Generation Sell
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
- the ideal personality is now someone gentle, who gets along with everyone
- the ideal social form is now to start a business or non-profit, or at least be an independent professional
- to this end, and due to social media and blogging, many of us are always selling ourselves, however subtly.
An entrepreneur is up to a whole thing, and deals with mainly closed feedback loops. A salesman is at best a fragment of a real enterprise, but is often, as in the case of a snake-oil salesmen, backed up by little or nothing. The feedback loops for a salesman are frequently open, allowing all manner of bullshit.
Further, even if he were right about entrepreneurship being more common, it still wouldn't be the dominant experience, so using it to explain a generation's affect is suspicious.
Instead, I think it's much more reasonable to look at the rise of electronic communication (cheap phone calls, texts, email, chat, Twitter, Facebook). It means, in effect, that each of us lives in our own virtual small town. People end up being pleasant to each other because when they aren't, the consequences are more likely to be felt and harder to dodge.
Just because the hipster ideal is more "mature and responsible" than related social movements which preceded it, does not make our generation more mature and responsible than those which preceded it.
Calling our generation "sellers" has negative connotations, as if we 're super-conformists or sth.
Are those negative connotations necessarily unwarranted? For example, is everyone starting their own business and doing their own PR really the most effective way for us to organize ourselves?
We understand that you can change society by not being confrontational
Really? I count OWS, WikiLeaks, Anonymous, etc. among the biggest contributions of our generation. Certainly these are confrontational?
We don't have a dominant mass culture, which means we are open to micro-cultures
Agreed. This is what I admire most about our generation.
- I think it will be, it is possible now to overthrow corporatism for a more ethical model where corporations will be socially responsible. Things like "PR" are slowly fading.
- Compared to May '68, or the Red Army Faction, it is.
I think he covers this point here: "Yes, we’re vicious, anonymously, on the comment threads of public Web sites, but when we speak in our own names, on Facebook and so forth, we’re strenuously cheerful, conciliatory, well-groomed. (In fact, one of the reasons we’re so vicious, I’m convinced, is to relieve the psychic pressure of all that affability.) "
I assume this is true, but can we be sure? What if the people who make nasty anonymous comments on the internet are actually nice in person? I know that I have hated people who hang on the same irc-channels than me, only to meet them in person later, and be surprised that they're not at all like they are online.
The other difference is that startups and small businesses give people a more comfortable narrative of how their life is going. It is a lot more comforting to tell yourself, "I'm doing badly now so I will do better in the future," than "I'll never get a job that pays as well as my parents."
If this was not the case, there would be much less romanticization of venture capital and angel investment on these boards, more startups would be focused on revenue-generating than traction-generating products, and lifestyle businesses would not be perceived as failures of boldness for "not swinging for the fences".
I suspect a lot of people are starting to realize there is no such thing.
It's pretty difficult to keep the selling boxed up even if you want to, and really have it be only a means to an end that isn't the main influence on what you do. Even independent businesses that make a conscious effort not to have all their decisions driven by marketing (say, Dischord Records) don't entirely succeed, and it's probably even less the case for people who don't have that kind of active "anti-selling-out" mindset.
It might even be harder, in some cases, than in a normal job. There are a lot of corners of the corporate world where you can make decisions either entirely, or at least mostly, based on technical considerations, because how it's going to make money is someone else's job. The limit case is corporate research labs, where e.g. Bell Labs employees spent very little time thinking about whether their research was sellable; but in a more limited way it appears in lots of places. If you're an independent technical researcher, it's much harder to keep your thoughts off the selling angle, because your livelihood more directly depends on whether your research output will produce revenue.
I think the dominant belief of our generation is basically that you shouldn't talk unless you're selling something. I don't think that this is because the people doing the 'selling' are superficial, but rather because the general public is becoming less well-educated and capable of independent thought. So the burden of thought is essentially now placed almost entirely in the hands of third parties. It's an extremely troubling trend.
Still, I think the article itself is pretty narrow in trying to economically label a loosely defined generation. The data just isn't there to support any large scale, nationwide increase in owned-and-operated businesses that are drawing in significant revenue.
