An easy pick for me but it captures the last decade so well. Lincoln looking at the noose/halo is what sends this one over from being just a funny picture into being genuine art. It should be in a gallery. It should be in the entryway to the White House.
to be fair (to myself i guess) i meant last decade as in 2013/14-present, not 2010-19. '13/14 were a lot closer to the trump era culturally than the few years before them even though we hadn't yet fully dived in
ehh 2015 felt like the year that the cultural shift really started happening. Then again I'm 30 so your mileage may vary
2015 was definitely when it kicked into high gear, when you could say that the trump era formally began with him announcing his intention to run with the speech about how "they're not sending their best".
i do think it - however you want to define "it," but i think we both know "it" - started gaining momentum a couple years before. i'm 27, so i was a teenager in 2013 and didn't really have my finger on the pulse, but even in the gaming sections of the internet that i pretty much exclusively hung out in around then i remember feeling a shift beginning. the reaction to games like Gone Home and depression quest felt different than it would have if they had come out a few years earlier. gamergate's importance can be overstated by some but i think it's a reflection rather than a cause of a wider rightward shift that was just beginning to gain steam then (2014).
in any case it seems like people think about the pre-trump 2010s the same way they think about 2019 vs 2020 or the late 90s to post-9/11. a time marked more by ignorance of what was to come than any properties the time had itself.
It depends on where you hang out. Gamergate was 2014 and gamers malding over Anita Sarkeesian, which was a dress rehearsal for Gamergate, happened in 2013. I think pre-2013 is too different from the rest of the 2010s, but the rest of the 2010s fit together. Pre-2013 was during Obama's first term when people were still euphoric that change and all that Obama campaign bullshit would happen. Hipsters, scene kids, and lol random humor xDDD were still in vogue, which mostly faded away by 2013. 2013 was also when the gap between meatspace and cyberspace no longer existed. Some Filthy Frank video somehow led to a worldwide meme adopted even by normal people who weren't terminally online. This would've never happened pre-2013, and it's not a stretch to trace that with the alt-right "meming" Trump into the White House 4 years later.