Note: This is a cut-and-paste of something from an old blog that I don’t use any more.
I’ve always found the tendency of generations to label themselves somewhat trite. There were the Baby Boomers, the Love Generation, the Yuppie Shitheads, Generation X and so forth. I would fall into Generation Y, I suppose, which I always found to be the most self-indulgent and silly of all. The Baby Boomers had the post-war rush to ride on, the Love Generation had self-actualization and LSD, the Yuppie Shitheads had money and cocaine and Generation X had self-pity and heroin. We started out without anything defining, besides perhaps crystalized amphetamines and house music. I have no fondness for either. Everything that we grew up with was culturally malignant or an atrophied rehash.
Enter the Internet.
The Internet was ours. We didn’t set it up, but we took it and shaped it into what it is today, for better or worse. We became technologically capable much faster. We commoditized technological savvy and made it a skill that you either learned or got left behind for a lack of. We took mobile phones and made them necessary for everyone, as opposed to the business men that actually, you know, needed them. We wired ourselves up and filled that void with content that we made. We didn’t just pick a cause-and-drug combination, as is traditional. We got ahold of something that wasn’t exactly a cause, nor was it exactly a drug or a type of media or X. It was (and is) amorphous, and we did whatever the Hell we wanted with it (pornogrophy and escapist entertainment, mostly). We used it to trade music and post inane shit about our lives for others to read, as well as inventing meta-humor as we know it. We didn’t really have anything else. Our president was alternately balls-deep in scandal or apocalyptically stupid, our pop-culture sucked, we didn’t know what we were going to do beyond getting a good GPA. We were tunnel-visioned to small, specific goals in such a way that we didn’t know what we really waned. All we had was our rapidly progressing connectivity, and the tools to hump it like Al Pachino humped the cocaine market in Scarface.
Is what we did bad or good? Is it really anything? I suppose that every generation asks more qustions about itself than anything else, but they generally get answers, at least eventually. They’re almost always something along the lines of “you failed”, as those like Hunter S. Thompson are so helpful to point out, but it makes me consider what we will say in retrospect. Will we even think anything? Maybe our use of such a volatile and amorphous tool will leave no real history behind, no fossilized footprints. We don’t really have the smoking remains of the Reichstag, Woodstock, Star Wars or Grunge. We just have this mass of cultrual Jell-o that nobody can really nail down.
Tags: culture crap
