Autofiction and social media are indistinguishable—co-evolution.
The culture of the 2000s, my teenage years, romanticized the material object; the Aughts were in influenced by the release of The Matrix and the Y2's scare in 1999. Hipster culture celebrated the analog not the Internet; bands recorded records and recording studios and filmmakers shot on 35mm. People on road trips to discover cool bookstores and venus and bars. You could still burn tapes and CDs and DVDs. The literary deity of that era was David Foster Wallace, whose essays and novels registered an early and profound anxiety about the affects of what we’d now call screen (and dopamine) addiction. For Wallace, who died in 2007, TV was bad enough and the Internet was going to be worse. He was right, but it didn’t matter.