Algopunk.

How decades died, and where we are now.

1960’s travel poster for Hong Kong produced by Jet BOAC

The end of world arrived early on a Saturday morning.

I don’t remember much of it.

But, I do remember the feeling of tension, and anticipation. It was almost a guilty thrill that we got to see something big happen in our lives.

I also remember how empty the shelves were in the grocery store. There were more than a few people, in our little mountain town, tweaked by the idea that this was it. The Big One. Good luck. Sayonara.

We parked up on a dark hillside to watch the countdown. The world held its breath - I think, even the sceptics. And then, nothing happened at all.

So the end of the world came, and went, with nothing more than the pop of fireworks overhead.

Y2K is often the butt of jokes. Of all the world’s calamities, this is the equivalent of the crazy guy with the cardboard sign on the street corner, or your weird conspiracy-theory posting relative. In actual fact, there was a real problem the world had to solve. And we did. It took a lot of effort and collaboration, but the problem was solved and the apocalypse put on hold.

Yet, looking back on it, it feels a bit like the world did actually end. We just didn’t really notice because it wasn’t all that dramatic. There was no nuclear explosion, no great wave. It ended as quietly, but as definitively, as closing a book at its end.

And maybe books are the best way to think about how the world has changed and where we find ourselves today.

1999 marked the end of one book, and the year 2000 signalled the beginning of another, in an entirely new genre.

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At some point, we stopped naming time.

Which is an odd thing for human beings to do, since we’ve been at it for a long, long while.

The Ancient Romans declared the Aetas Augusti - the Age of Augustus - when Augustus ruled as emperor until his death. Kings in medieval Europe declared their time as Renovatio Imperii - the renewal of the empire. Chinese emperors from 140 BCE onward declared era names for the periods they ruled, such as Jianwu which was actually used multiple times over the centuries.

The Renaissance is mostly a retroactive label, but some people living through it, such as painter Giorgio Vasari, did refer to that period as a exactly what the word means: ‘rebirth’.

Naming periods of time, even in retrospect, is generally rooted in what was happening at the time.

The Roaring Twenties saw a decade of prosperity, and cultural explosion - arts, fashion, the economy was in full swing. The parties were great, and it was a roaring good time. The French called it ‘années folles’ - the crazy years.

In classic fashion, the party ended with the Great Depression, like a great big societal hangover.

Around this time we had a boom in media and technology that allowed us to document and communicate far more of what was happening in the world - print, news, radio, television was suddenly documenting everything that might happen anywhere in the world. This demanded an easier way to talk about the periods we live in. So, we coined the Twenties, the Thirties, the Forties and so on.

And this worked pretty well, all the way up to the Nineties.

And then, something changed.

The New Year’s ball dropped. The clocks ticked over. Pop went the fireworks. And we slid into a new decade. We just didn’t know what to call it.

The Naughties, for the years 2000 to 2009 has been used here and there, with all the fumbling grace the name deserves. Equal parts cute and cringe-inducing. And sure, we’ll let that one go as it’s a new century and not all names can be winners.

The Twenty-Tens? It never really stuck, and if it did, it didn’t really convey much feeling.

If I asked you to describe the feeling of Roaring Twenties - could you? What about the Sixties? Even if we were born many years after these periods, we have a sense of them. We can describe them, however imperfectly, as a particular time and a specific style. Much of this style and feeling were in reaction to major events happening at the time. The hippie movement in the Sixties, for instance, was a counterculture response to the traditional values of the Fifties, and made even more pronounced in the context of the Vietnam War.

Certainly, culture has helped this with an abundance of art, architecture, films, books, television shows, and music that helps define a decade. Someone well versed in architecture could probably easily define what the Twenty-Tens were about, or you could point to something like Recession Pop.

But those are, I think, expert cases.

For the vast majority of us, the last few decades have lost a lot of feeling to differentiate them from one another. That is not to say there wasn’t a lot of things that happened to help us define the times, in fact quite the opposite: so much has happened, and we’ve been aware of so much happening, that it became too exhausting to keep track of it all.

In 2008 we consumed, on average, 34 gigabytes of information per day. That’s an increase of about 105% since the 1980s. (University of California). And that was only one year after the iPhone first launched - far from the cavalcade of entertainment and content we’re exposed to in 2025.

There’s another problem: major events that affect the world don’t tend to fit neatly into decade boxes anymore. The 2016 election was a defining point in politics, culture, and the economy - but its unfolding feels ever ongoing, and repeated in the 2024 election (albeit, more severely.) The COVID-19 pandemic began in the Twenty-Tens, and rolled for years into the Twenty-Twenties.

The concept of decades, at least as a way to refer to the times we’re living in, is dead.

Of course, we have other terms to define the time we’re in. We’re technically in the Internet Age (1990 to today) of technology, and the Holocene geological epoch. But these are big, conceptual ideas. Useful for studies, research papers, and historical accounts. They’re not that useful to think about what it means for everyday people, for society and culture. They’re too macro, and don’t convey the specific atmosphere we’re in.

Decade naming doesn’t work anymore, and big time period definitions are just, well, too big.

Strangely enough, I think the best way to think about our reality is to use genre.

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In the early 1980s, the writer Bruce Bethke produced a short story about kids immersed in a highly technological world, the troublemaking they cause online, and how they push back against authority. Bethke titled the story, Cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk blended the emerging world of computer technology with the rising and rebellious punk subculture. Rebellious youth that pushed back against the established order through tech.

