The early 2000s were not a good time for technology. After entering the new millennium amid the impotent panic of the Y2K bug, it wasnt long before the Dotcom Bubble was bursting all the hopes of a new internet-based era.
Fortunately the recovery was swift and within a few years brand new technologies were emerging that would transform culture, politicsand the economy.
They have brought with them new ways of connecting, consuming and getting around, while also raising fresh Doomsday concerns. As we enter a new decade of the 21st Century, weve rounded up the best and worst of the technologies that have taken us here, while offering some clue of where we might be going.
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There was nothing much really new about the iPhone: there had been phones before, there had been computers before, there had been phones combined into computers before. There was also a lot that wasnt good about it: it was slow, its internet connection barely functioned, and it would be two years before it could even take a video.
But as the foremost smartphone it heralded a revolution in the way people communicate, listen, watch and create. There has been no aspect of life that hasnt been changed by the technologies bundled up in the iPhone an ever-present and always-on internet connection, a camera that never leaves your side, a computer with mighty processing power that can be plucked out of your pocket.
Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone on 9 January, 2007 (Reuters)
The 2000s have, so far, been the era of mobile computers and social networking changing the shape of our cultural, political and social climate. All of those huge changes, for better or worse, are bound up in that tiny phone.AG
Though few people noticed, online social networks actually began at the end of the last century. The first was Six Degrees in 1997, which was named after the theory that everyone on the planet is separated by only six other people. It included features that became popular with subsequent iterations of the form, including profiles and friend lists, but it never really took off.
It wasnt until Friends Reunited and MySpace in the early 2000s that social networks achieved mainstream success, though even these seem insignificant when compared to Facebook.
Not only did Mark Zuckerbergs creation muscle its way to a monopoly in terms of social networks, it also swallowed up any nascent competitors in a space that came to be known as social media. First there was Instagram in 2012, for a modest $1 billion, and then came WhatsApp in 2014 for $19bn.
Between all of its apps, Facebook now reaches more than 2 billion people every day. It has come to define the way we communicate and heralded a new era of hyper-connectedness, while also profoundly shaping the internet as we know it. In doing so, Facebook has not only consigned the site Six Degrees to the history books, it has also re-written the theory itself cutting it down to just three-and-a-half degrees of separation. AC
At the start of this century, the complete reinvention of the entire economic system wasnt something many people were talking about. But then the 2007-08 financial crisis happened. As mortgages defaulted, companies collapsed, and governments bailed out the banks to the tune of trillions of dollars, people began to wonder if there might be a better way.
One person or group believed they had the answer. Satoshi Nakamotos true identity may still be a mystery, but their creation of a new electronic cash system called bitcoin in 2009 could have implications far beyond just currency. The underlying blockchain technology an immutable and unhackable online ledger could potentially transform everything from healthcare to real estate.
Bitcoin is yet to take off as a mainstream form of payment or transform the global economy like it might have promised, but we are barely a decade into the great cryptocurrency experiment. It has inspired thousands of imitators, including those currently being developed by Facebook and China, and it may be another 10 years before its true potential is finally realised. AC
Alright, so here we are, in front of the, er, elephants. And the cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And thats cool.
It may have been an inauspicious start, but these words would go on to fundamentally transform the way people consume media in the 21st century. It was 23 April, 2005, and Jawed Karim had just uploaded the first ever video to YouTube a video-sharing website he had helped create.
