The fascists are on the march, police use "stop and search" powers, the right stoke up fear about Britain being swamped by immigrants, the Conservative Party are promising sweeping legal changes, cuts to welfare spending and labour reform and two years ago there was a referendum on British membership of the EU.
The UK overwhelmingly voted to stay in it.
The year is 1977.
A new youth movement motivated by Punk Rock and Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League sprung up overnight. There was a seemingly organized reaction against what was seen as an old conservative guard of musicians playing prog rock 15 minute keyboard solos, stations playing radio friendly disco that glorified wealth and excess and a political landscape mired in a post-1960s-optimism depression. Music became a ridiculously fertile ground for youth rebellion.
THE 1970s
In 1971 the Nixon Shock decoupled gold from the dollar leading to lending booms that caused the 2008 crash. In 1972 Watergate led to the beginnings of a public distrust in politicians. In the same year The Equal Rights Amendment was passed in the US giving equality of rights under law "which could not be denied by sex." In 1973 the oil crisis led to Middle Eastern nations like Saudi Arabia and Qatar controlling world oil supply. In the same year Syria went to war. In a reaction to 1960s liberalism a "New Right" emerged in the US leading to a "a primal scream by The People against Big Government." A new movement began to protect the environment with the first Earth Day. Anti-war demonstrations against Vietnam spread across compasses, including Kent State in Ohio.
In the Islamic world in 1978 The Shah of Iran, a western puppet ruler was deposed and the Ayatollah Khomeini replaced him leading to modern Islamist conservatism.
Most of the remaining European colonies were handed back to their people. In a series of military coups, South American democracies were replaced with right wing "juntas", the most infamous being Pinochet's capture of Chile in 1973 with the help of the CIA, US covert forces overtly toppling foreign regimes.
While...in the New York Magazine in 1976 Tome Wolfe dubbed the 1970s The Me Decade.
Writing about the forthcoming US election and "the two most popular new figures in the 1976 campaign, Jimmy Carter and Jerry Brown," Wolfe wrote:
"Newspaper columnists and newsmagazine writers continually referred to the two men’s “enigmatic appeal.” Which is to say, they couldn’t explain it. Nevertheless, they tried. They theorized that the war in Vietnam, Watergate, the FBI and CIA scandals, had left the electorate shell-shocked and disillusioned and that in their despair the citizens were groping no longer for specific remedies but for sheer faith, something, anything (even holy rolling), to believe in. This was in keeping with the current fashion of interpreting all new political phenomena in terms of recent disasters, frustration, protest, the decline of civilization . . . the Grim Slide. But when the New York Times and CBS employed a polling organization to try to find out just what great gusher of “frustration” and “protest” Carter had hit, the results were baffling. A Harvard political scientist, William Schneider, concluded for the L.A. Times that “the Carter protest” was a new kind of protest, “a protest of good feelings.” That was a new kind, sure enough—a protest that wasn’t a protest."
Protest voting that wasn't actually any kind of protest.
Wolfe sees this me decade in terms of generational shifts, atomization, a new obsession with the self and making one's own life a kind of, well, life pursuit.
"The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!) This had always been an aristocratic luxury, confined throughout most of history to the life of the courts, since only the very wealthiest classes had the free time and the surplus income to dwell upon this sweetest and vainest of pastimes. It smacked so much of vanity, in fact, that the noble folk involved in it always took care to call it quite something else."
There was the rise of "lemon sessions" where: "One girl would become “it,” and the others would light into her personality, pulling it to pieces to analyze every defect . . . her spitefulness, her awkwardness, her bad breath, embarrassing clothes, ridiculous laugh, her suck-up fawning, latent lesbianism, or whatever. The poor creature might be reduced to tears. She might blurt out the most terrible confessions, hatreds, and primordial fears. But, it was presumed, she would be the stronger for it afterward. She would be on her way toward a new personality."
The rise of the slogan as self definition: "In 1961 a copywriter named Shirley Polykoff was working for the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency on the Clairol hair-dye account when she came up with the line: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” In a single slogan she had summed up what might be described as the secular side of the Me Decade. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a—!” (You have only to fill in the blank.)... often the unconscious desire is nothing more than: Let’s talk about Me. The great unexpected dividend of the feminist movement has been to elevate an ordinary status—woman, housewife—to the level of drama. One’s very existence as a woman—as Me—becomes something all the world analyzes, agonizes over, draws cosmic conclusions from, or, in any event, takes seriously." Just do it.
And Alienation: "Tocqueville’s idea of modern man lost “in the solitude of his own heart” has been brought forward into our time in such terminology as alienation (Marx), anomie (Durkheim), the mass man (Ortega y Gasset), and the lonely crowd (Riesman). The picture is always of a creature uprooted by industrialism, packed together in cities with people he doesn’t know, helpless against massive economic and political shifts—in short, a creature like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, a helpless, bewildered, and dispirited slave to the machinery. This victim of modern times has always been a most appealing figure to intellectuals, artists, and architects. The poor devil so obviously needs us to be his Engineers of the Soul, to use a term popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. We will pygmalionize this sad lump of clay into a homo novus, a New Man, with a new philosophy, a new aesthetics, not to mention new Bauhaus housing and furniture.
But once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s, they did an astonishing thing—they took their money and ran. They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do—they discovered and started doting on Me! They’ve created the greatest age of individualism in American history! All rules are broken! The prophets are out of business! Where the Third Great Awakening will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes . . . Me . . . Me . . . . Me . . . Me . . ."
Fast forward 40 years to the coming of age of Generation Z.
The 1970s and the 2000s have such strange parallels. Unlike the 1970s, Generation Z had no immediate golden age to look back on. If the 1970s were characterized by political upheaval and individuals turning inwards, becoming atomized narcissists then it was a reaction to the 1960s, Vietnam campus protests, 1968 student revolts, the overturning of culture being dominated by stuffy white men in suits, The Nouvelle Vague and The Beatles and The Stones, Pop Art and Monty Python then how do you react to revolution? You become more conservative.
Ultimately it was the baby boomers, the Woodstock Generation, that gave rise to the spectacle events like Apple store openings.
DECADING
Gen Z don't have a 1960s though, do they? And is "decading" cultures reductive? After all 1961 was a different world to 1969.
Perhaps such decading works historically to show upheaval.
The popular image has Britain looking much like 1945 16 years later. By the end of the decade Britain is swinging...
In reality, perhaps, Britain was swinging in 1961...
And life in 1969 was just as grim as the post war years...
Though something, as Tom Wolfe suggests in his New York article, did shift in the 1970s. Those on the right would argue that money trickled down to free those at the bottom from poverty and allow them the leisure and the freedom to explore themselves, something that had only traditionally been the perogative of the wealthy. Those on the left might argue that that leisure and freedom was hard fought by union disputes and protest.
By the end of the 1970s you do see a disillusionment with politics which allows populist charismatic personalities to gain power, Thatcher in 1979 in the UK and a couple of years later in the US, Reagan. You see a general disillusion with life. The nihilism of
We're the flowers
In the dustbin
We're the poison
In your human machine
We're the future
Your future...
There's no future
In England's dreaming...
Don't be told what you want
Don't be told what you need
There's no future
No future
No future for you
God Save the Queen: Sex Pistols
But punk nihilism soon became a fetishized fashion statement. Another way to exhibit your identity through clothes, wearing the t-shirt of your tribe.
Wolfe wrote The Me Decade in 1976 but anything he wrote would be superseded by the vacuous primary coloured self absorbed wealth obsessed 1980s.
By the end of that decade of the 1980s youth rebellion had found its voice in a Generation X, an overeducated underemployed Mcjob lost tribe where naval gazing was less about narcissism and more about a fulfilment of the Sex Pistols lyrics. The no future of 1977 became the no present for the grunge generation. And perhaps for the first time with youth revolt, rebellion was not expressed outwardly, as a means to change their lives and environment but rather a dark tinged expression of a generation who were the first to truly realize they had nowhere to go. That their time was up.
Exemplified by Kurt Cobain's vocals on Top of The Pops to Smells Like Teen Spirit...
The fakery of TOTP reflecting an empty pop culture gives way to a song that has verses of hopeless nihilistic numbness like
And I forget just why I taste
Oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile
I found it hard, it's hard to find
Oh well, whatever, never mind
All sung in a peculiar ghostly voice from the other side style by Cobain, hidden behind sunglasses and hair.
It feels like a requiem.
White youth died. Black youth found a voice in hip hop but like grunge this soon lost any sense of rebellion or revolution.
Public Enemy's "Harder Than You Think" was released in 2007 twenty years after they first rose to prominence as a groundbreaking rap act. Harder Than You Think was a single taken from the album How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul?.