I looked for it, not incredibly exhaustively, but long enough to wonder if it's out there. Moreover, the stagnant wage and salary figures, combined with increased student debt loads seemed to crowd out and more promising spins on the reality of what's happening with the Millennials.
I would love to find data that supports a real economic movement back to craftsmen culture though.
A craftsman focuses on making things. He focuses on his craft. Period. He does not focus on presenting his product at all. The product does not need presentation or sales, its craftsmanship stands for itself.
The difference between salesman and craftsman is that they are completely different things.
OWS has NOTHING to do with the article, except for the very end where he mentions a new culture forming.
I'm sure you know that words have meaning. You just aren't very good at working out what those meanings are or how they are different from eachother.
I also think entrepreneurs are a lot more threatening to the status quo than previous youth-culture archetypes. If you are a recording executive who would you fear most: 1) a drugged out punk rocker who is pissed at the world and letting everyone know it 2) a hacker entrepreneur like Sean Parker.
I think history shows us who the establishment should be more fearful of.
Without the music of the 60's/70's, do you think Steve Jobs would have dropped acid, become a Zen Buddhist and built Apple's brand as a the challenger of the status quo?
1) Don't put/do anything dubious online. (Theoretically easy, harder in practice.)
2) Don't put/do anything that could be de-contextualized and subsequently re-contextualized as dubious, online. (Hard, but not mathematically impossible.)
3) Create some kind of autonomy so that you're not subject to the effects of social-media-based judgment, because social networking never forgets who you were. (Moderate difficulty).
Individuals choose one of more of the above approaches for the various parts of their life... possibly all three simultaneously.
Since social media makes no distinctions about who you were then vs. who you are now, every moment of behavior counts equally into future perception... so being polite, and deferential, and constantly "selling", is not a independent life choice, but rather the result of a most subtle form of coercion.
Coercion is not only from the barrel of a gun. You may completely swear off of social media altogether, or only post precision-calibrated Markov-chained text blurbs that make you look like a model citizen, but you get much less control about what your friends post.
Or: I used to submit essays to Usenet or Kuro5hin, mostly out of a desire to stimulate discussion and get feedback. But now I post them on my blog, and when I'm writing them there's, consciously or not, always this background thought of where I'll advertise that post so people read it, whether it'll get me new RSS subscribers, etc.
I even sometimes think, on the occasions where I've written a long-ish Wikipedia article from scratch, that if I were really doing it right, maybe I should've posted it on my personal blog instead of submitting it as a Wikipedia article--- because I can't fully capture the personal-brand-building at Wikipedia. I'm sure there are people who do give in to that temptation, too.
The tendency to start artisan businesses is not a social narrative, it's just another part of the aesthetic. The author compares modern youth culture with the hippies, beatniks, and punks. But those generations were doing what they were doing for a reason. Read anything from the heroes of those generations, and you'll see a clear "grand narrative" that described the social relationships of the world they were trying to create. The social narrative of punk culture was not "a tendency to start bands that played three chord songs." That was part of the social aesthetic. The narrative was one of anti-authoritarinism, collective autonomy, and a vision for a world without hierarchy.
The truth is that youth culture today has no narrative. Yes, money is cool again, small-business entrepreneurship is a common pursuit, and "maker" culture has taken root, but these are just the things people do. Ask someone why they made the latest LED clock design out of "make magazine," and they'll more than likely say something along the lines of "because it's neat." Look at the average young entrepreneur, and you'll find someone who discovered technology before they discovered themselves -- someone who is "innovating" because that's what they read they're supposed to do, rather than out of some informed sense of the social reality they're trying to create.
You couldn't possibly be more wrong. The narrative of today's youth culture is passion. The passion to pursue your craft and the freedom to do it your way. To satisfy your curiosity without harming the world around you. It is unbelievably positive and optimistic. Liberty is the narrative of today and it's a narrative that has far more substance than those prior to it.
I pretty much hate May 1968. Not so much for the event itself; there was a lot to admire in what workers did to advance their rights. But for what it meant to the progressive ideal. There was much conflation between the starry-eyed ideals of the students, and the real effects that the strikes had on government. The academic left thought that one caused the other. Hence the glorification of dippy slogans like "I declare a permanent state of happiness". It seems to be the watershed when leftism stopped being about education and material welfare, and started being some kind of conceptual art project.
