Motherboard

Jokes, fetish objects, relics, and curiosities—states as permanent as smoke. The aughts were a decade of resurrection, from the taking-back of turntables from audiophile snobs to passenger rail’s political re-sanctioning to the resurrection of Polaroid, grandpa’s favorite photo style, by way of retro-hipster sanction. There’s no common thread here, no grand Internet-like phenomenon to bind them together, just culture recycling creative in a decade filled with so much trash. — BY MICHAEL BYRNE

Turntables
Music-prowess-as-status is hard to maintain when all of that music is stuck on a hard drive—and so a wall of CDs begets a wall of records. That’s not the whole picture, of course, but amidst all of the stuff about “tactile experience,” warm sound quality, album artwork treated right, and the rest of it, I can’t help but think of the first kid in our middle school parading around in a Pixies t-shirt like he taught Kim Deal bass guitar.

The Nintendo Power Pad
What is the Nintendo Wii but the Nintendo Power Pad fully realized? Almost, anyway: the decade also brought us the Dance Dance Revolution mat and, the Power Pad’s closest ancestor, the sporty Active Life series’ mat—which by most accounts seems about as shitty as its 1988 ancestor. Then there’s the Bluetooth-powered Wii Balance Board, which ups the technology to impressive levels and leaves a device that transcends gaming into actual fitness activity, which, I’ll say for the record, is an affront to evolution.

Passenger Rail
It’s likely that from wherever you sit, the whole picture isn’t entirely clear. Yes, there’s all of the hullabaloo about the United States’ high speed rail initiative and its promise of real actual money for new rail projects—California’s banner already-funded Los Angeles-to-San Francisco line, filling a transit gap so urgent I’m still amazed it exists at all, looms large, as does the proposed Midwest network.

To think, just a few years ago the U.S. passenger rail service Amtrak was practically begging on the street for bare operating expenses. But with the help of the government’s big stimulus handout, the country’s undergoing an interurban rail revolution. Light rail, streetcars, and heavy commuter rail projects from Los Angeles to Denver to Seattle to Baltimore, designed with community, not sprawl in mind, are moving the nation closer to collectively pissing on Henry Ford’s grave.

Web Cams
An early pop-Internet gimmick of chunky video that had “bone zone” written all over it was reimagined in the late aughts thanks to drag-race bandwidth speeds. Google’s newly popular video chat add-on is fine and all, but Sony’s Eyetoy gesture-recognition camera and Microsoft’s forthcoming Project Natal, upping the body-recognition ante to unseen heights, are blowing the web cam concept into near-spooky dimensions.

3D Movies
The first one I saw was the way-too-larger-than-life Bono-jerks-off-in-front-of-really-expensive-cameras “flick” U2 3D. However full of shit U2 may be, it looked really, really cool. Night shots panning up the stadium’s rows and rows of lighter-lit fans felt like something out of Bladerunner. (And bonus — the 3D glasses looked like Bono-glasses.) There’s something about much of the 3D new-wave’s output that seems rather indulgent, but as it’s getting harder and harder to get people into theaters and it seems like they’ve got less and less to offer for more money, any actual innovation is a good thing. The real holy grail of course is 3D without glasses (just like real life!). We’ll be watching what the industry does with it, but we’re not keeping our glasses on.

Polaroid
On one hand, Polaroid photography’s been a crutch for hacky hipster photographers, a set aesthetic that can make just about any shot look smart, candid, and even good. On the other hand, the pictures do look good, all of them, in the same way. The comeback is love/hate, to say the least, particularly with iPhone’s Polaroid app making it brutally ubiquitous. And, if you’ve ever doubted the power of hipsters, consider the Impossible Project, a group recently formed to crowdsource the financing to begin manufacturing Polaroid’s 600 film under sublicense, effectively bringing it back to life.

Bicycles
Just look around you. This decade saw an explosion of bike riding of all stripes, whether it’s spandexed jock riding, fixie posing, everyday commuting, or just plain old kicking around for fun. Take the explosion of infrastructure improvements — bike lanes/paths/routes, bike lockers, bike racks, bike share projects (in Montreal, Paris, and Washington D.C., notably) — and add in new co-ops, shops, advocacy groups, and political recognition. Not only is the United States’ heart attack posse getting smaller, but its people are getting smarter too.

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