A war going on so where y'all at?
"Fight the Power" comes great responsibility
'F the Police' but who's stopping you from killing me?
Disaster, fiascos over a loop by P.E
If it's an I instead of we believing TV
Spitting riches, bitches, and this new thing about snitches
Watch them asses move as the masses switches
System dissed them but barely missed her
My sole intention to save my brothers and sisters...
Revolution means change, don't look at me strange
So I can't repeat what other rappers be sayin'
You don't stand for something, you fall for anything
Harder than you think, its a beautiful thing
Clearly showing how rap had sold itself to tropes like fuck the police in a self confirming gangster glorifying loop overlaid with obsessing about style.
Ironic that Harder Than You Think was used as a British TV show's credit music and led to it becoming Public Enemy's biggest British hit.
Then somewhere in the the 1990s something happened that shifted attention from the hopeless Gen Xers to a new generation who grew up with no previous golden age to rebel against and revile or hold up as a beacon. Coupled with this was a new technological dawn. The personal computer would revolutionize our lives and coupled with the internet, the global village became a reality and perversely with it came both an homogenization of culture and atomization through urbanization.
X Y Z
Gen Y blends into Gen Z. Both generations have effectively known nothing other than the political system we have and have had for nearly forty years (in the west), neo-liberalism, if you like, an economy dependent on consumption, a culture dependent on zeitgeist rather than rebellion, and most importantly, a technological revolution.
Often one hears the internet revolution compared to Gutenberg and the print revolution. When naysayers bemoan the internet for all the ills of the world, those who see the internet as a great source of freedom, expression and democracy suggest that the printing press was seen in much the same way. However, of course, print media in the 15th Century required a skill that the vast majority of people did not retain and would not for another four centuries, the ability to read.
The same technology argument was used with television in the 1950s. The idiot box in the corner of the room would make us passive consumers. A moral panic ensued but the world didn't collapse. But did it make us into passive consumers?
Generation Z is usually defined as the generation born from the mid 1990s through to the present. This generation have always known digital technology. And in recent times has seen a further tech leap with the ubiquity of smartphones replacing 'traditional' home computers. They offer the freedom to roam, to instantly communicate, and perhaps most chillingly, with the creation of Apps the near superfluousness of written language.
If the baby boomers of the 50s that became the hippies of the 60s were easy to differentiate from the punk nihilistic 70s...
And the 1980s excess was reflected in 1990s Generation X reverting to a form of nihilism...
How does one differentiate Generation Y from Generation Z? As both are defined as a visual culture...here's some more pictures to explain the difference...
Come on, you're not fooling anyone. They're the same. Whilst tech time has reached warp speed in the 2000s reality time has become a monumental slab. Zingy new laptops then tablets then smartphones then...have made the ways we communicate, interact and think, work, play, a continually updating tech feed but our cultural life has remained stagnant. 2008 seems much like 2018 in my mind. The only thing that has changed is our technology.
THE ME ME ME GENERATION
Joel Stein wrote Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation for Time Magazine back in the heady days of 2013. Remember that? 2013. Who ruled then? Gen Y or Gen Z? Who knows? 2013. Margaret Thatcher and Nelson Mandela died, the pope resigned, The Boston Marathon terrorist attack, the terrorist machete attack in Woolwich, London, Edward Snowden leaked CIA files, President Morsi was deposed in the Egyptian Arab Spring, the Westgate terror attack in Nairobi, Kenya. It was also the year that "selfie" was added to dictionaries.
Stein is optimistic about Gen Zers, seeing them as "the most threatening and exciting generation since the baby boomers brought about social revolution, not because they're trying to take over the Establishment but because they're growing up without one. The Industrial Revolution made individuals far more powerful--they could move to a city, start a business, read and form organizations. The information revolution has further empowered individuals by handing them the technology to compete against huge organizations: hackers vs. corporations, bloggers vs. newspapers, terrorists vs. nation-states, YouTube directors vs. studios, app-makers vs. entire industries. Millennials don't need us. That's why we're scared of them."
Personally, I find them terrifying but I think that has less to do with any of this than that they are young.
So Stein, five years ago, saw the Gen Z's as full of potential. Their use of technology would revolutionize the way we think. Except, of course, it hasn't and it doesn't, unless one assumes this revolution to look like vlogs on YouTube or Instagram feeds.
Back in the present, Taylor Lorenz at the Daily Beast argues that Generation Z Is Already Bored by the Internet Today’s teens are still bored, often incredibly so. They’re just more likely to experience a new type of boredom: phone bored.
"Teenagers today have unprecedented access to technology, and yet many report that they’ve never been so bored...To many teens, smartphones and the internet have already lost their appeal.
Phone boredom occurs when you’re technically “on your phone,” but you’re still bored out of your mind. It’s that feeling when you’re mindlessly clicking around, opening and closing apps, looking for something to do digitally and finding the options uninteresting.
To a parent or the casual observer, a phone-bored teen may appear engaged. After all, they’re on their phone, which many people consider an inherently engaging activity. In reality, they’re bored out of their mind.
It’s important to note that the majority of time users spend on their phones, they spend engaged. Tech companies go to exorbitant lengths to keep users active and attentive. If you’re posting photos, liking, commenting, reading, or watching something on your phone, you’re not phone bored. Phone boredom hits when you’ve cycled through everything there is to do on your device and you’re left feeling stranded."
Where are all those hackers, YouTube directors and bloggers and app makers taking on The Man gone? How could one be bored with the limitless possibilities that the internet offers?
In the past the trajectory of generations was linear. For most with a relatively stable home, youth meant school and home until you escaped these shackles and joined the adult world in work in order to meet your mate and start your own home. School was regulated to both provide education and to prepare you for the workplace. Home often involved family time in front of the TV. Then you would reach a teenage level where you could hide away in your room (if you had one) in order to stare vacantly at the hideous wallpaper. Though there was always music, drink and drugs to take you away from that.
Rebellion was a rites of passage. Swooning to Elvis's hip swings, growing your hair long and imitating Jagger, mascara on boys as you bopped to Roxy Music, scowling to the Clash, being a rude boy and listening to The Specials, dropping homie as you listened to Erik b and Rakim, depressing and listening to Cobain and fearing the end of history...
A few years earlier Tim Berners Lee was creating a technological tool called the World Wide Web that would become accessible to the majority of those in the west by the end of the decade. In the same year that Berners Lee was creating this thing a Finnish company called Radiolinja were inventing second generation cellular technology phones.
The collision of new digital technology and a political shift to a consensus politics based around financial services and mega corporations and an economic shift away from manufacturing and towards consumption all collided in the mid 1990s. At the same time you see strange shifts in youth culture. By the beginning of the following decade even the stuffy old BBC had created its own TV channel for a 16-34 demographic. There's the rise of the corporate brand and brand loyalty. Music diversifies but at the same time homogenizes. Young people seem to identify themselves less through what they listen to rather than what they listen to it on. In an intriguing realization of Marshall Mcluhan's the Medium is the Message theory, mediums themselves, particularly among our present generation become the dominant form of message. Your ipod said more about you than what's on it.
This guy's so phone bored he's gonna throw himself off a mountain while videoing it and relaying it to a live feed on...uh...whatever social media platform is hot right now.
But could this tech dystopia phone boredom be a good thing?
"Adam Perkins, a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at King’s College in London, said that phone boredom may even be a good thing sometimes. He said that it could potentially stop children from engaging in more destructive thought patterns or daydreaming, which can lead to unhappiness.
“Evolution takes a long time to catch up with technology,” Perkins said. “Smartphones came out 10 years ago, it’s not enough time to change kids’ evolution of their brains… I think I’m quite optimistic about the benefits of smartphones, they’re a good thing.”
He also cautioned worried adults from jumping to conclusions about smartphones ruining kids’ brains. Certainly technology can be addictive and has certain undeniable effects, but are those worse than things previous generations dealt with?"
Yes. Well, maybe no. Daydreaming causes unhappiness? What on earth does that say about our existence?
The key difference is the difference to the things previous generations dealt with. At no point in history was there an ability to connect like we can with smartphones and social media, to so many so instantaneously.
The initial optimism surrounding the internet as a tool of knowledge, akin to the invention of the printing press, has somewhat dissipated into a fear of what social media is doing to us, to our society and, most disturbingly, to our behaviours. Whilst corporations and would be governments might gather data on social media users, for Generation Z, perhaps the most corrosive aspect of new technology is its ability to self survey. Smartphones, the net and social media combine to teach us how to conform. They work in much the same way as Foucault's theory around The Panopticon, self surveillance. No one needs to guard us anymore because we guard ourselves, constantly judging our behaviours via our peers. Well, that's the theory.
