That's Us II: The 2000s, the Twin Towers, reality TV, and lots of Harry Potter

In the end, the expected Y2K effect , which was supposed to cause computer systems around the world to crash due to their inability to recognize years beginning with "20," never happened. Technology increasingly invaded more aspects of everyday life, but it still seemed unable to unleash chaos. Nokia phones were the world's best-selling mobile phones, and most were prepaid.

And then, the most influential cultural phenomenon of the decade just beginning appeared in Spain. On April 23, 2000, Big Brother premiered . Reality shows had already been successfully tested in the United States —it was there that they were insisted to be a sociological experiment—but it was the first time something like this had been broadcast here. The first program had a 35% audience rating. The episode in which a contestant was first evicted, in May, had almost nine million viewers. Big Brother had twenty-nine cameras following ten contestants , and the entire house was bugged.

The contestants gradually understood that the keys to popularity with the public were scandal and provocation. Little happened in the house, but the comments and discussions about those minor events would last for hours. When the contestants who had been eliminated from the house wanted to continue making a living from television , they usually did so by taking on one of the professions that would most define our era: that of a panelist.

Snobs would, in retrospect, call that period the “new golden age of television,” because during that first decade of the millennium, shows like The Wire , The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men aired in the United States . We couldn’t have known it at the time, but Big Brother was anticipating the exhibitionist, voyeuristic, and constantly connected world we would eventually live in after the explosion of the internet, social media, and smartphones that appeared a few years later.

The entire culture of the era was shaped by reality shows: in 2004, The Apprentice premiered in the United States , starring Donald Trump. It was this program that truly made him famous and helped to build the personality that eventually led him to the US presidency among a mass audience. Spain soon saw the appearance of Survivor, Operación Triunfo , a hugely successful version of the talent show , and countless others. But these years were also obviously marked by the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent war on terror.

The entire culture of the time was marked by reality shows: in 2004, 'The Apprentice', starring Trump, premiered in the United States.

Countless novels appeared that directly addressed the attacks on the Twin Towers, such as The man of the jump , by Don Delillo, or Windows on the World , by Fédéric Beigdeber. But the best, for me, is the one that addressed the liberal left's reaction to the invasion of Iraq: Saturday, by Ian McEwan, portrayed how violence can affect even the most right-thinking and pacifist people. Even better were the thousands of essays published on Islam, Al-Qaeda and the Middle East : I remember that the question many of them asked was whether televised global terrorism —which, in a macabre way, was sometimes reminiscent of reality TV —was a return to medieval religious savagery or, rather, the crudest expression of a radical modernity that mixed television, the nascent mobile telephony and a globalized world.

In reality, all those books took a backseat to two gigantic phenomena. On the one hand, the delirious and addictive The Da Vinci Code , by Dan Brown , which ended up selling 80 million copies worldwide and creating a renewed obsession with alternative interpretations of the life of Jesus, Vatican plots, the role of Opus Dei, crypts, mystical riddles, fantastic archaeology and, in general, conspiracy theories linked to religion.

On the other hand, the Harry Potter saga, written by JK Rowling , which although it began in the late nineties, developed mainly in the following decade, when it broke all records in history: the eight volumes sold 600 million copies; in Spain, the initial print run of the seventh book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows , It sold 750,000 copies, an unprecedented figure. I don't know what it says about the culture of the time that, in the midst of terrorist panic and the inexorable growth of the internet, the two most famous literary figures of the decade were a specialist in religious symbology and a boy with supernatural powers who attended a British private school.

The question many of them were asking was whether televised global terrorism was a return to medieval religious savagery.

And the soundtrack? That's hardly relevant. What really mattered were the platforms on which music began to be listened to , which managed to destroy the CD and, with it, the traditional recording industry. Napster went bankrupt in 2002 after popularizing peer-to-peer file sharing, but it had countless successors such as BitTorrent or eMule , which always managed to evade the new regulations protecting copyright. Buying a CD became an extravagant and increasingly minority act. Although then, at the end of the decade, when smartphones were increasingly prevalent and the world was becoming a full-scale Big Brother set... well, just then the biggest financial crisis since the crash of 1929 erupted. And this was what completely dominated the culture of the following decade. But that's next week.