The YouTube channel homepage for Indian record label T-Series, which overtook controversial Swedish vlogger PewDiePie in 2019
AFP/Getty
PewDiePie has been the most popular YouTuber since 2013
PewDiePie / YouTube
5-Minute Crafts, which offers quick and quirky DIY tips to viewers, didn't even feature in the top 15 YouTube channels in July 2018
5-Minute Crafts
Brazilian music video producer and director KondZilla began his career after buying a camera with life insurance money left to him after his mother died when he was 18
Getty
Sony Entertainment Televesion (SET) launched in 1995 and has recently seen huge growth of its Hindi-language YouTube channel
AFP/Getty
Canadian musician Justin Bieber held the number-two spot in 2018 before T-Series took over
Getty
World Wrestling Entertainment has managed to gain a huge following on YouTube by sharing clips of fights and interviews with its stars
WWE
This YouTube channel specialises in 3D animation videos of nursery rhymes, as well as its own original songs. It is owned by the American firm Treasure Studio
Cocomelon
YouTube personalities Coby Cotton, Tyler Toney, Cody Jones, and Cory Cotton form Dude Perfect, a sports entertainment channel from the US
Getty
YouTube personality German Garmendia is a Chilean comedian and writer
HolaSoyGerman
One of several musicians that populate the top 15 most popular YouTube channels, Ed Sheeran joined the list in 2017
Getty
Music channel Badabun's subscriber count has not been publicly visible since 6 March 2019, at which point it had 37.2 million subscribers
Badabun / YouTube
US rapper Eminem first entered the list of the top 15 YouTube channels in 2013, the same year that PewDiePie took over
AFP/Getty
Brazilian Whindersson Nunes Batista joined YouTube in 2013 and became popular for his comedy videos
Whinderssonnunes / YouTube
US singer and actress Ariana Grande is the latest addition to the top 15 YouTube channels
AFP/Getty
The YouTube channel homepage for Indian record label T-Series, which overtook controversial Swedish vlogger PewDiePie in 2019
AFP/Getty
PewDiePie has been the most popular YouTuber since 2013
PewDiePie / YouTube
5-Minute Crafts, which offers quick and quirky DIY tips to viewers, didn't even feature in the top 15 YouTube channels in July 2018
5-Minute Crafts
Brazilian music video producer and director KondZilla began his career after buying a camera with life insurance money left to him after his mother died when he was 18
Getty
Sony Entertainment Televesion (SET) launched in 1995 and has recently seen huge growth of its Hindi-language YouTube channel
AFP/Getty
Canadian musician Justin Bieber held the number-two spot in 2018 before T-Series took over
Getty
World Wrestling Entertainment has managed to gain a huge following on YouTube by sharing clips of fights and interviews with its stars
WWE
This YouTube channel specialises in 3D animation videos of nursery rhymes, as well as its own original songs. It is owned by the American firm Treasure Studio
Cocomelon
YouTube personalities Coby Cotton, Tyler Toney, Cody Jones, and Cory Cotton form Dude Perfect, a sports entertainment channel from the US
Getty
YouTube personality German Garmendia is a Chilean comedian and writer
HolaSoyGerman
One of several musicians that populate the top 15 most popular YouTube channels, Ed Sheeran joined the list in 2017
Getty
Music channel Badabun's subscriber count has not been publicly visible since 6 March 2019, at which point it had 37.2 million subscribers
Badabun / YouTube
US rapper Eminem first entered the list of the top 15 YouTube channels in 2013, the same year that PewDiePie took over
AFP/Getty
Brazilian Whindersson Nunes Batista joined YouTube in 2013 and became popular for his comedy videos
Whinderssonnunes / YouTube
US singer and actress Ariana Grande is the latest addition to the top 15 YouTube channels
AFP/Getty
Just over a year later, Google bought the site for $1.65 billion and the fortunes of Karim, his co-founders, and countless future content creators were changed forever.
There are now hundreds of hours of video published to YouTube every minute and it all started with that 18-second clip at the zoo. AC
Arthur C Clarke famously quipped that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But there is surely nothing more like magic and no magic more powerful than the fact that the 21st century has brought the ability to instantly connect to information and people at the other side of the world.
First, at the beginning of the century, came 3G, and then 10 years or so later came 4G. Every decade of this century has been marked by new advances in the speed and reliability of mobile data connections.
And those mobile data connections have helped re-write the world that relies on them. Just about every other major breakthrough in technology that came through the 2000s social media, instant photo sharing, citizen journalism and everything else relied on having data connections everywhere.