First of all, beatniks, hippies, and punks were never the majority of their generations. We use them as shorthand for certain eras because they were innovative. But that's another way of saying that they weren't like everybody else.
The truth is, there was never a generation as socially conscious and globally aware as this one. It's not because they are more virtuous, it's because this is just the world they live in now. How dare you suggest that this generation has no "narrative" when we have a global protest movement ongoing right now, that's fixating the attention of the whole world?
Like the best of the punks, they're not just talking about it; they're doing it. And unlike 1968, they have more than slogans and attitude; they have technological and social skills and they're setting to build an alternative vision of society.
And there isn't even a need for everyone to have exactly the same goals before we move forward. A libertarian and a hippie can have different visions of society, but still agree on how to make a communication protocol robust.
Perhaps that is the main difference; this new generation seeks practical agreement rather than ideological unanimity. That's a lot of what OWS is about as well; developing a practice that can afford many different views. These practices don't exclude anyone, or even have one single agenda. On the contrary, they thrive on diversity.
Forget the hopelessly naive 1960s concept of "speaking truth to power". The new ideal is to create a self-sustaining practice that brings about change. To me, that's the internet; that's Burning Man; that's Tor, Mozilla, Wikipedia, and even Google on their best days; and that's Occupy Wall Street.
And from what I can see, it's working.
Is the entrepreneurial model so attractive that everything that may set you apart has to be shaved, to avoid displeasing anyone?
To me, hating something is at least as important as loving something else.
I'll place the first brick here and proudly declare that I hate organic food and the whole "bio" movement, since it is not scalable and mostly used for class signaling (ala overcomingbias)
I don't think selling ourselves is an overstatement here. And I would also say that we have one of the least scientific generation- not only because enrollment is scientific studies is low, but also because there is now a pride in being ignorant.
Also, while trying to protect everyone feelings, all opinions are considered as equally valid - even when some proved wrong. If that is not selling ourselves, how do you call that?
I only took organic food as an example of what one must love to be "in", trendy, hipster. A dissending opinion, even based on scientific facts, seems to be frowned upon by hipsters, and by extension the new moral order. In the organic food example, we want to believe in something other than facts. This is not science.
Let's follow that example, see http://reason.com/blog/2009/03/26/norman-borlaug-happy-95th-... - with organic food alone, the earth population would have to be around 4 billions. We're 7 billions. Oops. Internal consistence for organic food proponents would require suggesting china-like one child policy or genocides.
Here, the "selling generation" is using emotional engagement as a sale tactic, for "feel good" stuff.
Personally, I boycott organic food. I usually ask if the food I'm about to order is organic. If it is organic, I ask for something else. If I can not be served food that is not organic, I explain that I boycot organic food, and that I have to place my order somewhere else.
Regardless of your analysis of the organic food, you can say that's is very bold, and unfashionable, in today's culture.
So I guess I won't be a social media icon. Never mind :-)
And if everyone had a car and lived like Americans then the world would be in a tough spot as well. That doesn't mean I'm going to give up my good life. I eat organic because I don't trust non-organic food, because I don't want to eat animals that lived their lives in feces, themselves consuming ground up animals that were too sick to survive. Is organic scalable? It'd be great if were, and I encourage industry to try, but I'm not in it to save the world, I'm in it for myself.
At least, that's self consistent and honest. Maybe not a good sales strategy though.
If we look at the third world, organic agricultural techniques actually do much better than mechanized production methods, even when measured in yields alone. The reason for this is that not everyone has forty feet of topsoil, like we do in Kansas. In a lot of places, the soil is marginal, and simply cannot hold up to intensive agriculture for more than couple of years. Mechanized agriculture on land like that is disastrous and leads to crop failure and famine within a decade (for example, Ethiopia). The only way to make these lands agriculturally viable is with organic farming techniques. [1]
That said, I do agree with the point you're trying to make, even if I disagree with the specific example. We should support or oppose things not because it is fashionable to support or oppose them, but because of reasons that we've worked out for ourselves.
[1] Scott. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Measures to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press. 1999. Print.
