Today, we tend to see The Great Gatsby as a work of historical literature, as it gives a window into the Roaring Twenties. However, F. Scott Fitzgerald did not set out to depict the past; he was depicting his own present. Similarly, Proust's literature is seen as a window into the French high-society of the Belle Epoque, a society in which Proust lived.

Which works today do you think future generations will see as the classics of the 2010s and 2020s? Such may not even necessarily be works of literature; they could be other storytelling mediums, such as film.

> Which works today do you think future generations will see as the classics of the 2010s and 2020s?

South Park?

Maybe collectively those "actually the villain is just misunderstood" movies I hear are becoming a thing recently? They seem like a decent candidate for the "window into the culture of the time" thing.

Some of those wide-audience computer games like Candy Crush and Farmville?

Unironically dril's tweets[1].

Part of the problem of our time is that shared culture has significantly receded. There's little capacity to maintain "classics" as we understand them today. Take any massive artistic output (film, book, TV show) and it's nowadays either not seen/read/heard by more than 20% of the population or it's a flash in the pan hit which will be forgotten in another year or so (e.g. Barbenheimer).

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/dril/comments/cqde0e/pound_for_poun...

The ones that most qualify for me are:

* Minecraft: This will probably hold the position Pac Man holds to us. Single biggest culture-marker perhaps.

* Taylor Swift: She's like Michael Jackson was (perhaps because of access and audience size improvements)

I don't know if Wikipedia or the mainline social media websites would count. People remember The Myspace Era. Tumblr and Twitter have reputations for their culture but would they be classics? Hard to tell.

> Which works today do you think future generations will see as the classics of the 2010s and 2020s?

I think the film Tár will be. It captures the “fake it until you make it” spirit of the present really well along with the god complex and repressed guilt that accompany “making it”. Also the performances and direction are just excellent.

There’s a lot of discussion flying back and forth as to whether we’re in a period of cultural stagnation. Obviously you need to heavily discount the possibility of “old fogeyism” and reactionary nostalgia whenever you make such claims, and historically a lot of them have been totally false, but the one argument I have found convincing that we’re not in a good cultural place right now is the difficulty of coming up with such a work.

What work captured the zeitgeist of the 2010s and so far of the 2020s? I certainly can’t think of any novels that did it, far too much of that literary decade was about self-obsessed New Yorkers and had no relevance to anyone else. None of the reactions against it (i.e. Dimes Square) produced anything of lasting note either.

Breaking Bad, if we're lucky. More likely some superhero movie with a title like ThunderMan VI: Dawn of the Mayhem Battalion.

Game of thrones will be. No main character is safe since Ned Stark was killed on TV.

No ending was going to be good. Sopranos had a controversial ending too.

Silicon Valley captured the feel of the bay area and did a good job with satire.

2000s would be easier, I think 2010 is about the switch to super hero movies.

"they really liked pedophile vampires for a hot minute in the 2000s"