In a recent interview with Vulture to promote his new book The Nineties, cultural critic Chuck Klosterman refers to the titular time frame as “the last decade with a fully formed and recognizable culture of its own,” arguing that “it’s very difficult to see something from, say, 2005, and get the sense that it was 15 or 16 years ago. Time seems to be microscoping.”

I understand Klosterman’s take to a certain point. After all, it does seem like video and sound quality, advancements in which can define the look and sound of a decade, has to stop improving at some point. But anyone who’s seriously considered how one might define the 2000s or even the 2010s should quickly come to the conclusion that Klosterman is wrong. Cool youth haircuts, to use one example, were much more angular in 2005, whereas now they’re very bushy. When I was in high school and college, everyone seemed like they were competing to wear the skinniest jeans possible; now, every girl wears loose, baggy jeans like Billie Eilish. And when’s the last time you saw a man wear a bowling shirt in public? I could go on, but the point is, there has been many a “vibe shift” since Klosterman’s precious 90s, and there are plenty of cultural markers through which one can document them.

But Chuck shouldn’t just take my word for it. He should also watch The Dropout, Hulu’s recently-concluded miniseries about would-be world changer Elizabeth Holmes. The miniseries, which begins in Holmes’ senior year of high school in 2002 and ends in 2017 when Theranos, the fraudulent blood testing company she founded, was more or less shut down by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is an engaging, funny, and ultimately terrifying social historiography of the 21st century. In the micro-sense this is the story of a woman who conned investors, the press, and even the United States government into believing that she could build a machine that would be able to run blood tests using only a finger prick of blood. But zoom out a little and you find that it’s also about the misplaced optimism and technology-driven arrogance that made the people she conned receptive to her fantastical lies, and how they came to define this allegedly ill-defined era.

While there are plenty of period appropriate haircuts and musical cues, The Dropout illustrates the passage of time primarily through consumer products. In the first episode, we see Elizabeth conceive of the first version of her blood testing machine while holed up in her dorm room at Stanford, listening to Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Y Control” on what looks like a second or third generation iPod through white wired earbuds. In a later episode, she’s lined up outside of an Apple store with other Steve Jobs devotees waiting to buy an iPhone, this time to the strains of Feist’s “1234,” the twee folk diddy that soundtracked an iconic iPod Nano commercial. The inclusion of these scenes, and later scenes that show Walgreens executives playing Angry Birds and using Uber for the first time, is less about playing a game of “remember when” than it is reminding the viewer about what they found so appealing about Apple and other tech companies at the time. The Jobs-era Apple marketing aesthetic – the smooth metallic colors, the rounded edges, the mainstream indie music syncs – didn’t just make you excited for the future. It made you feel like you were already there. And even if you were just using these products to listen to music while you walked your dog or write work emails, it made you feel like a member of the so-called “creative class.” Nevermind the compatibility issues with non-Apple devices, never mind that you can’t plug in a USB cable into a Macbook anymore. Utility is overrated. The idea of what you could be doing is much more important than the idea of what you’re actually doing. That’s what made you, one of a million owners of the same piece of technology, feel special.

It’s also the very mindset that Holmes built Theranos on. The young Holmes (Amanda Seyfried, a very likely Emmy winner) is portrayed in The Dropout as aimlessly ambitious – she doesn’t know exactly what she wants to do, but she does know that she wants to change the world. Eventually, thanks to a heartrending story told by her mentor-turned-boyfriend Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), she settles on simplifying blood tests by building a machine that can perform a wide array of assays with only a finger prick’s worth of blood. Even after being told repeatedly by Stanford faculty that it’s an impossible task, she drops out of college and invests her tuition money in a startup. She attracts venture capitalists and big name board members even though she has no actual product, but they’re charmed nevertheless by her penchant for inspiring quotes (“What would you do if you knew you could not fail?,” she asks an early hire), her youth, and her gender. Elizabeth is at once a victim – an early montage of pitches show potential investors making a series of sexist and condescending comments, and she drops out of Stanford not just to start her own company but also because she was sexually assaulted at a parrty – but she also weaponizes Silicon Valley’s desire to seem progressive to skirt a number of ethical crises.

