Truth and consequences

Well thank God that's over. The noughties, the two-thousands, the first decade of the 21st century. Whatever it was or should be called - that was one of its first problems, giving it a damn name - we are well shot of it. So long, whatever-they-weres, thanks for nothing.

If only. The trouble, of course, is that they will probably never really go away. We are stuck with them.

Not that this was immediately obvious from the endless lists used to fill empty pages by the world's newspapers and magazines at the end of 2009 and the beginning of the new decade. For all the fine-combing of the decade for signs of meaningful progress to include in these meaningless inventories, there was a signal failure to identify and catalogue the stuff that actually matters: the real, unintended, unforseen, unbearable consequences of it all.

Like some hopeless drunk, the perpetrator will appear to be struggling with motor function as they weave this way and that, or unexpectedly stop while attempting to find the next tune - always right in front of you as you are trying to get somewhere.

The advent of the tiny, cheap mobile phones during the whatever-they-weres has had much the same effect, only multiplied many times. The Government might have banned drivers from using them in cars but what is it going to do about the hopeless cases who cause chaos on our streets attempting but failing in the act of walking and texting at the same time?

Indeed, far more than the iPod, the small, cheap mobile phone is the generator of a colossal amount of social irritation. There's the annoying novelty ringtones, the taking of pointless photos (often at inappropriate times), the end of intelligible communication, the huge bills for so much meaningless chatter. Perhaps the most pernicious conse-quence is the staggering decline in manners during the whatever-they-weres. So few cellphone owners seem to acknowledge barriers to their use. They therefore feel free to, say, interrupt any conversation to answer one, text in any context, have loud, boring conversations in confined spaces like lifts, "forget" to turn it off at the theatre, the cinema, or, heaven help us, funerals, or leave their cellphones on their desks to ring and ring and ring.

Consequences, consequences. Actually it is more meaningful to compile a list of these rather than catalogue the whatever-they-weres' gadgets, social trends, fads and big news events like 9/11.

Surely the chief consequence of the last decade is we all now have the yips. Its legacy is an unreasonable fear of and paranoia about everything: terrorism, most kinds of food, someone bringing up the subject of climate change, Helen Clark, plastic bags, pandemics, Google street view, Islam, Voldemort, Amy Winehouse, internet viruses, not having enough

Facebook friends, carbon, obesity, the economy, house prices rising or falling, too much credit, not enough credit, rugby world cups (again), tsunamis and emails sent by Hone Harawira ...

The common corollary of all this paranoia is a siege mentality, one fed by apparently perpetual wars, and not just the "war on terror", but media-led ones like the wars on P, obesity and "cougars".

Frankly, it takes everything I have to leave the house each morning. The whatever-they-weres have turned me into a scaredy-cat.

Humbug posing as reality was another troubling development, and I don't just mean for the usually stated reasons of reality TV overload and a super-saturation of specious celebrity.

Once again technology has been the handmaiden of hell, leading people to believe that a cycling track will save the nation; having won the America's Cup once we can do it again; Peter Jackson is the world's greatest filmmaker; social networking isn't a fad; property is a dandy investment; flat-screen TVs are a substitute for content; GPS works better than a map; smart phones are worth the money and owning anything made by Apple makes you a higher life-form...

The biggest fantasy, of course, is that the internet has improved everything. It hasn't. If you haven't read Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's internet Is Killing Our Culture, I humbly suggest that you do.

The last decade's rush to digitise everything - whether it needs to be or not - is killing culture, too. I mean really, digital books? If reading The Great Gatsby on a Kindle is the future, I really do hope climate change ends us.

And then there's the racket. The whatever-they-weres weren't just the hottest decade on record (possibly), they were the loudest. This is a direct consequence, I'm pretty sure, of everything being made in China for bugger-all. In the 1990s, for example, most sane people used a nice, quiet broom to clean up their yard. Now every second idiot has a leafblower featuring a motor that sounds like a 747 taking off and with a label on it saying "for use on Sunday mornings only".

I could go on. Oh, how I could go on. Which is, in itself, the most significant consequence of the whatever-they-weres for me. They have, as you see, made me a grumpy old man.