Joel Stein argues: "In the U.S., millennials are the children of baby boomers, who are also known as the Me Generation, who then produced the Me Me Me Generation, whose selfishness technology has only exacerbated. Whereas in the 1950s families displayed a wedding photo, a school photo and maybe a military photo in their homes, the average middle-class American family today walks amid 85 pictures of themselves and their pets. Millennials have come of age in the era of the quantified self, recording their daily steps on FitBit, their whereabouts every hour of every day on PlaceMe and their genetic data on 23 and Me. They have less civic engagement and lower political participation than any previous group. This is a generation that would have made Walt Whitman wonder if maybe they should try singing a song of someone else.
The idea of the teenager started in the 1920s; in 1910, only a tiny percentage of kids went to high school, so most people's social interactions were with adults in their family or in the workplace. Now that cell phones allow kids to socialize at every hour--they send and receive an average of 88 texts a day, according to Pew--they're living under the constant influence of their friends. "Peer pressure is anti-intellectual. It is anti-historical. It is anti-eloquence," says Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory, who wrote The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30). "Never before in history have people been able to grow up and reach age 23 so dominated by peers. To develop intellectually you've got to relate to older people, older things: 17-year-olds never grow up if they're just hanging around other 17-year-olds.""
Bauerlin's argument is that this generation are unique. Unlike ours (Bauerlein's and my own) the linear passing of knowledge gives way to a circular self fulfilling narrative, the already cliched echo chamber effect. Where peers look to peers for affirmation, information, a formation of identity.
Despite our cultural differences the youth that Bauerlin experienced is much the same as my own. As a child and adolescent we had little personal money, we spent our evenings sitting with our families, in most ways this was simply horrific, but in one key way it linked back to our ancestors who sat around fires telling stories. Generations passed on their knowledge to the next generation. History was handed over. Now, obviously, my parents were morons so what could they hand to me? Well, I was fortunate to be the first generation that did have a TV set and back in those heady days we had three whole channels of choice. For most of the time it was the same pap you get now, game shows and situation comedies, soaps and badly lit dramas. But in amongst all that were history documentaries, foreign art movies, literary dramas. Of course these are still shown today but one doesn't interact with them in a family group. That isn't rose tinted glasses. I can't stand my family. However, that interaction between generations helped build a sense of shared history. A linear history. However, if most of your life information is coming from peer groups any kind of historical continuity is lost.
Traditionally, the tension between generations is the catalyst for societal transformation. The suburbia of 50s America shaken by rock'n'roll, the establishment, man, tuned out of by the hippies, poor old Bill Grundy meeting The Sex Pistols...
Much like a kind of Hegelian dialectics or Eisenstein theory of montage...
The clash of generations tended to give rise to new cultural and political aesthetics. Generation B clashing with staid Generation A gives rise to Generation C. My belief that generations no longer rebel would make sense in that the political, economic and social climate is much as it was three decades ago.
Somewhere in the 1990s this clash of generations appeared to disappear. Generations coalesced. The youth became conservative, conformist, they returned to a Protestant work ethic and freely branded themselves with corporate logos. But oddly so did everyone else. The older generation imitated their offspring in dress, manner and culture. It's no coincidence that the blockbuster movies based around comic books and fantasy novels began to dominate mainstream cinema and young adult fiction became a mainstream reading experience for fully grown up people.
Joel Stein points out that he's effectively a millennial too "I know my number of Twitter followers far better than the tally on my car's odometer; although Facebook has a strictly enforced limit of 5,000 friends, I somehow have 5,079. It was impossible not to remember, the whole time I was accusing millennials of being lazy, that I was supposed to finish this article nearly a year ago.
...Millennials' self-involvement is more a continuation of a trend than a revolutionary break from previous generations. They're not a new species; they've just mutated to adapt to their environment.
In fact, a lot of what counts as typical millennial behavior is how rich kids have always behaved. The Internet has democratized opportunity for many young people, giving them access and information that once belonged mostly to the wealthy.
Because millennials don't respect authority, they also don't resent it. That's why they're the first teens who aren't rebelling. They're not even sullen.
It's hard to hate your parents when they also listen to rap and watch Jon Stewart."
It's not that Gen Z are fundamentally different to previous generations, children and teenagers are much the same as children and teenagers have always been, me me me, but that the previous generations, adults, grandparents, now act and think like their child and teenage progeny.
We are all infantalized (and bored) by technology. So in a strange reversal of power relations, rather than adults regulating child behaviour, children and teenagers, our Generation Z, begin to regulate the behaviour of previous generations.
When Francis Fukuyama claimed we had reached the end of history in 1992 with the end of the cold war and the pre-eminence of liberal democracy he had a point. Perhaps not the point he meant (an ideological and economic victory) but the generations that have grown up in that period of the 90s, 00s, 10s, have never known anything other than our society. And it's a society that is the most conformist since the end of World War II but at the same time one that hails individualism more than any other. It's a society where individual human rights are the pre-eminent political discourse (gender rights, racial rights, sexuality rights) whilst being the most exploitative society since the dawn of the industrial Revolution with Chinese Apple factories, Bangladeshi sweatshops every bit as unpleasant as Blake's dark satanic mills. It's a society of unparalleled wealth and the only society to ever know its mode of production and consumption is killing itself with climate change. It's the only society to ever not to have future bearing dreams. For us the future is a bleak and dark catastrophe. But with amazing tech.
Generation Z, it is said, is a generation of responsibility and sense. The young don't drink much, they don't smoke, are less likely to use hard drugs. They are tall, healthy physical specimens yet emotionally a bit of a mess.
Is it any wonder if they have to live at home with their parents forever and ever?
They're a generation saddled with the biggest student debt. They can't afford to buy houses. Or often even to rent. The employment market is unstable, welfare has been cut, A.I. is a threat to many jobs yet education is no longer about knowledge but about prospective employment, with hard science and business subjects far outstripping the demand for the humanities.
Who do they look to for advice? Well certainly not their elders because they're too busy checking their twitter feed on their Iphone 8 or watching a Marvel superhero movie on Netflix on their 32 metre television. So...
"Kim Kardashian, who represents to nonmillennials all that is wrong with her generation, readily admits that she has no particular talent. But she also knows why she appeals to her peers. "They like that I share a lot of myself and that I've always been honest about the way I live my life," she says. "They want relationships with businesses and celebrities. Gen X was kept at arm's length from businesses and celebrity." When you're no longer cowed by power, you are going to like what a friend tells you about far more than what an ad campaign does, even if that friend is a celebrity trying to make money and that friendship is just a reply to one tweet."
Gen Z look to other young people (mostly on youtube or snapchat, it seems) for inspirational words of wisdom.
""Can you imagine if the boomers had YouTube, how narcissistic they would've seemed?" asks Scott Hess, senior vice president of human intelligence for SparkSMG, whose TedX speech, "Millennials: Who They Are and Why We Hate Them," advised companies on marketing to youth. "Can you imagine how many frickin' Instagrams of people playing in the mud during Woodstock we would've seen? I think in many ways you're blaming millennials for the technology that happens to exist right now." Yes, they check their phones during class, but think about how long you can stand in line without looking at your phone. Now imagine being used to that technology your whole life and having to sit through algebra."
A really good argument. Imagine if you could change something in the past it would make the past different. And Scott Hess isn't even a Gen Zer, proving the point that we're all idiots now.
Joel Stein: "Millennials are more accepting of differences, not just among gays, women and minorities but in everyone. "There are many, many subcultures, and you can dip into them and search around. I prefer that to you're either supermainstream or a riot grrrl," says Tavi Gevinson, a 17-year-old who runs Rookie, an online fashion magazine, from her bedroom when she's not at school. It's hard, in other words, to join the counterculture when there's no culture. "There's not this us-vs.-them thing now. Maybe that's why millennials don't rebel," she says."
Which all sounds very nice but, of course, without rebellion what do you get?
Rebellion (noun)
1. open fighting against authority
2. refusal to obey
Near Antonyms of rebellion:
agreeability, amenability, amiability, slavishness, submissiveness, subservience, subserviency, trainability, deference, docility, dutifulness, conformity, compliance, obedience, submission, subordinateness, subordination, tractability, tractableness.
Hmmm.
But this isn't the slavish future dystopia of Orwell that we're in is it? As Neil Postman argued in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business of 1985, our present dystopia, and here Postman was talking pre-digital, primarily about the negative effects of television, mirrors Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
Huxley looked so much cooler too. And that, of course, counts in our visual age.