Tech’s obsession with aesthetics and perceived progress – the idea of being “new” and “fresh,” wasn’t just relegated to the tech world. “Old White Men,” the series’ fourth episode, focuses on Theranos’ courtship of Walgreens, a legacy retailer run by the titular demographic. The episode rivals Succession in its serio-comedy. Jay “Dr. J” Rosen (Succession’s own Alan Ruck) convinces Walgreens’ C-suite to visit Theranos’ Palo Alto headquarters with the intent of evaluating their technology and potentially putting Theranos “wellness centers” in stores across the country. Most of the humor is derived from the culture clash between the uptight Walgreens suits and the more casual, yet also pretentious, behavior of Holmes and Balwani (“She doesn’t get to treat us like this, we’re fucking Walgreens and we’re walking!” CFO Wade Miquelon declares after sitting on an exercise ball for half an hour), but Rosen’s infatuation with Theranos, and his insistence that their refusal to show Walgreens’ consultants inside their labs is just how young, hip companies operate, isn’t just a testament to Holmes’ skills of deception. It’s also about the false promise that tech companies represented not only to the young people who worked for them, but also to older people like Rosen who bought into the overly optimistic Obama era idea that the youth were going to save the world by breaking down old barriers and that they were motivated by an altruistic fervor instead of profit. For Theranos (and one could argue, WeWork too), “tech” and “startup,” rather than describing the services or lifespan of a company, became a way to describe a mindset and a way of doing business and, more often than not, was used as an excuse with which to paper over unprofessional and illegal corporate practices.

Even though there’s little dramatic irony to be found in The Dropout – we know, from the very beginning, that Elizabeth Holmes is full of shit – the series’ team still manage to portray Theranos as seductive and enticing. The crisp cinematography and sleek electronic score make you feel like you’re inside of an Apple ad. Even Holmes’ cringe-inducing dance moves, which she deploys multiple times throughout the series both by herself and with Balwani – look like the freakish first draft of the famed silhouette iPod commercials. And When Balwani presents Holmes with a busted open Siemens blood testing machine, it’s treated like a romantic moment between two serial killer lovers bonding over their latest victim. It’s only disturbing because everything around them seems so serene.

As the series moves into its last three episodes, the focus shifts away a bit from Holmes and Balwani and towards Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who would end up publishing the expose that would set into motion the end of Theranos, as well as his two primary sources, young Theranos employees Tyler Shultz (Dylan Minnette) and Erika Cheung (Camryn Mi-Young Kim), abandoning some of its commentary on technomania in favor of a more straightforward journalism thriller plot. But in the final scene, we see our final bit of technological advancement. Meeting in Theranos’ vacant offices with her new husky by her side, Holmes has one last conversation with the company’s former legal counsel, Linda Tanner (Micheala Watkins). Disturbingly sanguine, she swaps out her post-Recession grindset talk for Trump era self-care rhetoric, telling Tanner that she’s just “taking a moment to enjoy life and have fun,” even as she faces down the threat of prosecution. Uncharmed, Tanner insists on forcing Holmes to take some kind of responsibility for her actions, virtually chasing her out of the building while repeating “you hurt people” over and over. But Holmes slips out, pops in a pair of AirPods, and opens up Uber to hail a ride home. While waiting for her ride she screams, loudly and repeatedly, slowly crumbling to the ground with each shout before perking back up again when her driver arrives. 

The technology we thought would connect us, we thought would bring transparency, has only made it easier to tune our critics out, to hide from our problems. What’s more, it’s enabled us to drown out ourselves, too, to anesthetize us from our own pain. Guilt ridden over putting people’s lives at risk over your own, ego-motivated pipe dream? Don’t worry. There’s an app for that.