EDIT: fixed typo
Jersey Shore aside, I have to disagree with this. We have a media culture that celebrates ignorance, but I don't think you can really trust media to represent actual culture anymore. We have an over-achieving culture that misses the point in a lot of ways, and I'm certainly not saying that this generation values scientific endeavor more than e.g. the WWII generation, but it certainly does not value ignorance.
And "hating" organic food (really?) is not signalling? There are plenty of things wrong with the world, things that are worth hating, but organic food does not really strike me as one of them.
If we want to really have a second green revolution, we're going to have to start looking at organic farming techniques to make marginal lands agriculturally viable.
As to “self-branding” and innocuous politeness: to Deresiewicz, these identify a salesman. More probably, they result from a generational awareness that one’s words and actions are immortalized online. One cultivates a persona or risks letting others do so for you.
And is this really new? Haven't people (and I'm half tempted to apply the term pseudo-intellectual here) been complaining about life being a bit passionless "lately" since...ever?
The longing for the "old days" of the wild west is such a common complaint that its just a cliche now.
If this article feels like it has any sort of merit to you (and you agree with the implication that this is bad), I suggest surrounding yourself with a different group of people.
I suppose when attempting to reduce such a group to a simple catchphrase ("post-emotional"), no additional harm is done by throwing those who were 21 in the year 2000 with those who were five.
My opinion is that it's always difficult to describe phenomena while inside; easier to categorize the mood of an era once the era has passed.
As someone born in 1981, I've ended up in all sorts of buckets. Sometimes '81 is considered the tail end of Generation X. When I was younger, I thought of myself as solidly Gen-X, because "my" culture all seemed to be quintessentially Gen-X culture: Nirvana, MTV, skate-punk, the microcomputer revolution, cynicism about both staid corporate life and the hippie alternative to it, etc. Later I realized that many people considered '81 a bit late for Gen-X, but I had considered myself in it because as a teenager I identified with culture-drivers who were actually 5-15 years older (e.g. Kurt Cobain somehow seemed in my generation at the time, but was in fact born in '67). This article, and some others, by contrast would group me as a Millennial, but many of the other descriptions I've found of Millennials seem aimed at people younger than me, mainly people born in the late-80s/early-90s.
Generational theory is interesting on the surface, but often I take these meta-analyses with a grain of salt. They seem to be grandiose astrological interpretations that would be applicable to any generation.
I'm part of the "Nomad" generation type. Nomadic definitely describes my life fairly well for the past 10 years. I've lived in 2 countries and 5 states. The post office should just start OCRing my mail and sending it via email.
To get meta, I think that it's probably easiest to envision generations as phases of an ideological sine wave. At any given time, one set of ideas and culture - one phase - will be dominant and will contain most of the population. However, no phase ever dies out completely - there's always a few oddballs who will find medieval chivalry, for instance, appealing. I think that you and I were just born in between the peaks of Generation X and the Millenial generation, so our values are somewhat harder to predict.
If you're firmly part of Generation G (for Generic, a theoretical generation) which has qualities X, Y, and Z but born in the mid-to-late period of said generation, you're told from the moment you're born that you're part of a group that is X, Y, and Z.
I don't have an answer, but I suspect that the problem with 20-30 year-spanning "generations" which are defined and classified by older folks is that, over time, they take on the qualities imbued by an outside observer.
Being post-emotional myself (I guess), I have no real opinion to add other than another observation that once again holds true: that the comments about the article here on Hacker News has been a way better discussion on the topic than the comments on the NYTimes site. Why is the NYTimes always so behind the curve?
Sounds like Prozac has really had an impact. These kids, when they get the rare moment of depression or rage now, should savor it, like tasting a dish that one only eats once or twice a year.
Seriously?
Let me counter with: Two land wars in Asia, thirty (!) years of cancerous deregulation of the private sector leading to an economic implosion, 9/11, OWS protests, raging unemployment...
Having said all of this, I would agree that PORTLAND, OR is a fundamentally agreeable society...it is difficult to communicate this in writing, you really have to visit the place to understand.
But the wars? Neo-liberal baby boomers cooked that up. Deregulation? GenX loves that shit.
At any rate that's still a large portion of it unemployed, being around a quarter, compared to the population-wide unemployment rate of 9%. And surely you would find overrepresented among the movement folks who are underemployed or otherwise frustrated by the lack of mobility in the current market. So (I think) my point stands.