Why was 2007 such an insane year for culture

[lakes]

if that's true, why does it feel like humans have less culture now than before? i can't tell you what the latest hot trends are other than "being annoying and boring and repeating what we already did several years ago". in the corporate world, the hot trends seem to be "invade everyone's privacy without their consent, while charging more for products that are worse". those are not good trends that scream "culture". sounds more like collective death throes before it all comes crashing down

well one could argue that the entire system is either collapsing, accelerating, or just gradually degrading over time
yes, it may be true of the past that the most iconic years of pop culture were before/during recession
but even if that were true, there's still more going on than just a reccession & i do think that should be taken into account
that said, i'm not sure that's completely true either because the 1950s were seen as iconic for a lot of people and the economy was supposedly doing better during that time
i'd love to see a well sourced article or video essay on the topic though because it's interesting

[noahie]

I remember watching this a few years back. 2007 was a great year because it was at an economic height since it was right before the financial crisis. Culture was good because people were thriving on fat lines of credit and no end in sight. We had money to spend, and gave us what we wanted. But then it all changed when the housing bubble burst.

[ValyceNegative]

I need to second how the "best years" perception is a sentiment influenced by one's own age, but also country of origin and individual state of mind/upbringing/tastes.
I'm a little older so late 2000s was already an era in which I was percieving new trends as a detatchment from what I knew and felt comfortable to me or my peers; on top of it a lot of stuff that's famous in my own country (or even just my region!) are irrelevant anywhere else in the world, and my school and friend groups were full of classic rock fans or diehard metalheads, so we'd often peruse media that was well before our times.

The surfacing of videos fondly talking about 2007 and related years is normal and cyclical as, obviously, the people who were younger during that era have now grown up and want to share what has mostly influenced them during childhood. Before this, we had so many essays praising the very early 2000s, the late 90s, the early 90s, the 80s... the list goes on, and it won't stop either. This is the exact same argument that has been already presented in the Frutiger Aero aesthetic thread, a lot of people are fond of it because that's what was most popular at the time of their childhood, while others prefer what was before. Soon, we'll have people being nostalgic for Metro aesthetics, and the cycle will repeat.

With all that said! I agree the mid-to-late years in a decade are especially defining as they encapsulate an establishment of all the new trends surfaced in the years prior without falling too much into the discoveries that will, in turn, define the decade right after it.
So yeah, 2007 is indeed a perfect year to sum up the 2000s as a whole! As you mentioned, early social media like YouTube (but also online galleries such as DeviantArt, SheezyArt or FurAffinity) had already come out a few years before but by 2007 they were all well established and were experiencing a "golden age" before shifting into other trends by 2010s. 2007 was also the peak of emo culture, very defining for the 2000s as a whole, though the seeds were already there in 2005 when American Idiot came out. So on and so forth!

Similarly, I could say that 1997-1998 is the perfect duo to define the cultural peak of the 90s, 1987 for the 80s...

[AbsurdPirate]

if that's true, why does it feel like humans have less culture now than before? i can't tell you what the latest hot trends are other than "being annoying and boring and repeating what we already did several years ago". in the corporate world, the hot trends seem to be "invade everyone's privacy without their consent, while charging more for products that are worse". those are not good trends that scream "culture". sounds more like collective death throes before it all comes crashing down

I think a lot of the lack of culture is the fact that we functionally killed the monoculture of previous decades. Everything is a niche within a niche and trends come and go within a month to a couple weeks. I feel like the last glimpse of a monoculture we had was during the pandemic was when everyone was watching Tiger King.

The days of everyone and their kid brother knowing about the big trend is largely gone these days because of how fast the internet moves.