Joel Stein finishes his article on the me me me generation on a positive note: "But if you need the ultimate proof that millennials could be a great force for positive change, know this: Tom Brokaw, champion of the Greatest Generation, loves millennials. He calls them the Wary Generation, and he thinks their cautiousness in life decisions is a smart response to their world. "Their great mantra has been: Challenge convention. Find new and better ways of doing things. And so that ethos transcends the wonky people who are inventing new apps and embraces the whole economy," he says."
Of course, this is complete nonsense (challenge convention? really?) but in The Guardian Michael Cragg also smells rebellion, of a sorts, in the air in Meme, myself and I: how pop’s new gen deal with social media anxiety.
"A wave of nihilism is infiltrating music, with the likes of Noah Cyrus, Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Let’s Eat Grandma reflecting on the dystopia created by the digital world...
Pop into any branch of high-street clothes shop Urban Outfitters and you will be presented with a paradox. Stroll through the clothes racks and towards the checkout, past the mini cacti, glittery photo frames and avocado bed linen, and you’ll find a selection of books. “READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO BE INSTAGRAM FAMOUS,” screams one in all-caps, while next to it whispers another called The Little Book of Self-Care. It’s emblematic of an identity crisis that is engulfing a whole generation – the so-called fame-hungry narcissists v hyper-aware over-thinkers – and one that’s increasingly being reflected by its pop stars. Recently, it gained its anthem in the shape of We Are Fucked by 18-year-old Noah Cyrus (featuring Mø), a surprisingly self-lacerating, Max Martin-produced nihilistic banger that simmers with frustration at Cyrus’s generation’s social media addiction and her fears for how it might hobble their future."
I heard about 30 seconds and I felt like my past (30 seconds) and been hobbled (whatever that means). No wonder youth are so disaffected if that's their anthem. It's. Just. Horrible.
"So why is it Cyrus’s generation specifically (Generation Z is roughly marked as those born anywhere between the mid-1990s and mid-00s) who are starting to sing about it, and why with such anger? How does it fit alongside previous acts of musical nihilism that grew out of the punk scene in the 70s, grunge in the 90s and hip-hop’s recent downbeat turn?"
I don't know anything about hip-hop's recent downbeat turn but this has nothing to do with grunge or punk. There is no anger. It's more like a whiney yelp.
"The Swedish singer-songwriter LOVA, AKA 19-year-old Lova Alvilde, actively eschews writing about some of pop’s typical themes (love, heartbreak, being “in da club”). Her forthcoming EP will focus instead on the false idea of perfection generated by social media...“For me, writing about social media and its effect on people has always felt like a very natural and important thing to do,” she says. “I think it’s going to be hard not to write about it, especially for younger, upcoming artists. Social media is such a current factor, not only in my life but for almost every person of my generation, so that makes it a more obvious thing to write about. I want to open up to conversations about how society is shaping us into not talking about the things that actually matter,"" she said in a post on instagram.
"While Dr Aaron Balick, author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking, agrees that “for Generation Z, social media is more embedded into the social fabric than previous generations”, he also sees this as not wholly negative. “On the one hand, the social self as represented online is in some ways a fundamental, but young people are savvy too, and are capable of engaging with it critically.”
Balick sees We Are Fucked’s attack on ruptured identities as more of a wake-up call than a shrug: “This song represents that criticism, drawing attention to the fact that a postured presentation of self could be a direct road to being fucked.”" It is at once within and without the dialectical possibility of a form of jouissance and metaphysical being and non-being...
I don't know how Balick extrapolated that from the song. It seemed to be a rather maudlin attempt to critique her culture whilst being immersed in said culture. It's not her fault that our culture allows no space for acts of rebellion, though I'm assuming the song is partly her fault. To be fair I couldn't listen to it without getting an anxiety attack. What I did hear was a kind of 80s throwback angsty whine. I sensed no anger. A sort of resigned inward looking vacuousness. I think I found why...
"Songwriter Savan Kotecha, who co-wrote We Are Fucked alongside Cyrus and Swedish pop alchemist Max Martin, agrees. “The youth are so articulate and bright and aware. We’re going to see more of that, I think; they can sense when something’s wrong, even if they don’t have all the answers.” Kotecha says that, from other sessions he has been in, more and more artists of Cyrus’s age are starting to write not only about the identity crises social media inflicts, but wider issues affecting their generation."
Kotecha is an X-Factor "vocal producer" and Max Martin is an old Swedish bloke who mass produces Taylor Swift and Maroon 5 songs. No wonder the anthem for our doomed youth sounded like a cosmetically formulaic pop tune with all the anger of a Disney TV show.
The New York Dolls said it all much better back in 1973 and they wrote it too. Wow.
The article by Cragg goes on in much the same way, young people feel despondent about social media and tech but are addicted to it, so whaddya gunna do? And ends on a bright cheery positive note.
"“I truly believe that the older generation have more to learn from us than we have to learn from them,” says Alvilde. “Today’s society is constantly changing and evolving and I think they have a harder time keeping up with that.”
Balick agrees: “The speed at which social technologies change makes it a bit more difficult for older generations to understand the nature of the challenges of the younger ones because the generation gaps get smaller and smaller.”
Pop, as it always has done, reflects society, and at the moment there’s a generational shift towards a youth culture raised in a prism of self-evaluation and self-recognition. “I wouldn’t say we’re lazy or don’t have potential, we’re just not channelling it correctly all the time,” states Cyrus. “We can do more than just social media. We can change the world.”"
Change the world into what? That sounds optimistic. I thought you were fucked. Shall I share a dose of pre-Generation X healthy cynicism here? You are fucked. We're all fucked.
Lova Alvilde, one of the gifted Gen Z songsters in the article, really nails the problem to the tech mast. Tech does indeed change at an alarming rate but if one is still circulating the same things with the new tech what is there to learn? What can I learn from Alvilde's instagram feed? There's just loads of photos of herself, thereby surely proving the me me me generation dictum?
Oddly, one of the comments on the Guardian article had far more to say about Gen Z than the actual article and thereby proving social media can be enlightening, I suppose:
"My teenage daughter despairs about her classmates who she says spend all their time on social media. She had a friend stay for a sleepover recently but said afterwards that the friend kept checking her phone every five minutes. My daughter isn’t immune to looking at instagram but never posts anything about herself - she is too interested in reading (although my wife frets that she should be reading something educational rather than her latest obsession which seems to be Korean and Chinese manga!)
Fittingly for the article my daughter does seem too cynical and world-weary for someone so young. She recognises that she is very privileged yet at the same time feels that the future looks bleak for herself and her generation. Objectively her life is so much better than mine was but I wonder whether she simply knows too much. I was much more ignorant at her age but perhaps that naivety helped in some way to keep me more positive."
It's a strange knowledge though. It's tech savvy and culture light, it's the loss of childhood but perpetual adolescence, it's having everything but feeling like you have nothing.
Joel Stein's piece in Time encouraged numerous retorts in The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic, among others.
Of course, defining generations is meaningless without notions of class, gender or race. If you can remember the sixties you really weren't there, said comedian Charlie Fleischer but, of course, that should read you weren't young, white and middle class. And, of course, when Stein or others talk about Generation Z it is a generalization to mostly mean white middle class like himself.
For the best critique of the me me me generation I point you to The Atlantic piece by Elspeth Reeve which rightly points out that every post war generation has been the me me me generation.
However, I would add the caveat that in the past they grew up into a different generation. If all the generations consume the same culture now then what is Generation Z going to become? Isn't Z the end of the line?
In Samuel Butler's Darwin Among The Machines, a letter to a New Zealand newspaper in 1863 he argued:
"Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."
Perhaps Gen Z are no different to any other generation. It's simply the technology that has changed.
After all, we have a 71 year old president who announces American foreign policy via tweets.
But then again, there is something horribly wrong when the most powerful nation on Earth elect a manchild who prefers Twitter to political discourse.
Mark Bauerlein (in a piece by Lee Drutman LA TImes:'The Dumbest Generation' ) offers a grim view of our present generation.
"The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace. "Social life is a powerful temptation," Bauerlein explains, "and most teenagers feel the pain of missing out."
This ceaseless pipeline of peer-to-peer activity is worrisome, he argues, not only because it crowds out the more serious stuff but also because it strengthens what he calls the "pull of immaturity." Instead of connecting them with parents, teachers and other adult figures, "[t]he web . . . encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age." When Bauerlein tells an audience of college students, "You are six times more likely to know who the latest American Idol is than you are to know who the speaker of the U.S. House is," a voice in the crowd tells him: " 'American Idol' IS more important.""
