Topic change, Mr. Potter, a side-topic that occurred to me while reading some of your work (and apologies if this is addressed by other work I've missed) but offices, too, have "scenes".
It isn't just scientists that need human mortality for progress (Bohr, I think, famously saying that new ideas like quantum mechanics don't really win, the old clingers just die off), it's industry. People cling to technologies, that get identified with generations. I fought a battle to get plastic water pipe accepted over ductile iron, long after the scientific value was proven. The old guys just couldn't believe 50kg of anything could replace 300kg of solid iron.
But, what has me writing is IT. A field where the whole architecture "generations" are *shorter* than human ones, and older workers struggle to adapt. In age terms, I'm an alleged Boomer, but various life circumstances set me back in career to be with the early Gen-X. Which, at work, put me solidly on the "PCs and servers will take over" side, of the 1985-1995 "war" inside corporations between the Boomers who clung to the mainframe, and the Gen-X who saw the obvious progression towards networked small machines and the Internet. (I can only beg 21st century readers to believe me, that there were corporations that thought they could control networking itself: AppleTalk; IBM Token-Ring; HP-Net; and my favourite, Boomer Bill Gates and his "Road Ahead" book that predicted the next 30 years of computing, barely mentioning the Internet, and promoting his "MSN". He had to re-issue the book with a third of the content changed. The ultimate humiliation for a seer.)
Easy meat for you, man: a generational analysis of various industries - but of course, IT is the most-famous, in the news - would be of value. I hardly need to point out that Gen-X were later being told that *they*, now, 'Just didn't get it', by Millennials brandishing Apps.
A book about how clinging-on, by the old, and disruption, by the young, affect technological progress, is a natural.
Funny -- I have an abandoned book project that was a look at the 80s as the liminal decade between the old and the new; the end of analog and the birth of digital culture. I was co-writing it with someone and we couldn't figure out how to work together; I think I'll serialize the material I had written here, probably after xmas.
The 80s set up the technology (the future was there, "just not evenly distributed"). The 90s implemented it for corporations and early-adopters, the 2000s for everybody.
In a few hundred years, two decades will reverse-telescope down into one point, the year 2000. The last 1% of the previous millennium, the first 1% of the third, are the two decades: 1990-2010. In 1990, nearly all sound, and still and moving images, all communications, was analog. By 2010, every kind of information (text, sound, image, movie, maps) was digital and wirelessly networked.
As noted, corporations got PCs about 1985, when older Gen-X were just out of the U. The PC-revolution in the late 80s (my workplace had 100 PCs and 1500 mainframe terminals in 1986; 5000 PCs in 2006) and through the 90s, was a classic Gen-X career, cursing Boomer mainframers for the first half of it.
That's my line! What journalists are for! Division of labour.
I could write my own story, but having to interview scads of colleagues in the hope of telling the broad-based story, as real journalist did for the Boomer Nerds in "Hackers" (1984), would be a whole new skillset.
But, OK, I could try to summarize my own career story (vis-a-vis IT) which a real journalist might take as raw data.
The 80s seem like the last decade to offer up anything original. That could be due to technology, or that youth culture could only recede after the Boomers invented it, or maybe before the homogenizing influence of globalization took over.
Big-picture use of "culture" was flipped for me when SF great Neal Stephenson wrote (paraphrased) that "How you produce food, clothing, shelter, medicine, education, safety is your 'culture'. The rest is just funny hats and clog-dancing."
The "counter culture" that we all praised Potter & Heath for X-raying did not "counter" how we do most of that. The only serious counter-culture-warriors were the anti-materialist hippie communes committed to really dropping out of the economy, consuming little that wasn't available in the Depression. Everybody who got a job with any kind of large institution was a "sellout", for Stephenson, even if they spent every weekend protesting.
About everything that the column describes as a "scene" is in the funny-hats-and-dancing side of the ledger. Happy "scenes" of everybody's youth are locations where you had some odds of finding a mate, which is to say *age-exclusive*. A good "scene" must exclude those too young to be available, conveniently provided by liquor consumption, and those too old to be good matches.
For a century, every generation excludes its elders from their favourite dating places with sounds, fashions, sights that make them uncomfortable, invent words they don't know. (Youth can tolerate more noise, and use that tactic heavily. My wife can't go into young-person clothing stores, for the soundtrack.)
Neither the Boomers, Gen-X, nor any since have actually offered a different actual-culture. We're all down with ever-larger corporations, signed off on ever-higher income inequality. We've purchased, generation by generation, ever-larger houses and vehicles.
So, if all you've got is changing tastes in hats, pants, and music to denote a given generation's "culture" from other generations, it's certain that it fades away along with their need for dating. A "scene" in a culture is like a "scene" in a movie. There's no movie unless there's a next scene, and a next.
Great series so far Andrew. But I’m feeling old. You’ve said a few times that GenXers’ parents are Boomers, but a lot of us have Silent Generation parents. And the dynamic is a lot different than with Boomers. Selling out? They were just happy to have survived.
Maybe a future piece could look at the differences between old Xers (REM fans?) young ones (Nirvana fans?)
