The decade's worst ideas

Terrorism: Check. War: Double check. Recession: Check plus! Global warming: Well, we've kinda checked out on that one. So, how was your decade? When the best you can say about the past 10 years is that at least Y2K didn't usher in Armageddon on the front end and that we managed to avoid a depression on the back end, you know that, in between, it was hardly the best of times. So we leave you behind, dear 2000s — or Inbox Age or iDecade or whatever forgettable nickname you prefer — with the hope that the Tens are better, stronger and kinder than you ever were and with a last look back at some of the really, truly bad ideas you inflicted upon us, some reminders of what makes this decade so worthy of finally ringing out.

Age of the email chain-smokers

Once upon a time, elevator rides were silent. The bathroom was for using the bathroom. Dinnertime was about sharing a meal with friends or family and mornings were about waking up. Most radically, home was simply home. Work may have been on our minds, but it wasn't in our hands (or pockets).

But now, thanks to the BlackBerry (and the iPhone, and the Treo and all the other hand-held email devices), we are always connected.

The modern BlackBerry, which dates to 2002 (a two-way pager by the same name came to market in 1999), has evolved into something sleek and handy and almost discreet. Using it is like taking an electronic cigarette break. The problem is, we're all email chain-smokers now. Anytime a moment opens up, we fill it with email.

The BlackBerry starts by infiltrating your morning. Then emailing replaces reading on your commute. Next you have it under the table at meetings; surely no one notices your thumbs clicking. Finally, it winds up at your bedside.

Enabled by an umbilical attachment to the hand-held, the average office worker sent and received 100 emails a day in 2009 almost as many telegrams a high-output operator sent in Western Union's heyday.

But those operators simply passed messages along. We're supposed to think and respond and sort as well. How are we doing? Not very well, considering how many of us spend our mornings and nights and weekends replying to emails to get to the bottom of our inbox.

The problem is, the more emails we send, the more we receive. So the empty inbox is a phantom, an impossibility and the attempt to achieve it the ultimate Sisyphean task. How many of the emails are essential? How many could be replaced by a simple phone call? We'll never know: As of last February, 50 million BlackBerrys had been sold. Pretty soon, these devices will be as common as car keys and as they expand to include ereader technology, they will also become our virtual bookshelves, our day planners, our newspapers, our maps and our shopping malls.

Barring a full-fledged revolt, our electronic fidget is here to stay. It almost makes one nostalgic for a long, awkward elevator ride.

We're all connected, in reel life

In the past decade, as our growing connectedness has gone from fact of modern life to airport-best-seller truism, movies have struggled to capture a shrinking world — often by telling several simultaneous stories that converge into a larger master narrative.

Cinema has drawn on the power of parallel storytelling at least since D.W. Griffith weaved together three colour-coded narratives for his 1916 epic Intolerance. But in recent years, a new breed of ensemble movie emerged, straining for seriousness and significance, using large casts, intersecting plots and aggressive cross-cutting to tackle Big Issues and illuminate Universal Truths.

Some have riffed on current affairs, including Traffic (2000), about the war on drugs, and Syriana (2005), about the thirst for oil. But even these seemed modest compared with the cosmic ambitions of Paul Haggis' Crash (2004), in which the loudly aired grievances of a hot-tempered multiethnic group of Los Angelenos supposedly reveal the universal roots of bigotry, and Alejandro Gonzalez Iqarittu's Babel (2006), a globe-trotting connect-the-dots exercise that unites East and West, rich and poor, in a world of pain.

Both Babel and Crash were acclaimed (Crash won the Best Picture Oscar; Babel took a top prize at Cannes) and have inspired many imitators, such as Crossing Over (2009), a Crash-like tale of immigration in Southern California; and Mammoth (2009), a Babel knockoff juxtaposing First World privilege and Third World privation.

The outlook of these films evokes the premise of one of the decade's most influential books, Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, which argued that the new global economy is defined by a level playing field (and more or less ignored wealth inequities, class immobility and other inconvenient factors that might weaken its argument). Filmmakers such as Iqarritu and Haggis replaced Friedman's gung-ho optimism about new technologies and open markets with a knee-jerk pessimism in which connectedness goes hand in hand with alienation.