What's Myspace? The piece was from 2008 and shows the same concerns, different tech.
But fortunately the article is alarmist and does not foresee a realistic future for 2018.
"The book's ultimate doomsday scenario -- of a dull and self-absorbed new generation of citizens falling prey to demagoguery and brazen power grabs -- seems at once overblown (witness, for example, this election season's youth reengagement in politics) and also yesterday's news (haven't we always been perilously close to this, if not already suffering from it?). "
Oh yeah, Trump. But hey, Gen Z came out all guns blazing (metaphorically...as of yet) against Trump in 2016.
The alarmist concerns of Bauerlein has less to do with youth and more to do with socio-political culture. When Bauerlein rails against a culture that doesn't read, is fixated by a hand held electronic device and that over 50% of them don't know that Germany were the enemy of the allies in World War II he's really railing against people, per se rather than Millennials. As smartphones become a mechanical extension of ourselves Gen Zers are merely an extension of a cultural shift that has been occurring for at least 40 years. Yet, at the same time, it feels to this sad old gimmer, that something has shifted, that we lack a promise of any substantial future, we're all too aware that climate change is happening and will have unknown and unpleasant effects on our world, that consumption can't continue at the present rate, that our very lives governed by a culture steeped in an eternal present will have to grow up and face the consequences of our youthful folly. Or maybe we'll just go check Instagram again.
Are you a selfish whining millennial? Take the handy quiz here at How Millennial Are You?
Victorian Flaneur.
The UK overwhelmingly voted to stay in it.
The year is 1977.
A new youth movement motivated by Punk Rock and Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League sprung up overnight. There was a seemingly organized reaction against what was seen as an old conservative guard of musicians playing prog rock 15 minute keyboard solos, stations playing radio friendly disco that glorified wealth and excess and a political landscape mired in a post-1960s-optimism depression. Music became a ridiculously fertile ground for youth rebellion.
THE 1970s
In 1971 the Nixon Shock decoupled gold from the dollar leading to lending booms that caused the 2008 crash. In 1972 Watergate led to the beginnings of a public distrust in politicians. In the same year The Equal Rights Amendment was passed in the US giving equality of rights under law "which could not be denied by sex." In 1973 the oil crisis led to Middle Eastern nations like Saudi Arabia and Qatar controlling world oil supply. In the same year Syria went to war. In a reaction to 1960s liberalism a "New Right" emerged in the US leading to a "a primal scream by The People against Big Government." A new movement began to protect the environment with the first Earth Day. Anti-war demonstrations against Vietnam spread across compasses, including Kent State in Ohio.
In the Islamic world in 1978 The Shah of Iran, a western puppet ruler was deposed and the Ayatollah Khomeini replaced him leading to modern Islamist conservatism.
Most of the remaining European colonies were handed back to their people. In a series of military coups, South American democracies were replaced with right wing "juntas", the most infamous being Pinochet's capture of Chile in 1973 with the help of the CIA, US covert forces overtly toppling foreign regimes.
While...in the New York Magazine in 1976 Tome Wolfe dubbed the 1970s The Me Decade.
"Newspaper columnists and newsmagazine writers continually referred to the two men’s “enigmatic appeal.” Which is to say, they couldn’t explain it. Nevertheless, they tried. They theorized that the war in Vietnam, Watergate, the FBI and CIA scandals, had left the electorate shell-shocked and disillusioned and that in their despair the citizens were groping no longer for specific remedies but for sheer faith, something, anything (even holy rolling), to believe in. This was in keeping with the current fashion of interpreting all new political phenomena in terms of recent disasters, frustration, protest, the decline of civilization . . . the Grim Slide. But when the New York Times and CBS employed a polling organization to try to find out just what great gusher of “frustration” and “protest” Carter had hit, the results were baffling. A Harvard political scientist, William Schneider, concluded for the L.A. Times that “the Carter protest” was a new kind of protest, “a protest of good feelings.” That was a new kind, sure enough—a protest that wasn’t a protest."
Protest voting that wasn't actually any kind of protest.
Wolfe sees this me decade in terms of generational shifts, atomization, a new obsession with the self and making one's own life a kind of, well, life pursuit.
"The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self . . . and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!) This had always been an aristocratic luxury, confined throughout most of history to the life of the courts, since only the very wealthiest classes had the free time and the surplus income to dwell upon this sweetest and vainest of pastimes. It smacked so much of vanity, in fact, that the noble folk involved in it always took care to call it quite something else."
There was the rise of "lemon sessions" where: "One girl would become “it,” and the others would light into her personality, pulling it to pieces to analyze every defect . . . her spitefulness, her awkwardness, her bad breath, embarrassing clothes, ridiculous laugh, her suck-up fawning, latent lesbianism, or whatever. The poor creature might be reduced to tears. She might blurt out the most terrible confessions, hatreds, and primordial fears. But, it was presumed, she would be the stronger for it afterward. She would be on her way toward a new personality."
The rise of the slogan as self definition: "In 1961 a copywriter named Shirley Polykoff was working for the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency on the Clairol hair-dye account when she came up with the line: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” In a single slogan she had summed up what might be described as the secular side of the Me Decade. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a—!” (You have only to fill in the blank.)... often the unconscious desire is nothing more than: Let’s talk about Me. The great unexpected dividend of the feminist movement has been to elevate an ordinary status—woman, housewife—to the level of drama. One’s very existence as a woman—as Me—becomes something all the world analyzes, agonizes over, draws cosmic conclusions from, or, in any event, takes seriously." Just do it.
And Alienation: "Tocqueville’s idea of modern man lost “in the solitude of his own heart” has been brought forward into our time in such terminology as alienation (Marx), anomie (Durkheim), the mass man (Ortega y Gasset), and the lonely crowd (Riesman). The picture is always of a creature uprooted by industrialism, packed together in cities with people he doesn’t know, helpless against massive economic and political shifts—in short, a creature like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, a helpless, bewildered, and dispirited slave to the machinery. This victim of modern times has always been a most appealing figure to intellectuals, artists, and architects. The poor devil so obviously needs us to be his Engineers of the Soul, to use a term popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. We will pygmalionize this sad lump of clay into a homo novus, a New Man, with a new philosophy, a new aesthetics, not to mention new Bauhaus housing and furniture.
But once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s, they did an astonishing thing—they took their money and ran. They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do—they discovered and started doting on Me! They’ve created the greatest age of individualism in American history! All rules are broken! The prophets are out of business! Where the Third Great Awakening will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes . . . Me . . . Me . . . . Me . . . Me . . ."
Fast forward 40 years to the coming of age of Generation Z.
The 1970s and the 2000s have such strange parallels. Unlike the 1970s, Generation Z had no immediate golden age to look back on. If the 1970s were characterized by political upheaval and individuals turning inwards, becoming atomized narcissists then it was a reaction to the 1960s, Vietnam campus protests, 1968 student revolts, the overturning of culture being dominated by stuffy white men in suits, The Nouvelle Vague and The Beatles and The Stones, Pop Art and Monty Python then how do you react to revolution? You become more conservative.
Ultimately it was the baby boomers, the Woodstock Generation, that gave rise to the spectacle events like Apple store openings.
DECADING
Gen Z don't have a 1960s though, do they? And is "decading" cultures reductive? After all 1961 was a different world to 1969.
Perhaps such decading works historically to show upheaval.
In reality, perhaps, Britain was swinging in 1961...
Though something, as Tom Wolfe suggests in his New York article, did shift in the 1970s. Those on the right would argue that money trickled down to free those at the bottom from poverty and allow them the leisure and the freedom to explore themselves, something that had only traditionally been the perogative of the wealthy. Those on the left might argue that that leisure and freedom was hard fought by union disputes and protest.
By the end of the 1970s you do see a disillusionment with politics which allows populist charismatic personalities to gain power, Thatcher in 1979 in the UK and a couple of years later in the US, Reagan. You see a general disillusion with life. The nihilism of
We're the flowers
In the dustbin
We're the poison
In your human machine
We're the future
Your future...
There's no future
In England's dreaming...
Don't be told what you want
Don't be told what you need
There's no future
No future
No future for you
God Save the Queen: Sex Pistols
But punk nihilism soon became a fetishized fashion statement. Another way to exhibit your identity through clothes, wearing the t-shirt of your tribe.
Wolfe wrote The Me Decade in 1976 but anything he wrote would be superseded by the vacuous primary coloured self absorbed wealth obsessed 1980s.
