About this time two years ago, I described 2011 as feeling like "an end-of-season finale", thanks to all the spectacular news events it contained. The Arab spring! Fukushima! The August riots! Dead Bin Laden! Dead Gaddafi! Remember? Course you don't.

Like all season finales, it was a tough act to follow, and consequently 2012 was a sort commercial break – and comparative lull – whereas 2013 has been the opening episode of Humankind: Season Two. And this time around the producers are going for a pared-down, considerably darker feel, with less emphasis on spectacle and more on shock after stomach-churning shock.

Yes: 2013 was a horrorshow. The news became a Stephen King short-story collection accidentally being adapted into live events in real time. Even unpleasantly extreme news stories that would normally stand out as the most appalling thing you'd ever heard about were quickly replaced by something even worse. Remember when that footage of a Syrian rebel commander eating a dead man's heart turned up and we assumed we'd collectively experienced a new low for humankind, one that would never be forgotten? Admit it: you'd discarded it completely until I mentioned it just there, and even then you had to squint with your mind's eye to remember what the hell I was going on about. That's the sort of year it was.

This was the news, every day: bombings, massacres, murders, celebrity child abuse and high-profile deaths. One after the other. After a while you just thought: no. No. Anything but this. So your brain shut down and started whistling. No wonder The Great British Bake Off's so popular.

The Great British Bake Off symbolises everything cosy and chummy and ironically retro and almost certainly evil about current middle-class twattery. Loads of things are a bit Bake Off. Cupcakes, obviously, are a bit Bake Off. Bunting is a bit Bake Off. Furniture painted cream is a bit Bake Off. Union Jack cushions are a bit Bake Off. Giant clocks hanging on kitchen walls are a bit Bake Off. John Lewis is a bit Bake Off. People singing in the style of 40s girl groups are a bit Bake Off. Festivals are a bit Bake Off. Somehow Andy Murray winning Wimbledon became a bit Bake Off, just because it was on the BBC, which is very Bake Off indeed. I'm writing this in the Guardian, which is incredibly Bake Off, which means I must be pretty fucking Bake Off myself, which is probably why I watched The Great British Bake Off, week after week after week. Don't judge me. It was that or the Syrian heart-eating video again.

But never mind the baking contests. This was a year in which the most significant global cultural development was "twerking" going mainstream. Twerking effectively consists of bending over and shuddering your buttocks around until they start applauding sarcastically, like someone trying to use a vibrating squat toilet. It's the most proctological dance craze there is, and despite existing for years was finally popularised by formerly cleancut pop idol Miley Cyrus in a landmark performance at the VMAs. She also stuck her tongue out a lot – and stuck it out violently, like a giraffe lunging at an especially verdant branch. Actually no – more violently than that. She stuck it out like her face was trying to throw it against a wall on the other side of town.

Shortly afterwards she swung around naked on a wrecking ball in the video for her song Wrecking Ball, which is about a man who came in like a wrecking ball, whatever that means. It's either a ghastly euphemistic way of claiming someone is devastatingly well-endowed or a heartfelt breakup anthem. The video is about four minutes long and has been viewed over 400m times on YouTube, which according to my amateur mathematics makes a total of 96,000,000,000 seconds, or just over 3,040 years of total viewing time, which means Miley Cyrus has been swinging around on a wrecking ball since a thousand years prior to the birth of Christ, and is therefore the most significant figure in human history, after Psy from Gangnam Style.

Of course swinging around on a wrecking ball with the wind whistling through your bum hairs is virtually the only way to get attention these days, because according to statistics 97% of the global population is too busy posing for a "selfie" at any given moment to notice they're sharing the planet with anyone else. I'm no psychologist, but I'm pretty sure we only take self-portraits to remind ourselves that we still exist. It's like pinching yourself in other words, and we do it because reality seems increasingly like a dream, the sort you have after washing down a wheel of brie with a pint of Benylin. Soon someone's going to come out with a gadget that does nothing but spool live CCTV coverage of your own face directly into your right eye, so you can be perpetually assured of your own existence without having to pout or tuck a troublesome bit of hair behind your ear every five minutes. Actually, that feature probably comes as standard with Google Glass.

Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why, despite the repeated efforts of this newspaper to make people care about Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA snooping, the typical response was a sort of muted "cuh, typical". The population seems to roughly break down into two groups: those who'd long suspected this kind of surveillance was happening anyway, and those who were secretly delighted to discover that someone somewhere was actually paying attention to their tweets and emails and phone calls, even if that "someone" wasn't even a real person, but a chunk of Prism code on a hard drive in a bunker somewhere that hasn't even bothered sending a Christmas card.

Prism has to be the cockiest secret plan in history for one reason alone: it's got its own logo. At some point someone involved in this highly confidential surveillance operation decided it needed a distinct brand identity, presumably so the public wouldn't confuse it with any of the other top secret plans it doesn't know about. Still, maybe rustling up a corporate identity is standard practice with all secret plans. Maybe the gunpowder plot had an official typeface and jingle. Come to think of it, it did spawn a range of masks.

Speaking of blowing up parliament, Russell Brand had a slightly odd 2013, one that made you suspect he might end 2014 in a fortified compound, surrounded by followers. Conventional politicians were fairly easy to ignore for most of the year, with the media only really drawing attention to them when they made outrageous statements – such as the (now ex) Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom, a stock "spluttering establishment character" from every satirical TV comedy sketch of the 80s who'd accidentally fallen through some kind of reality hole into our dimension, and consequently kept bumping up against a language barrier that forbids the use of phrases such as "sluts" and "bongo-bongo land". The only way to guarantee more publicity was to stop existing, like Margaret Thatcher and Nelson Mandela, who became the two most influential political figures of the year just by leaving us alone for ever.

Charlie Brooker's 2013 Wipe is on iPlayer now.