In terms of drama, flatness is exactly the problem with these films, which are as two-dimensional as a board game: The stories are diagrams and the characters pawns, arranged in a network of specious links and overdetermined ironies. The genre itself isn't fatally flawed; filmmakers from Robert Altman (Nashville) to Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia) have long worked wonders with the panoramic form. But the recent spate of multistrand movies are so busy advancing their self-satisfied theory of the human condition that they haven't bothered to create any recognisable human beings.

As works of social commentary, these movies are reductive to the point of absurdity. Crash hypothesises that everyone is on some level a racist; Babel solemnly concludes that Californian yuppies are as likely to be miserable as Moroccan peasants or Japanese schoolgirls.

They share with Friedman's book a view of the world that depends on smug oversimplification and false equivalence. Despite its veneer of we-are-the-world humanism, the flat-world perspective is born of privilege and myopia: If you're observing from a sufficiently high vantage point, it could be that the terrain looks flat. And if you squint hard enough, it just might seem that everyone is connected.

TV dance competitions

This was the TV decade of the real and the grotesquely unreal of Real Housewives and The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off, of Real World/Road Rules Challenges and the Duggars and their outsize brood. But worst of all was the dancing.

In 2004, news of a strange new TV show called Strictly Come Dancing a British programme where C-list celebrities left the safety of a laugh track to cha-cha in front of an audience trickled across the Atlantic. "What is this ‘dancing'?" the world wondered. "Why must every-one arrive strictly doing it?" When Dancing With the Stars premiered in the summer of 2005, we found out: "Dancing" describes the hideous movements that lesser characters from beloved sitcoms, former boy-band participants and even a former House majority leader make with their bodies in response to music in order to win back a tiny sliver of the sliver of fame they once had. It is a terrible, dignity-demolishing spectacle so you would think it would be pretty entertaining.

Oh, but it isn't. Dancing With the Stars is a glitter-drenched, rumba-strewn, spray-tanned bore. Naturally, the show is preparing for its 10th season over six years. Thanks to its success, a number of other dance competition shows have sprouted (Bravo's mercifully short-lived Step It Up and Dance, Fuse's Pants-Off Dance-Off.) Some have even taken root in the television landscape, including So You Think You Can Dance (in which average people move their bodies in response to music in the hope of winning, and one day attaining has-been status), and America's Best Dance Crew (in which groups of average people move their bodies in response to music in the hope of winning, and one day attaining has-been group status).

Sure, dancing's been on television before Solid Gold, Dance Party USA, MTV's The Grind but never like this. Never with the guy who had one line in the Sex & the City movie as a spandex-clad headliner, tangoing his way to an In Touch photo spread about how he decorates his home for the holidays. Never with the brother of the guy who was once married to Jessica Simpson bathing himself in sequins and talking to Access Hollywood. These dancing shows are tedious, meaningless fame factories (and obviously a huge boon to the decorative feather industry).

Dancing-to-win on television is a trend that shows no signs of stopping. Unfortunately, it also shows no signs of getting interesting.

Compassionate Conservatism

Compassionate conservatism won George W. Bush the White House in 2000, a year Democrats should have taken in a landslide. But over the next eight years, it badly undermined the Republican reputation for competence and fiscal rectitude. Instead, the GOP came to resemble a gaggle of earmark-chasing charlatans who veered from phony compassion to get-tough border-fence theatrics with dizzying speed. Had conservatives built on the successes of the 1990s, things would look very different.

In his first presidential campaign, Bush wisely distanced himself from the increasingly toxic congressional conservatives who had waged war on Bill Clinton. But what he didn't do was learn from the conservative governors and mayors who had restored faith in government by successfully reforming welfare and fighting crime. One can easily imagine a conservative candidate in 2000 making the case for a new federalism or for trust-busting populism or for some other approach that promised to shift power from the nation's capital to states and citizens. Instead, Bush presented himself as a would-be healer in chief who would direct the armies of compassion from Washington, D.C.

The essential problem was that compassionate conservatism was an unstable amalgam of two very different ideas, one good and one very bad. The good idea, encouraging self-help and grass-roots entrepreneurship, was largely abandoned in favour of the bad idea, namely the embrace of central planning to raise K-12 test scores and homeownership rates, as though artificially pumping up mortgage finance bore any resemblance to encouraging real prosperity. Bailouts of Detroit and Wall Street would follow the same logic.

While compassionate conservatism elected a Republican president, it may have set the stage for an era of crony capitalism in which real entrepreneurship and growth are snuffed out for a generation.

Dennis Lim is a freelance writer and the editor of the online film magazine Moving Image Source.