REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PASSÉ
These trends once held our attention, but now beg the question: What were we thinking?
A lot has happened since 2010 — for that matter a lot has happened since this morning, many of us struggling to keep pace with a relentless, overwrought and overcrowded news cycle. To commemorate the end of this pulverizing decade and its often baffling preoccupations and to help you brace for what’s to come as a new era of cultural bombardment gets ready to rumble, it’s instructive to recall that fads have a mercifully short shelf life.
Here are 10 notable examples of popular ephemera from the past decade that you may enjoy in hindsight — or prefer to forget.
ANGRY BIRDS
The smartphone game in which vengeful birds launch themselves at increasingly elaborate structures to destroy the green, egg-stealing pigs within, Angry Birds was downloaded 50 million times within a year of its release and won best game for handheld devices at the 2011 Webby Awards. Ten years later, the game has seen multiple iterations and themes, including Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Space and Angry Birds Star Wars. It’s also been reimagined as board games and two — count ’em — feature films.
YOLO/SWAG
You Only Live Once (YOLO) is an acronym popularized by rapper Drake in his 2011 track The Motto, with its famous hook, “You only live once / That’s the motto / YOLO.” While Jay-z is credited for introducing “swag,” (i.e. swagger), it was Justin Bieber’s 2012 hit Boyfriend that made it part of the lexicon when he sang, “Swag, swag, swag on you” and “Swaggy.”
Both terms emerged as a kind of cultural shorthand, a way to signal your knowledge (ironic or otherwise), of current youth culture, from hashtags to informal merchandise.
FARMVILLE
Farmville relied on a simple pitch designed to appeal to everyone’s inner farmer as players discovered the peculiar joys of managing a simulated online farm, including plowing, planting, harvesting crops and raising animals — all without breaking a sweat. It was free to play and gained massive popularity as an application through Facebook, which encouraged users to recruit/annoy friends with requests to take up the virtual hobby.
Controversially, the application had an in-game currency called Farm Cash, which was bought with real-world money and helped users plow ahead in the highly addictive game.
MOUSTACHE THEMES
There was a time in the early 2010s when cartoon moustaches were a prominent if inexplicable part of the visual landscape — emblazoned on T-shirts, tattooed onto the sides of fingers, and prevalent in design and fashion, they decorated everything from jewelry to nail art. A Los Angeles Times piece published in 2013 theorized the enthusiasm for all things hairy was an outgrowth of hipster culture: a way to demonstrate nostalgia and appreciation for the perceived authenticity of the past.
SILLY BANDZ
Every once in a while a fad emerges that’s distinctive, fun and captures the zeitgeist in some way — think hula hoops! Silly Bandz are not that. Ultra-flexible silicone rubber bands, Silly Bandz come in various colours and identifiable shapes, such as animals, objects, foods, instruments, etc.
Traded in schoolyards, they lose their recognizable shapes when worn as bracelets, but once removed, return to their original form.
END OF THE WORLD/ MAYAN CALENDAR
When Roland Emmerich’s disaster movie 2012 came out in 2009, its apocalyptic narrative was taken with a grain of salt ... by most. Others, more gloomy, however, embraced the imminent end of the world as we know it. An April 2012 article from USA Today noted sales of underground fallout shelters increased as marketing efforts caught on and began to target the anxious doomsday crowd. The prevailing wisdom at the time was that the Maya Long Count calendar ended
Dec. 21, 2012 — and so, by extension, would we.
DUCK FACE
The trend that made us wish the Mayans were right, “duck face” was a selfie staple in the early 2010s. You know it when you see it — pouting lips, cheeks sucked in, in unconscious homage to Derek Zoolander. Supposedly this was an effort to look sexy in pictures that fell ludicrously flat and resisted parody and yet, it still persists in some especially resistant quarters.
INTERNET CHALLENGES
From planking to the Harlem Shake, wacky internet challenges from the recent past resist explanation and remain a rightfully puzzling blur. Arguably, planking started it all. Lying face down in a public place, participants did their best impersonation of a plank, a photo of which was then posted online.
This spawned variations such as owling, gargoyling and to a lesser extent, the Mannequin Challenge. And who can forget the Harlem Shake? Oh, wait, remind us again what was the Harlem Shake?
POKÉMON GO
This is the app that brought augmented reality to the mainstream. In a style resembling mixed live-action and cartoon films, the app lets you walk around and catch, collect and battle wild Pokémon appearing on your screen as if they were right in front of you. The app took what made the original Pokémon games of the ’90s great and brought it to communities everywhere, daring gamers to go outside. Interest peaked in the summer of 2016 when players could be found just about everywhere.
FIDGET SPINNERS
Fidget spinners emerged from seemingly nowhere, spiked in popularity midway through 2017 and basically disappeared, like any proper and obedient little fad. The small, flat, three-lobed gadgets were a whirling staple among kids, until many schools banned them for causing distraction. Initially marketed as focus aides for people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism and anxiety, the spinners were ultimately discredited as tools of health.