ILLUSTRATION / VASYA KOLOTUSHA
GENERATION VEXED
Immense changes show us, again and again, that we are the same as ever.
BY PAUL FORD
MIND GRENADES
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Among the detritus to survive my late adolescence are a few cases of cassettes, dozens of paper books, a
crate of vinyl albums, and many plastic albums filled with CDs. Typical Gen X ephemera. Today, scanning
all of that and creating digital versions would require about 20 gigabytes of storage. Q Back then I would
have needed to spend around $15,000 to buy a bunch of hard drives to store that stuff, roughly the same
amount as my student loans. I probably shouldn’t say that so loud that millennials might hear, but it would
have seemed like a lot of money at the time. Q Today the local electronics store gives you 32-gig SD cards
free with a coupon. Which is insulting. I lugged this essential information around for three decades and you
tell me it fits on a black chip of plastic smaller than my (admittedly curiously broad) thumbnail? Q I hate the
concept of generations. Maybe it’s because I’m Generation X, and I hate popular things. But that’s not
