In the past ten years, we lost hope in American politics, realized we were being watched on the internet, and finally broke the gender binary (kind of). So many of the beliefs we held to be true at the beginning of the decade have since been proven false—or at least, much more complicated than they once seemed. The Decade of Disillusion is a series that tracks how the hell we got here.

For decades now, the entertainment industry has struggled to realize that the best way to stop piracy is to offer consumers better, cheaper products. Instead, the industry spent much of the early aughts suing and vilifying potential customers or lobbying for copyright laws like the DMCA that created more problems than they professed to solve.