The End of the 00s: The Stupid Kids of 1999, By Will Leitch

by The End of the 00s

In January 2000, the world was conquerable. New York City was cleaner, crime was down, Disney was taking up half of Times Square and you could buy a pack of cigarettes for three bucks. There were jobs everywhere, and it felt like the city was an infinite playground. It was what brought me here. It’s what brought thousands of us. It’s difficult to comprehend now, and you probably won’t even believe me when I say it, but the dot-com boom that led to the influx of stupid young things into New York City was not, inherently, about money.

Sure, money was wherever you looked-Kurt Andersen famously said raising capital during the boom was “easier than getting laid in the 60s”-but money never quite seemed the point. We came to New York City not because we wanted to get rich, at least not most of us: We came here because this was where you could do whatever you want and be paid for it. It was more altruistic-thus, dumber-than capitalistic. I wanted to be a film critic, and an investigative journalist, and a Web pioneer, and a serious novelist. I didn’t have to choose. I could be all of them. I was the future. We all were. New York City was our Eden, our Utopia, our promised land. It was easy, sure, easier than it should have been, but we never thought of it that way. We thought the world was on the cusp of something important and lasting, and that we were just lucky to be alive at this point in human history. We weren’t overly optimistic or greedy or gluttonous. We just felt this was our time. We were honored the fates had chosen to give us, of all people, the opportunity. We could do whatever we wanted. We could invent our own life.

It didn’t last long, and of course it couldn’t. After the collapse-the first one, the first of many-we were listless, lost. It happened quicker that anyone could have anticipated. One day, a co-worker of mine, a friend of mine (because then all co-workers were your friends), and I were ignoring the office HR person who wanted to talk to us about the matching 401(k) plan Novix Media offered, knowing we never had to worry about retirement, or investment, or the future. A week later, our company imploded and we were drinking whiskey straight from the bottle in front of that same HR person during our exit interview. (I gave her a swig. She took it.) It seems like we were assholes now, and I suppose we probably were, but it didn’t feel that way then. It just felt like if we all worked our asses off, it was destined that we would succeed. The universe felt just.

Two months later, I was writing wildly unprofessional tell-alls about my dot-com and answering phones for Telemundo for temp work. We all deserved it, obviously. It was never supposed to be that easy. New York is supposed to be hard. I moved to New York City on January 8, 2000, with a center part, a suitcase full of Woody Allen movie posters, about 10 pounds less weight and a cat. I had never even visited New York City until I moved here. The story of this decade, for me, is the story of my decade in New York City. In this, I am not alone.

What’s funny, though, and what’s important, is that we stayed. We are the detritus of the dot-com age. We fought through it and came out stronger, or at least still alive. In my 10 years in New York City, I have held eight full-time jobs, lived in 12 different apartments (in 10 different neighborhoods, with 15 different roommates) and met and lost hundreds of people. It was a desperate lurch from one period of stasis to another, over and over, 20something Frogger morphing into 30something Sims. Like everybody else, I didn’t know what I was doing. I just knew what I wanted to do. Someday. I think we’re all still kind of like that.

See, though: That on-rush of talented, ambitious young people during the dot-com boom, they’re still here, and they laid the foundation for what you see today, the Gawkers, the Awls, everything that is great and terrible about this strange planet we find ourselves bewildered and enthralled by. This decade has been our decade, the decade in which we came out here to take over the world, were smacked rudely back into our proper station, and then regrouped for the long, slow crawl back up. Some of us made it. Some of us didn’t. But that itch, that reason we leaped into the abyss in the first place, is still there. It’s in everything you read.

There is a perception that this odd colony of bloggers and journalists and blogger-journalists and journalist-bloggers is cynical, that it is jaded, that it only wants to tear down and carp. This is the literal opposite of the truth. Those that are left, those who learned and adapted and kept trudging forward, they are the dreamers-they are, at heart, the most painfully earnest people you could ever meet. That spirit, in my opinion, is perhaps best exemplified by this very site, the one you’re reading. It would have been easy to quit, to knock this shit off, to start getting serious. Instead: There was this, a daily prance through the sad and the beautiful, the ridiculous and the divine, the Philistine and the transcendent. I see The Awl and I see those stupid 1999 kids, hoping to elbow their way toward a spot at the table before realizing, fuck it, let’s just build our own table. It means it’s still out there. It means people are still trying. It’s worth hanging on to. It always was.

Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York magazine and the founder of Deadspin. He is the author of four books, including the upcoming Are We Winning?, to be released by Hyperion in May 2010.