By the end of that decade of the 1980s youth rebellion had found its voice in a Generation X, an overeducated underemployed Mcjob lost tribe where naval gazing was less about narcissism and more about a fulfilment of the Sex Pistols lyrics. The no future of 1977 became the no present for the grunge generation. And perhaps for the first time with youth revolt, rebellion was not expressed outwardly, as a means to change their lives and environment but rather a dark tinged expression of a generation who were the first to truly realize they had nowhere to go. That their time was up.
Exemplified by Kurt Cobain's vocals on Top of The Pops to Smells Like Teen Spirit...
And I forget just why I taste
Oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile
I found it hard, it's hard to find
Oh well, whatever, never mind
All sung in a peculiar ghostly voice from the other side style by Cobain, hidden behind sunglasses and hair.
It feels like a requiem.
White youth died. Black youth found a voice in hip hop but like grunge this soon lost any sense of rebellion or revolution.
Public Enemy's "Harder Than You Think" was released in 2007 twenty years after they first rose to prominence as a groundbreaking rap act. Harder Than You Think was a single taken from the album How You Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul?.
A war going on so where y'all at?
"Fight the Power" comes great responsibility
'F the Police' but who's stopping you from killing me?
Disaster, fiascos over a loop by P.E
If it's an I instead of we believing TV
Spitting riches, bitches, and this new thing about snitches
Watch them asses move as the masses switches
System dissed them but barely missed her
My sole intention to save my brothers and sisters...
Revolution means change, don't look at me strange
So I can't repeat what other rappers be sayin'
You don't stand for something, you fall for anything
Harder than you think, its a beautiful thing
Clearly showing how rap had sold itself to tropes like fuck the police in a self confirming gangster glorifying loop overlaid with obsessing about style.
Ironic that Harder Than You Think was used as a British TV show's credit music and led to it becoming Public Enemy's biggest British hit.
Then somewhere in the the 1990s something happened that shifted attention from the hopeless Gen Xers to a new generation who grew up with no previous golden age to rebel against and revile or hold up as a beacon. Coupled with this was a new technological dawn. The personal computer would revolutionize our lives and coupled with the internet, the global village became a reality and perversely with it came both an homogenization of culture and atomization through urbanization.
X Y Z
Gen Y blends into Gen Z. Both generations have effectively known nothing other than the political system we have and have had for nearly forty years (in the west), neo-liberalism, if you like, an economy dependent on consumption, a culture dependent on zeitgeist rather than rebellion, and most importantly, a technological revolution.
Often one hears the internet revolution compared to Gutenberg and the print revolution. When naysayers bemoan the internet for all the ills of the world, those who see the internet as a great source of freedom, expression and democracy suggest that the printing press was seen in much the same way. However, of course, print media in the 15th Century required a skill that the vast majority of people did not retain and would not for another four centuries, the ability to read.
The same technology argument was used with television in the 1950s. The idiot box in the corner of the room would make us passive consumers. A moral panic ensued but the world didn't collapse. But did it make us into passive consumers?
Generation Z is usually defined as the generation born from the mid 1990s through to the present. This generation have always known digital technology. And in recent times has seen a further tech leap with the ubiquity of smartphones replacing 'traditional' home computers. They offer the freedom to roam, to instantly communicate, and perhaps most chillingly, with the creation of Apps the near superfluousness of written language.
If the baby boomers of the 50s that became the hippies of the 60s were easy to differentiate from the punk nihilistic 70s...
The Further bus of the Merry Pranksters
The nowhere bus, Jamie Reid's cover to the Sex Pistols' Pretty Vacant
And the 1980s excess was reflected in 1990s Generation X reverting to a form of nihilism...
How does one differentiate Generation Y from Generation Z? As both are defined as a visual culture...here's some more pictures to explain the difference...
THE ME ME ME GENERATION
Joel Stein wrote Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation for Time Magazine back in the heady days of 2013. Remember that? 2013. Who ruled then? Gen Y or Gen Z? Who knows? 2013. Margaret Thatcher and Nelson Mandela died, the pope resigned, The Boston Marathon terrorist attack, the terrorist machete attack in Woolwich, London, Edward Snowden leaked CIA files, President Morsi was deposed in the Egyptian Arab Spring, the Westgate terror attack in Nairobi, Kenya. It was also the year that "selfie" was added to dictionaries.
Stein is optimistic about Gen Zers, seeing them as "the most threatening and exciting generation since the baby boomers brought about social revolution, not because they're trying to take over the Establishment but because they're growing up without one. The Industrial Revolution made individuals far more powerful--they could move to a city, start a business, read and form organizations. The information revolution has further empowered individuals by handing them the technology to compete against huge organizations: hackers vs. corporations, bloggers vs. newspapers, terrorists vs. nation-states, YouTube directors vs. studios, app-makers vs. entire industries. Millennials don't need us. That's why we're scared of them."
Personally, I find them terrifying but I think that has less to do with any of this than that they are young.
So Stein, five years ago, saw the Gen Z's as full of potential. Their use of technology would revolutionize the way we think. Except, of course, it hasn't and it doesn't, unless one assumes this revolution to look like vlogs on YouTube or Instagram feeds.
Back in the present, Taylor Lorenz at the Daily Beast argues that Generation Z Is Already Bored by the Internet Today’s teens are still bored, often incredibly so. They’re just more likely to experience a new type of boredom: phone bored.
"Teenagers today have unprecedented access to technology, and yet many report that they’ve never been so bored...To many teens, smartphones and the internet have already lost their appeal.
Phone boredom occurs when you’re technically “on your phone,” but you’re still bored out of your mind. It’s that feeling when you’re mindlessly clicking around, opening and closing apps, looking for something to do digitally and finding the options uninteresting.
To a parent or the casual observer, a phone-bored teen may appear engaged. After all, they’re on their phone, which many people consider an inherently engaging activity. In reality, they’re bored out of their mind.
It’s important to note that the majority of time users spend on their phones, they spend engaged. Tech companies go to exorbitant lengths to keep users active and attentive. If you’re posting photos, liking, commenting, reading, or watching something on your phone, you’re not phone bored. Phone boredom hits when you’ve cycled through everything there is to do on your device and you’re left feeling stranded."
Where are all those hackers, YouTube directors and bloggers and app makers taking on The Man gone? How could one be bored with the limitless possibilities that the internet offers?
In the past the trajectory of generations was linear. For most with a relatively stable home, youth meant school and home until you escaped these shackles and joined the adult world in work in order to meet your mate and start your own home. School was regulated to both provide education and to prepare you for the workplace. Home often involved family time in front of the TV. Then you would reach a teenage level where you could hide away in your room (if you had one) in order to stare vacantly at the hideous wallpaper. Though there was always music, drink and drugs to take you away from that.
Rebellion was a rites of passage. Swooning to Elvis's hip swings, growing your hair long and imitating Jagger, mascara on boys as you bopped to Roxy Music, scowling to the Clash, being a rude boy and listening to The Specials, dropping homie as you listened to Erik b and Rakim, depressing and listening to Cobain and fearing the end of history...
Slacker 1991
Then oddly something appears to change somewhere in the 1990s. Politically, the left in the UK and US began to look an awful lot like the right. Bill Clinton was elected in 1993 on a public spending mandate but quickly reversed that and oversaw the most swinging cuts to public services ever in the US. Four years later Tony Blair was elected PM in the UK and began a series of measures that completely transformed education and the way we view employment, culture and public expenditure.A few years earlier Tim Berners Lee was creating a technological tool called the World Wide Web that would become accessible to the majority of those in the west by the end of the decade. In the same year that Berners Lee was creating this thing a Finnish company called Radiolinja were inventing second generation cellular technology phones.
Berners Lee showing some old gimmers how to get free porn
Comedian Dom Joly satirizing the advent of mobile cellular phones
The collision of new digital technology and a political shift to a consensus politics based around financial services and mega corporations and an economic shift away from manufacturing and towards consumption all collided in the mid 1990s. At the same time you see strange shifts in youth culture. By the beginning of the following decade even the stuffy old BBC had created its own TV channel for a 16-34 demographic. There's the rise of the corporate brand and brand loyalty. Music diversifies but at the same time homogenizes. Young people seem to identify themselves less through what they listen to rather than what they listen to it on. In an intriguing realization of Marshall Mcluhan's the Medium is the Message theory, mediums themselves, particularly among our present generation become the dominant form of message. Your ipod said more about you than what's on it.
To an alien or someone over 40 maybe some ads become like a zen riddle...
But could this tech dystopia phone boredom be a good thing?
"Adam Perkins, a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at King’s College in London, said that phone boredom may even be a good thing sometimes. He said that it could potentially stop children from engaging in more destructive thought patterns or daydreaming, which can lead to unhappiness.