5G which has ostensibly already rolled out, but is yet to make its full impact is likely to be similarly transformative through the decade to come, if its evangelists are to be believed.
Debates have raged about whether this constant connectivity and the distractions and dangers it has brought has really driven us apart. But that too is surely testament to its power. AG
Many of technologys biggest developments in the 2000s havent really been about technology at all: piracy and then streaming changed how we make and consume culture entirely, social media has turned politics on his head. Nowhere is that more clear than in the gig economy and the apps and websites like Uber, Deliveroo and Airbnb that power it, which claim to be tech businesses but are really new ways of buying and selling labour.
The real revolution of the gig economy was not the technology that powers these apps: there is little difference between calling for a cab and summoning an Uber, really. Nor was it what the companies like to suggest, that they have opened up a new and inspiring way of working that allows anyone to clock on whenever they log on.
Instead, it was the beginning of a process of changing the way that people work and relate to those who fulfil services for them. It is likely that we have not seen the end of the kinds of profound changes that these companies have made to working conditions or the ways that those workers have fought back. AG
Virtual reality has been the future before: ever since the first stereoscopes, people have been excited about the possibility of disappearing into other worlds that appear before their eyes. But it has never quite arrived.
But in the more recent years of the 2000s it started to look a bit more meaningful. Virtual reality headsets have been pushed out by many of the worlds biggest companies, and consumer computers are finally powerful enough to generate believable worlds that people are happy to spend their time in.
In recent years, much of the focus has turned to augmented reality rather than virtual reality. That technology allows information to be overlaid on top of the real world, rather than putting people into an entirely virtual world. If it comes off if it is not confined to failed experiments like Google Glass then it could change the way we interact with the world, potentially giving us information all of the time and could even do away with things like smartphones as our primary way of connecting with technology. AG
Quantum computing has not really happened yet. A few months ago, researchers announced that they had achieved quantum supremacy by doing an operation that would not be possible on a traditional computer but it was a largely useless, very specific, operation, which didnt really change anything in itself.
Already, however, the promise and the threat of quantum computing is changing the world. It looks set to upend all of our assumptions about computers, allowing them to be unimaginably fast and do work never thought possible. It could unlock new kinds of health research and scientific understanding; it could also literally unlock encryption, which currently relies on impossible calculations that could quickly become very possible with quantum computers.
A new era of computing could bring about a 'quantum apocalypse' (iStock)
It isnt clear when it will arrive, of course; like other potentially revolutionary technologies, it could take a very long time or never arrive at all. But it is sitting there in the future, ready to turn everything on its head and, as researchers rush to understand it, it is already changing the world. AG
No vision of the future would be complete without the ability to speak to and control your home. And now it seems like we are finally living in it.
Through the 2000s, just about everything came to be hooked up to the internet: you could buy smart kettles, internet-enabled doorbells, and a video camera for every room in your house. And to control them came microphones and speakers that you put in your house and could talk to.
But as the smart home and the voice assistants that power it have soared in popularity, they have been beset by concerns, too. Is giving over control of your home to internet-enabled devices safe, when those devices can break down or be seized by hackers? Should we be allowing internet giants like Amazon and Google to put microphones in our home? As we enter the new decade, it looks like our homes are set to be defined not by the capabilities the technology in our homes give us but who we want to have power over them. AG
Before there was Spotify, there was Napster, and before people were watching movies on Netflix, they were downloading them through PirateBay. Piracy has been one step ahead of legal ways to consume media but in doing so it has led the way for new platforms that now dominate our online lives.
Streaming has not only changed the way we listen to music and watch films, it has also given rise to new ways to create content. Live streaming video games on Twitch is one of the fastest growing mediums, while live video broadcasts through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube give people instant access to everything from street protests to rocket launches.
The Pirate Bay's latest venture into streaming comes despite battling takedown attempts by authorities for more than a decade (Reuters)
More:
The 20 technologies that defined the first 20 years of the 21st Century - The Independent