A year after Cyberpunk was published, William Gibson’s acclaimed Neuromancer hit the shelves, a novel about hackers and artificial intelligence in a future dystopia. The film Blade Runner and the cultural sensation manga Akira were both released in 1982, and along with a wave of other titles, birthed the fiction subgenre of cyberpunk: science fiction set in a dystopia, that blends societal decay with advanced technology. Cyberpunk stories often explore the nature of humanity, sexuality, drug culture, and the impact of technology.

For a genre that emerged in the 1980s - all of that makes perfect sense. Cyberpunk, as a genre, helped understand and explore the events that were happening all around us.

Today, there’s a punk for pretty much anything you’re into:

• Steampunk, retro-futuristic science fiction that combines the Steam Age (1700’s through to early 1900’s) with fantastical technology and settings.

• Atompunk, which includes pre-digital technology and culture akin to the Forties and Fifties, and as the name suggests, often features atomic technology for good or bad.

• Biopunk, that explores biotechnology, genetic enhancement and engineering. Generally, biopunk stories feature unintended consequences and untrustworthy corporations and governments. Biopunk emerged in the Nineties - the same decade that brought us genetically modified crops, a boom in gene patenting, and Dolly the cloned sheep.

And then there’s solarpunk - a genre that is defined by social progress, optimism, sustainability, and solar energy. First coined in the - again, awfully titled - Naughties, solarpunk has evolved through books and art into a full social movement and even a 2021 Chobani yoghurt commercial. It’s easy to understand solarpunk as a reaction to the climate crisis, fossil fuels, capitalism, and social inequality - all topics we’ve been increasingly grappling with since Y2K.

Genres emerge as a response to the time we live in, the problems we’re grappling with, the technology that most impacts us.

Which begs the question, if the world today were represented in fiction: which shelf of the bookstore are we living on?

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Steampunk has steam engines. Atompunk splits the atom. Cyberpunk is riddled with cybernetics. Biopunk finds our very biology commodified and warped. Solarpunk reimagines the world with sustainable technology and a future for all.

If you review the last few decades, there are a number of contenders that seem like the most important, world-shaping technologies that would define our genre. Facebook unleashed social media in 2004, and Apple launched the age of the smartphone in 2007. OpenAI released ChatGPT and the advent of large language models in 2022.

But all of these major milestones are built on a single technology concept. The same concept that has Pandora’s boxed us in with the gift of massive amounts of information, computational power, and networking, but also the curse of misinformation, polarisation, and mental health deterioration.

The central defining technology that has shaped our time period is the algorithm.

a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.

a data-tracking system in which an individual’s internet search history and browsing habits are used to present them with similar or related material on social media or other platforms.

And thus, the story we find ourselves in is, of course, algopunk.

Our whole lives are now intertwined with algorithms. It dictates how we get our news, what entertainment we engage with, how we’re politically informed and shaped, and even who we might date. If you think about anything you use in the modern world, at least if it has any sort of digital component, its likely been touched by an algorithm in some form. Even if you yourself don’t use a digital product, its still probably influencing you by influencing those around you.

From the products we’re encouraged to buy (targeted ads) and the routes we take to work (map apps) and even the way we word emails (autocorrect and now, full ‘AI’ writing tools) - our decisions are shaped for us.

This is not to say that algorithms are inherently bad. They do, after all, help us run hospitals, stock grocery stores, and uncover the mysterious language of whale song. But in the same sense, cybernetics, atomic energy, and steampower are not inherently bad. It’s their abuse that is.

Which is where the word ‘punk’ comes in.

The punks of the Seventies and Eighties were troublemakers and rebels - and a lot of other things. But that core idea of nonconformity and rebellion carried over into the genres. An extremely common element in all ‘punk genre fiction is the fight against oppression. It may be against a totalitarian government that segregates people based on their gene profiles, or a villainous captain of steampowered industry, or even the insatiable megacorporations of cyberpunk. There is almost always a force investing in the oppression and control of others that must be thwarted.

Google holds 90% of the world’s search traffic and more than 2 billion users on YouTube.

Meta has about 5 billion users across Facebook and Meta - or, more than half the world.

Many of these companies ignore their own research about the damage their technology can cause.

There’s a dozen and more other examples that illustrate the point: algopunk is defined by the influence algorithms hold over society, and the power held by a small group of large companies over that technology.

At the same time, ‘punk genres are a useful way to look at the inverse of these problems. Cyberpunk stories highlight the true meaning of being human, for instance. In this age of algopunk, it may be that our best path of pushing back is to invest in what this technology keeps away from us: introspection, connection, calm, focus, and the ability to just look up from a screen once in a while.

Its ironic that algopunk seemed to begin at a time when the world was worried about another technological problem.

While the common belief is that Y2K was a nothing-burger, or a hoax, the truth is that it took many programmers and computer scientists and a lot of effort to avert what could have been a collective calamity. Many of whom never got the kudos they deserved.

Solving Y2K required the same elements we need now: an awareness of the problem and a focused collective action to solve it. Votes, petitioning, and the every day choices as to what platforms we use and how much - these are the tools that will ring in the New Year and a new genre.

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Brave Old Work is a series about what it means to be human in a technological world, by William Smith-Stubbs, an award-winning design strategist, speaker, and founder of the ideas lab Mettlesome and social cohesion non-profit Museum of Sticks & Stones.

Will has spoken for the Obama Democracy Forum, World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, YMCA Global and more.

Will’s work in social progress, community, innovation, and mental health and wellbeing has been recognised with several Good Design Awards, an UNLEASH Innovation Award, and a nomination to a UNESCO Prize.

Will is an Obama Foundation Asia Pacific Leader, World Economic Forum Global Shaper Alumni, Gates Foundation Goalkeeper, and was the first Global Good Fund Fellow from Oceania.