“Evolution takes a long time to catch up with technology,” Perkins said. “Smartphones came out 10 years ago, it’s not enough time to change kids’ evolution of their brains… I think I’m quite optimistic about the benefits of smartphones, they’re a good thing.”
He also cautioned worried adults from jumping to conclusions about smartphones ruining kids’ brains. Certainly technology can be addictive and has certain undeniable effects, but are those worse than things previous generations dealt with?"
Yes. Well, maybe no. Daydreaming causes unhappiness? What on earth does that say about our existence?
The key difference is the difference to the things previous generations dealt with. At no point in history was there an ability to connect like we can with smartphones and social media, to so many so instantaneously.
Joel Stein argues: "In the U.S., millennials are the children of baby boomers, who are also known as the Me Generation, who then produced the Me Me Me Generation, whose selfishness technology has only exacerbated. Whereas in the 1950s families displayed a wedding photo, a school photo and maybe a military photo in their homes, the average middle-class American family today walks amid 85 pictures of themselves and their pets. Millennials have come of age in the era of the quantified self, recording their daily steps on FitBit, their whereabouts every hour of every day on PlaceMe and their genetic data on 23 and Me. They have less civic engagement and lower political participation than any previous group. This is a generation that would have made Walt Whitman wonder if maybe they should try singing a song of someone else.
The idea of the teenager started in the 1920s; in 1910, only a tiny percentage of kids went to high school, so most people's social interactions were with adults in their family or in the workplace. Now that cell phones allow kids to socialize at every hour--they send and receive an average of 88 texts a day, according to Pew--they're living under the constant influence of their friends. "Peer pressure is anti-intellectual. It is anti-historical. It is anti-eloquence," says Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory, who wrote The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30). "Never before in history have people been able to grow up and reach age 23 so dominated by peers. To develop intellectually you've got to relate to older people, older things: 17-year-olds never grow up if they're just hanging around other 17-year-olds.""
Bauerlin's argument is that this generation are unique. Unlike ours (Bauerlein's and my own) the linear passing of knowledge gives way to a circular self fulfilling narrative, the already cliched echo chamber effect. Where peers look to peers for affirmation, information, a formation of identity.
Eggers dystopia in which a Google like Circle company controls every aspect of the heroine's life whilst promoting the ideas of freedom and individualism (it's an incredibly boring book)
Despite our cultural differences the youth that Bauerlin experienced is much the same as my own. As a child and adolescent we had little personal money, we spent our evenings sitting with our families, in most ways this was simply horrific, but in one key way it linked back to our ancestors who sat around fires telling stories. Generations passed on their knowledge to the next generation. History was handed over. Now, obviously, my parents were morons so what could they hand to me? Well, I was fortunate to be the first generation that did have a TV set and back in those heady days we had three whole channels of choice. For most of the time it was the same pap you get now, game shows and situation comedies, soaps and badly lit dramas. But in amongst all that were history documentaries, foreign art movies, literary dramas. Of course these are still shown today but one doesn't interact with them in a family group. That isn't rose tinted glasses. I can't stand my family. However, that interaction between generations helped build a sense of shared history. A linear history. However, if most of your life information is coming from peer groups any kind of historical continuity is lost.
Traditionally, the tension between generations is the catalyst for societal transformation. The suburbia of 50s America shaken by rock'n'roll, the establishment, man, tuned out of by the hippies, poor old Bill Grundy meeting The Sex Pistols...
Somewhere in the 1990s this clash of generations appeared to disappear. Generations coalesced. The youth became conservative, conformist, they returned to a Protestant work ethic and freely branded themselves with corporate logos. But oddly so did everyone else. The older generation imitated their offspring in dress, manner and culture. It's no coincidence that the blockbuster movies based around comic books and fantasy novels began to dominate mainstream cinema and young adult fiction became a mainstream reading experience for fully grown up people.
Abe looks on in horror
One of these is the mother of the other three.
Joel Stein points out that he's effectively a millennial too "I know my number of Twitter followers far better than the tally on my car's odometer; although Facebook has a strictly enforced limit of 5,000 friends, I somehow have 5,079. It was impossible not to remember, the whole time I was accusing millennials of being lazy, that I was supposed to finish this article nearly a year ago.
...Millennials' self-involvement is more a continuation of a trend than a revolutionary break from previous generations. They're not a new species; they've just mutated to adapt to their environment.
In fact, a lot of what counts as typical millennial behavior is how rich kids have always behaved. The Internet has democratized opportunity for many young people, giving them access and information that once belonged mostly to the wealthy.
Because millennials don't respect authority, they also don't resent it. That's why they're the first teens who aren't rebelling. They're not even sullen.
It's hard to hate your parents when they also listen to rap and watch Jon Stewart."
It's not that Gen Z are fundamentally different to previous generations, children and teenagers are much the same as children and teenagers have always been, me me me, but that the previous generations, adults, grandparents, now act and think like their child and teenage progeny.
We are all infantalized (and bored) by technology. So in a strange reversal of power relations, rather than adults regulating child behaviour, children and teenagers, our Generation Z, begin to regulate the behaviour of previous generations.
Generation Z, it is said, is a generation of responsibility and sense. The young don't drink much, they don't smoke, are less likely to use hard drugs. They are tall, healthy physical specimens yet emotionally a bit of a mess.
Who do they look to for advice? Well certainly not their elders because they're too busy checking their twitter feed on their Iphone 8 or watching a Marvel superhero movie on Netflix on their 32 metre television. So...
"Kim Kardashian, who represents to nonmillennials all that is wrong with her generation, readily admits that she has no particular talent. But she also knows why she appeals to her peers. "They like that I share a lot of myself and that I've always been honest about the way I live my life," she says. "They want relationships with businesses and celebrities. Gen X was kept at arm's length from businesses and celebrity." When you're no longer cowed by power, you are going to like what a friend tells you about far more than what an ad campaign does, even if that friend is a celebrity trying to make money and that friendship is just a reply to one tweet."
Gen Z look to other young people (mostly on youtube or snapchat, it seems) for inspirational words of wisdom.
Zoella is the Derrida of now
Pewdiepie dispenses wisdom like Lao Tzu
Kids huh? They do spout nonsense.
A really good argument. Imagine if you could change something in the past it would make the past different. And Scott Hess isn't even a Gen Zer, proving the point that we're all idiots now.
Joel Stein: "Millennials are more accepting of differences, not just among gays, women and minorities but in everyone. "There are many, many subcultures, and you can dip into them and search around. I prefer that to you're either supermainstream or a riot grrrl," says Tavi Gevinson, a 17-year-old who runs Rookie, an online fashion magazine, from her bedroom when she's not at school. It's hard, in other words, to join the counterculture when there's no culture. "There's not this us-vs.-them thing now. Maybe that's why millennials don't rebel," she says."
Which all sounds very nice but, of course, without rebellion what do you get?
Rebellion (noun)
1. open fighting against authority
2. refusal to obey
Near Antonyms of rebellion:
agreeability, amenability, amiability, slavishness, submissiveness, subservience, subserviency, trainability, deference, docility, dutifulness, conformity, compliance, obedience, submission, subordinateness, subordination, tractability, tractableness.
Hmmm.
But this isn't the slavish future dystopia of Orwell that we're in is it? As Neil Postman argued in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business of 1985, our present dystopia, and here Postman was talking pre-digital, primarily about the negative effects of television, mirrors Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
Joel Stein finishes his article on the me me me generation on a positive note: "But if you need the ultimate proof that millennials could be a great force for positive change, know this: Tom Brokaw, champion of the Greatest Generation, loves millennials. He calls them the Wary Generation, and he thinks their cautiousness in life decisions is a smart response to their world. "Their great mantra has been: Challenge convention. Find new and better ways of doing things. And so that ethos transcends the wonky people who are inventing new apps and embraces the whole economy," he says."
Of course, this is complete nonsense (challenge convention? really?) but in The Guardian Michael Cragg also smells rebellion, of a sorts, in the air in Meme, myself and I: how pop’s new gen deal with social media anxiety.
"A wave of nihilism is infiltrating music, with the likes of Noah Cyrus, Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Let’s Eat Grandma reflecting on the dystopia created by the digital world...
Pop into any branch of high-street clothes shop Urban Outfitters and you will be presented with a paradox. Stroll through the clothes racks and towards the checkout, past the mini cacti, glittery photo frames and avocado bed linen, and you’ll find a selection of books. “READ THIS IF YOU WANT TO BE INSTAGRAM FAMOUS,” screams one in all-caps, while next to it whispers another called The Little Book of Self-Care. It’s emblematic of an identity crisis that is engulfing a whole generation – the so-called fame-hungry narcissists v hyper-aware over-thinkers – and one that’s increasingly being reflected by its pop stars. Recently, it gained its anthem in the shape of We Are Fucked by 18-year-old Noah Cyrus (featuring Mø), a surprisingly self-lacerating, Max Martin-produced nihilistic banger that simmers with frustration at Cyrus’s generation’s social media addiction and her fears for how it might hobble their future."