Nice one! There was a great NYT piece about Maneskin, that dealt with an aging rock critic trying to come to grips with a bunch of 20 some things who are sort of making rock, except it’s not rebellion at all but exists basically in a post rock “genre” world. Like the kid’s dont give a hoot about the chronologies of this or that indie band, it just all exists at once.
But I think what’s impossible for oldsters to really get a sense of is just how fast memes and jokes and riffs on riffs ricochet around the internet on tik tok etc. The NYT has also been running kind of “what the kids these days are saying” which I love because it makes my kids cringe as I am SO by definition out of touch.
But then again the old man shouting at a cloud is a role I was born-ish to play. It’s deeply cool, I tell myself, to be so uncool that the kids cannot even…
Counter-intuitively the collaboration revolution unleashed through technology may have stifled creativity. Perhaps that is due to collaborators sharing incremental thoughts that are shot down too soon to progress to something truly experimental. "Scenes" at least operated in a self-reinforcing vacuum that went tangential before being discovered.
I think there's something to this for sure. I remember reading something a while ago, I think Adam Sternbergh might have written it, about how the culture seems to have frozen around the mid 2000s. Whatever you want to see about the selling out fear as a political stance, it gave us an intensely creative culture.
Social media, with its thumbs up seeking behavior, is the ultimate form of selling out. I'm still unsure if culture froze around the mid 2000s due to the rise of social media, or that is when I got old (born 1971).
Of course there are cultural developments. I think the reference to cosplay courts it somewhat - kind of the culture of disenfranchisement.
On the one hand we see the rise of the schismatic political clash between reactionary forces and radical inclusiveness; on the other, economic apprehension widening out of the increasing prevalence of homelessness and the flattening of the income distribution curve, with more and more people earning middle-class salaries but unable to afford traditional middle-class lifestyles.
The apex of this motion that I have so far witnessed is a student posting about intentionally introducing grammatical irregularities into original text as a way to convince AI detectors that the text was original. This is the opposite of the Captcha. The AI has integrated the standards and become their reifier and arbiter. To be recognized as human is to emphasize one's ability to miss the mark.
What does cosplay represent except youth claiming success in adopting the trappings of an ideal reality they aspire but have abandoned hope of truly manifesting?
The Therians are in the forefront of human preparation to become AI's housepets.
Topic change, Mr. Potter, a side-topic that occurred to me while reading some of your work (and apologies if this is addressed by other work I've missed) but offices, too, have "scenes".
It isn't just scientists that need human mortality for progress (Bohr, I think, famously saying that new ideas like quantum mechanics don't really win, the old clingers just die off), it's industry. People cling to technologies, that get identified with generations. I fought a battle to get plastic water pipe accepted over ductile iron, long after the scientific value was proven. The old guys just couldn't believe 50kg of anything could replace 300kg of solid iron.
But, what has me writing is IT. A field where the whole architecture "generations" are *shorter* than human ones, and older workers struggle to adapt. In age terms, I'm an alleged Boomer, but various life circumstances set me back in career to be with the early Gen-X. Which, at work, put me solidly on the "PCs and servers will take over" side, of the 1985-1995 "war" inside corporations between the Boomers who clung to the mainframe, and the Gen-X who saw the obvious progression towards networked small machines and the Internet. (I can only beg 21st century readers to believe me, that there were corporations that thought they could control networking itself: AppleTalk; IBM Token-Ring; HP-Net; and my favourite, Boomer Bill Gates and his "Road Ahead" book that predicted the next 30 years of computing, barely mentioning the Internet, and promoting his "MSN". He had to re-issue the book with a third of the content changed. The ultimate humiliation for a seer.)
Easy meat for you, man: a generational analysis of various industries - but of course, IT is the most-famous, in the news - would be of value. I hardly need to point out that Gen-X were later being told that *they*, now, 'Just didn't get it', by Millennials brandishing Apps.
A book about how clinging-on, by the old, and disruption, by the young, affect technological progress, is a natural.
Funny -- I have an abandoned book project that was a look at the 80s as the liminal decade between the old and the new; the end of analog and the birth of digital culture. I was co-writing it with someone and we couldn't figure out how to work together; I think I'll serialize the material I had written here, probably after xmas.
The 80s set up the technology (the future was there, "just not evenly distributed"). The 90s implemented it for corporations and early-adopters, the 2000s for everybody.
In a few hundred years, two decades will reverse-telescope down into one point, the year 2000. The last 1% of the previous millennium, the first 1% of the third, are the two decades: 1990-2010. In 1990, nearly all sound, and still and moving images, all communications, was analog. By 2010, every kind of information (text, sound, image, movie, maps) was digital and wirelessly networked.
As noted, corporations got PCs about 1985, when older Gen-X were just out of the U. The PC-revolution in the late 80s (my workplace had 100 PCs and 1500 mainframe terminals in 1986; 5000 PCs in 2006) and through the 90s, was a classic Gen-X career, cursing Boomer mainframers for the first half of it.
You should write something on all this.
That's my line! What journalists are for! Division of labour.
I could write my own story, but having to interview scads of colleagues in the hope of telling the broad-based story, as real journalist did for the Boomer Nerds in "Hackers" (1984), would be a whole new skillset.
