PAUL FORD (@ftrain) is a programmer,
award-winning essayist, and cofounder
ofPostlight, a digital product studio.a correct characterization—I enjoy things,
dammit. I have been to therapy and I am
capable of like. I tweet. I leave others’
yums unyucked. I am glad you like Cold-
play. I welcome feedback. It’s cool that you
believe in astrology (sound of grinding jaw).
A generation, at its footnoted best, is a
sociological tool intended to make sense of
behavior across large cohorts—i.e., if geog-
raphy can influence a culture, then so can
time: market crashes, earthquakes, war, the
VMAs. Certainly a noble horseman of the
Khan had a different worldview than I do,
and drank more horse blood. But that’s not
what generations represent right now. Gen-
erations are drama.
Oh poor millennials. “They are largely
self-absorbed and extremely focused on
personal appearance. But they are vaguely
aware that identity is primarily a construct
of culture and family conditioning, vari-
ables over which they have little control.”
Actually that’s a description of Genera-
tion X as drawn by marketers trying to sell
them stuff at Lollapalooza. In 1958, teen
researchers were talking about the “young
phone addict” developing his personal-
ity. And so on, back to clay tablets, where
I’d guess a dude named Timgiratee com-
plained that teens don’t buy enough barley.
Anyone can make a pop generation. Do
it with me: Subtract 20 from the current
year and round to the nearest multiple of
five. Give it a name, like the Double Zeros
or the Naughties, and describe the univer-
sal qualities of youth (Jealousy, Sex Drive,
Openness, Narcissism, or JSON) as the side
effect of new technologies and trends. “The
critical thing to know about Naughties,”
an imaginary critic might say, “is they’re
obsessed with their communication devices
and social status. They will never invest in
low-yield bonds.”
Worse, I found myself starting to buy in.
After 20 years of never giving the tiniest
hoot about my own generation, and as a
person of a certain age in a management
into global climate catastrophe, but then
again, we’re only facing doom because for
75 years no one started a nuclear war.
We aren’t so different, are we? Just born
along different curves.
I trundled from concert to concert in the
waning days of the Clinton administration.
Recorded music was precious and carried
from place to place; my 20 gigs weighed a
lot. Now music is more like food—some-
thing to be enjoyed, digested, remarked
upon in passing. We all still like it, though.
And in 20 more years you’ll have a per-
sonal petabyte nearby, enough storage to
hold a hi-def video recording of 30 con-
tinuous years of your life, sleep included.One day a furry will win major public office in a
fursuit, and wear their suit to chambers, and that’ll
be that. The world is unruly and will not behave.
capacity, I fell prey to the 20 or 30 articles
a day about dread millennials entering my
feeds. I’ve plopped down in a conference
room to moan over the youth with their
crying and social media and their refusal
to prioritize my exact goals. Why won’t
young people simply submit to my whims
and admit I am right? I am only trying to
profit from their labor.
The pop concept of generation is about
placing us in a box of singular, predictable,
manageable identities, branding us so that
we might more readily hate each other,
and then stepping right into River City to
market to the carnage (“and that stands for
pool”). Don’t we have enough of all that?My children are roughly the same as I was,
just less into computers. My grandfather
grew up on a farm between the wars, trap-
ping raccoons. Later, together, we watched
Knight Rider.
One of the things that is joyful about the
current youth, for me as a mid-old, is that
they are creating a new world of zillions
of identities, in an age of chaotic recom-
bination and Finstas. One day a furry will
win major public office in a fursuit, and
wear their suit to the chambers, and that’ll
be that. The world is unruly and will not
behave. As someone who struggled (still
struggles) to figure out what I was even
about, I’ve always believed that people
had the right to define themselves, and
it’s thrilling to see it suddenly in practice,
even if sometimes I’m a little uncomfort-
able with all the drama.
Not that they care what I think.
Generations imply some giant disrup-
tion in the universe. I like curves more.
Moore’s law (always more transistors), Met-
calfe’s law (bigger networks are more valu-
able), experience curves (making things
gets cheaper when you learn by doing),
and so forth. I like these thumbnail rules
because they encapsulate the Great Much-
ness more than some theory of intergener-
ational strife. It’s terrible that we’re headedOr you could download all of Sci-Hub, the
great illegal archive of 80 million scien-
tific articles, now available via torrent and
presumably forevermore, and have most
of science on your phone, with room left
over for porn and recipes. You will always
have enough space for your thoughts, and
all the other thoughts too.
So our sleep will be transcribed and
robots will deliver our sneakers, which will
themselves be computers. Technology will
not solve bad marriages, bad eating, or rac-
ist thoughts, nor stop DisneyWarnerNet-
flixQuibiPlus from making superhero
movies. I find it profoundly helpful, then,
to not just reject the concept of generations
but to invert it: The immense changes in
technology show us, again and again, year
after year, that we are basically the same
as ever, just reacting to our place along
curves of life well out of our control. One
can get very mixed up about what makes
us human. And it would, in fact, behoove
all of us on the grayer side to get to know
and love our peculiar youths, so that they
might speak well of us when we do not
matter anymore.