2000s

The 2000s were the decade we discovered we were all connected—and that connections could kill you. Network science emerged from physics and sociology to explain everything from viral marketing to financial contagion. The citations from this period are obsessed with hubs, clusters, and cascades. The breakthroughs reshaped how we think about systems. Barabási's work on scale-free networks explained why some nodes matter more than others—the internet, social networks, and disease transmission all follow power-law distributions where a few hubs connect to everything. The Human Genome Project completed in 2003, revealing that humans have far fewer genes than expected (about 20,000, similar to a fruit fly) and that complexity emerges from gene interactions, not gene count. Systems biology emerged as a discipline, attempting to understand cells as integrated systems rather than collections of parts. The blind spots were catastrophic. Network science focused on how connections enable—not how they destroy. The 2008 financial crisis was a network phenomenon: banks connected through derivatives created a system where Lehman's failure cascaded globally. Taleb's Black Swan (2007) warned that networked systems produce unpredictable catastrophes, but the warning came too late. The assumption that rational actors would self-regulate proved spectacularly wrong. Business absorbed the upside while ignoring the downside. 'Network effects' became the holy grail of startup strategy—build a platform where each user makes it more valuable for others. 'Viral marketing' aimed to trigger cascades through social networks. 'Six degrees of separation' became a business proposition. But systemic risk, concentration fragility, and cascade failures were treated as edge cases rather than inherent features. The 2008 crisis was the decade's final exam—and business failed it. The legacy of 2000s citations is about connections and their costs. The best work from this period—Taleb on fat tails, Barabási on network topology, systems biologists on cellular integration—remains essential reading. The worst work assumed that connection automatically meant benefit. Read 2000s citations asking: does this account for what happens when networks fail?