Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
A lot can change in 10 years. When the sun rose on January 1st, 2010, Steve Jobs was still CEO of Apple, and the hottest Android phone was the newly minted Motorola Droid. Facebook was still an upstart, having just recently clawed its way to profitability. Uber hadn’t reached an app store yet, and Spotify hadn’t reached the US. Tinder, Twitch, and TikTok simply didn’t exist.
Taking the long view, the individual stories of the past 10 years tend to blur into a few big trends. Social networks consolidated and expanded globally, bringing new anxieties over their political power. Threatened by piracy, content companies traded hard copy sales for monthly streaming charges. The cult of the founder withered, while platforms sank into an endless…