org/details/e-dv039_doc_searls_02_002.ogg
The title is a riff on Malcolm Gladwell‘s book The Tipping Point, which came out in 2000, same year as The Cluetrain Manifesto. The tipping point I sensed four years later was, I now believe, a foreshadow of now, and only suggested by the successes of the open source movement and independent personal publishing in the form of blogs, both of which I was high on at the time.
What followed in the decade after the interview were the rise of social networks, of smart mobile phones and of what we now call Big Tech. While I don’t expect those to end in 2021, I do expect that we will finally see the rise of personal agency and of constructive social movements, which I felt swelling in 2004.
Of course, I could be wrong about that. But I am sure that we are now experiencing the millennial shift we expected when civilization’s odometer rolled past 2000.
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