But, OK, I could try to summarize my own career story (vis-a-vis IT) which a real journalist might take as raw data.
The 80s seem like the last decade to offer up anything original. That could be due to technology, or that youth culture could only recede after the Boomers invented it, or maybe before the homogenizing influence of globalization took over.
Big-picture use of "culture" was flipped for me when SF great Neal Stephenson wrote (paraphrased) that "How you produce food, clothing, shelter, medicine, education, safety is your 'culture'. The rest is just funny hats and clog-dancing."
The "counter culture" that we all praised Potter & Heath for X-raying did not "counter" how we do most of that. The only serious counter-culture-warriors were the anti-materialist hippie communes committed to really dropping out of the economy, consuming little that wasn't available in the Depression. Everybody who got a job with any kind of large institution was a "sellout", for Stephenson, even if they spent every weekend protesting.
About everything that the column describes as a "scene" is in the funny-hats-and-dancing side of the ledger. Happy "scenes" of everybody's youth are locations where you had some odds of finding a mate, which is to say *age-exclusive*. A good "scene" must exclude those too young to be available, conveniently provided by liquor consumption, and those too old to be good matches.
For a century, every generation excludes its elders from their favourite dating places with sounds, fashions, sights that make them uncomfortable, invent words they don't know. (Youth can tolerate more noise, and use that tactic heavily. My wife can't go into young-person clothing stores, for the soundtrack.)
Neither the Boomers, Gen-X, nor any since have actually offered a different actual-culture. We're all down with ever-larger corporations, signed off on ever-higher income inequality. We've purchased, generation by generation, ever-larger houses and vehicles.
So, if all you've got is changing tastes in hats, pants, and music to denote a given generation's "culture" from other generations, it's certain that it fades away along with their need for dating. A "scene" in a culture is like a "scene" in a movie. There's no movie unless there's a next scene, and a next.
Solid enough so far that I upgraded to Paid. High praise from an Xer ;)
Aw thanks! Now I have to keep delivering...
Great series so far Andrew. But I’m feeling old. You’ve said a few times that GenXers’ parents are Boomers, but a lot of us have Silent Generation parents. And the dynamic is a lot different than with Boomers. Selling out? They were just happy to have survived.
Maybe a future piece could look at the differences between old Xers (REM fans?) young ones (Nirvana fans?)
Yeah good points. 80s v 90s is on the list!
Nice one! There was a great NYT piece about Maneskin, that dealt with an aging rock critic trying to come to grips with a bunch of 20 some things who are sort of making rock, except it’s not rebellion at all but exists basically in a post rock “genre” world. Like the kid’s dont give a hoot about the chronologies of this or that indie band, it just all exists at once.
But I think what’s impossible for oldsters to really get a sense of is just how fast memes and jokes and riffs on riffs ricochet around the internet on tik tok etc. The NYT has also been running kind of “what the kids these days are saying” which I love because it makes my kids cringe as I am SO by definition out of touch.
But then again the old man shouting at a cloud is a role I was born-ish to play. It’s deeply cool, I tell myself, to be so uncool that the kids cannot even…
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/12/magazine/maneskin-rock-band.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
oooh thanks for this. I am so out of it. My spotify wrapped was all Weezer and Radiohead and Oasis and Taylor Swift, thanks to my daughter.
Counter-intuitively the collaboration revolution unleashed through technology may have stifled creativity. Perhaps that is due to collaborators sharing incremental thoughts that are shot down too soon to progress to something truly experimental. "Scenes" at least operated in a self-reinforcing vacuum that went tangential before being discovered.
I think there's something to this for sure. I remember reading something a while ago, I think Adam Sternbergh might have written it, about how the culture seems to have frozen around the mid 2000s. Whatever you want to see about the selling out fear as a political stance, it gave us an intensely creative culture.
Social media, with its thumbs up seeking behavior, is the ultimate form of selling out. I'm still unsure if culture froze around the mid 2000s due to the rise of social media, or that is when I got old (born 1971).
The eternal question.
"Is it me or is the department store playing really good music now?"
I heard a Muzak version of "Welcome to the Jungle" playing in an office lobby a few months back. End of Days.
Of course there are cultural developments. I think the reference to cosplay courts it somewhat - kind of the culture of disenfranchisement.
On the one hand we see the rise of the schismatic political clash between reactionary forces and radical inclusiveness; on the other, economic apprehension widening out of the increasing prevalence of homelessness and the flattening of the income distribution curve, with more and more people earning middle-class salaries but unable to afford traditional middle-class lifestyles.
The apex of this motion that I have so far witnessed is a student posting about intentionally introducing grammatical irregularities into original text as a way to convince AI detectors that the text was original. This is the opposite of the Captcha. The AI has integrated the standards and become their reifier and arbiter. To be recognized as human is to emphasize one's ability to miss the mark.
What does cosplay represent except youth claiming success in adopting the trappings of an ideal reality they aspire but have abandoned hope of truly manifesting?
The Therians are in the forefront of human preparation to become AI's housepets.
you should write this as a column