"So why is it Cyrus’s generation specifically (Generation Z is roughly marked as those born anywhere between the mid-1990s and mid-00s) who are starting to sing about it, and why with such anger? How does it fit alongside previous acts of musical nihilism that grew out of the punk scene in the 70s, grunge in the 90s and hip-hop’s recent downbeat turn?"
I don't know anything about hip-hop's recent downbeat turn but this has nothing to do with grunge or punk. There is no anger. It's more like a whiney yelp.
"The Swedish singer-songwriter LOVA, AKA 19-year-old Lova Alvilde, actively eschews writing about some of pop’s typical themes (love, heartbreak, being “in da club”). Her forthcoming EP will focus instead on the false idea of perfection generated by social media...“For me, writing about social media and its effect on people has always felt like a very natural and important thing to do,” she says. “I think it’s going to be hard not to write about it, especially for younger, upcoming artists. Social media is such a current factor, not only in my life but for almost every person of my generation, so that makes it a more obvious thing to write about. I want to open up to conversations about how society is shaping us into not talking about the things that actually matter,"" she said in a post on instagram.
"While Dr Aaron Balick, author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking, agrees that “for Generation Z, social media is more embedded into the social fabric than previous generations”, he also sees this as not wholly negative. “On the one hand, the social self as represented online is in some ways a fundamental, but young people are savvy too, and are capable of engaging with it critically.”
Balick sees We Are Fucked’s attack on ruptured identities as more of a wake-up call than a shrug: “This song represents that criticism, drawing attention to the fact that a postured presentation of self could be a direct road to being fucked.”" It is at once within and without the dialectical possibility of a form of jouissance and metaphysical being and non-being...
I don't know how Balick extrapolated that from the song. It seemed to be a rather maudlin attempt to critique her culture whilst being immersed in said culture. It's not her fault that our culture allows no space for acts of rebellion, though I'm assuming the song is partly her fault. To be fair I couldn't listen to it without getting an anxiety attack. What I did hear was a kind of 80s throwback angsty whine. I sensed no anger. A sort of resigned inward looking vacuousness. I think I found why...
"Songwriter Savan Kotecha, who co-wrote We Are Fucked alongside Cyrus and Swedish pop alchemist Max Martin, agrees. “The youth are so articulate and bright and aware. We’re going to see more of that, I think; they can sense when something’s wrong, even if they don’t have all the answers.” Kotecha says that, from other sessions he has been in, more and more artists of Cyrus’s age are starting to write not only about the identity crises social media inflicts, but wider issues affecting their generation."
Kotecha is an X-Factor "vocal producer" and Max Martin is an old Swedish bloke who mass produces Taylor Swift and Maroon 5 songs. No wonder the anthem for our doomed youth sounded like a cosmetically formulaic pop tune with all the anger of a Disney TV show.
The New York Dolls said it all much better back in 1973 and they wrote it too. Wow.
The article by Cragg goes on in much the same way, young people feel despondent about social media and tech but are addicted to it, so whaddya gunna do? And ends on a bright cheery positive note.
"“I truly believe that the older generation have more to learn from us than we have to learn from them,” says Alvilde. “Today’s society is constantly changing and evolving and I think they have a harder time keeping up with that.”
Balick agrees: “The speed at which social technologies change makes it a bit more difficult for older generations to understand the nature of the challenges of the younger ones because the generation gaps get smaller and smaller.”
Pop, as it always has done, reflects society, and at the moment there’s a generational shift towards a youth culture raised in a prism of self-evaluation and self-recognition. “I wouldn’t say we’re lazy or don’t have potential, we’re just not channelling it correctly all the time,” states Cyrus. “We can do more than just social media. We can change the world.”"
Change the world into what? That sounds optimistic. I thought you were fucked. Shall I share a dose of pre-Generation X healthy cynicism here? You are fucked. We're all fucked.
Lova Alvilde, one of the gifted Gen Z songsters in the article, really nails the problem to the tech mast. Tech does indeed change at an alarming rate but if one is still circulating the same things with the new tech what is there to learn? What can I learn from Alvilde's instagram feed? There's just loads of photos of herself, thereby surely proving the me me me generation dictum?
Oddly, one of the comments on the Guardian article had far more to say about Gen Z than the actual article and thereby proving social media can be enlightening, I suppose:
"My teenage daughter despairs about her classmates who she says spend all their time on social media. She had a friend stay for a sleepover recently but said afterwards that the friend kept checking her phone every five minutes. My daughter isn’t immune to looking at instagram but never posts anything about herself - she is too interested in reading (although my wife frets that she should be reading something educational rather than her latest obsession which seems to be Korean and Chinese manga!)
Fittingly for the article my daughter does seem too cynical and world-weary for someone so young. She recognises that she is very privileged yet at the same time feels that the future looks bleak for herself and her generation. Objectively her life is so much better than mine was but I wonder whether she simply knows too much. I was much more ignorant at her age but perhaps that naivety helped in some way to keep me more positive."
It's a strange knowledge though. It's tech savvy and culture light, it's the loss of childhood but perpetual adolescence, it's having everything but feeling like you have nothing.
Joel Stein's piece in Time encouraged numerous retorts in The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic, among others.
Of course, defining generations is meaningless without notions of class, gender or race. If you can remember the sixties you really weren't there, said comedian Charlie Fleischer but, of course, that should read you weren't young, white and middle class. And, of course, when Stein or others talk about Generation Z it is a generalization to mostly mean white middle class like himself.
For the best critique of the me me me generation I point you to The Atlantic piece by Elspeth Reeve which rightly points out that every post war generation has been the me me me generation.
However, I would add the caveat that in the past they grew up into a different generation. If all the generations consume the same culture now then what is Generation Z going to become? Isn't Z the end of the line?
In Samuel Butler's Darwin Among The Machines, a letter to a New Zealand newspaper in 1863 he argued:
"Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question."
Perhaps Gen Z are no different to any other generation. It's simply the technology that has changed.
After all, we have a 71 year old president who announces American foreign policy via tweets.
But then again, there is something horribly wrong when the most powerful nation on Earth elect a manchild who prefers Twitter to political discourse.
Mark Bauerlein (in a piece by Lee Drutman LA TImes:'The Dumbest Generation' ) offers a grim view of our present generation.
"The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace. "Social life is a powerful temptation," Bauerlein explains, "and most teenagers feel the pain of missing out."
This ceaseless pipeline of peer-to-peer activity is worrisome, he argues, not only because it crowds out the more serious stuff but also because it strengthens what he calls the "pull of immaturity." Instead of connecting them with parents, teachers and other adult figures, "[t]he web . . . encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age." When Bauerlein tells an audience of college students, "You are six times more likely to know who the latest American Idol is than you are to know who the speaker of the U.S. House is," a voice in the crowd tells him: " 'American Idol' IS more important.""
What's Myspace? The piece was from 2008 and shows the same concerns, different tech.
But fortunately the article is alarmist and does not foresee a realistic future for 2018.
"The book's ultimate doomsday scenario -- of a dull and self-absorbed new generation of citizens falling prey to demagoguery and brazen power grabs -- seems at once overblown (witness, for example, this election season's youth reengagement in politics) and also yesterday's news (haven't we always been perilously close to this, if not already suffering from it?). "
Oh yeah, Trump. But hey, Gen Z came out all guns blazing (metaphorically...as of yet) against Trump in 2016.
The alarmist concerns of Bauerlein has less to do with youth and more to do with socio-political culture. When Bauerlein rails against a culture that doesn't read, is fixated by a hand held electronic device and that over 50% of them don't know that Germany were the enemy of the allies in World War II he's really railing against people, per se rather than Millennials. As smartphones become a mechanical extension of ourselves Gen Zers are merely an extension of a cultural shift that has been occurring for at least 40 years. Yet, at the same time, it feels to this sad old gimmer, that something has shifted, that we lack a promise of any substantial future, we're all too aware that climate change is happening and will have unknown and unpleasant effects on our world, that consumption can't continue at the present rate, that our very lives governed by a culture steeped in an eternal present will have to grow up and face the consequences of our youthful folly. Or maybe we'll just go check Instagram again.
Are you a selfish whining millennial? Take the handy quiz here at How Millennial Are You?
Victorian Flaneur.
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