I have been saying for the past 6 - 8 years that Gen Z is the future, they are different, they are compassionate, etc. My opinion changed on that Tuesday in a bad way.
Turns out that growing up with a phone in their hand made a lot of them particularly susceptible to right-wing propaganda.
They’ve been raised to believe their thoughts are valid and they should speak up, instead of shutting the fuck up and listening until they have enough experience.
Sorry, but that was a “kids these days” moment.
“Crazy how Millennials were the only ones to learn how to use computers and we apparently are also the only ones who learned to see through disinformation,”
Whoever this Dylan jackass is can piss right off. Gen-X built your fucking computers.
Well, TBF, the boomers helped bootstrap what Gen X was working with, and then there are the Elder Gods like Turing, Hopper, John McCarthy, Neumann, etc…
In any case, if someone thinks that learning computers means they can see through disinformation…LOLOLOL. This is exactly why I keep beating the drum for critical thinking and media literacy, steeped within a rich liberal (in every meaning of that term) educational program.
Whoa there! Cant have the working class intelligent enough to see through the bull shit.
I do think that much of the things drummed up about “generations” feeds into the distraction. If you can get boomers vilified and at the throats of millennials, if you can get Gen-X mostly ignored and sidelined, and Gen Z getting feds lots of complete dreck while telling them “you are a magical species who gets ‘tech’ like no other” and so on (while starting to rev up the propaganda to tell Gen alpha the exact same thing)…it’s quite the sideshow from what is really happening, and that is that the upper crust like Elon and donvict are utterly lawless and making off with all the loot.
I think none of this is all that new - setting age groups against one another, setting up a war between male and females, the rural against the metropolitan, the various strata of classes that range from extreme poverty to the middle class (that still desperately needs a job to keep their head above water) and of course the old standby: setting the races against one another.
This is age-old stuff, but the techniques have been sharpened and perfected like never before. And the qons work extra hard to make sure that education won’t rise to meet the challenge.
Gen-X mostly ignored and sidelined
We’ve been ready for that since we realized that our parents were never going to retire soon enough for us to have access to the “good jobs”. We went to school and majored in “whatever was available”, and then the generation that graduated after us coincided with our parents retiring and freed up the good jobs for them.
“Ignored and Sidelined” pretty much sums up my generation. If we didn’t have computers, weed, and grunge, we’d have nothing.
Yes, as I get older, I think about how cynical I’ve been all along, as a consequence of seeing both how the boomers suffered under corporate rule - many were expecting to be able to be corporate men and then retire with the gold watch and all that, only to be downsized, rightsized, outsource, offshored - because of seeing that, and being a realist about how corporations value their “human resources”, I’ve never fallen for the corporate line when working. Thing is, I cannot say that about all of my peers. Salaried IT staff still work more than 40 hours. They skip their vacations because they are “too busy”. Not realizing that those things simply will not matter when it comes to layoff time. And these are people in my age bracket - they entered the workforce - possibly - under the early 90s recession, they’ve seen the dot-com bubble burst, they’ve seen the real estate meltdown and so they know exactly how workers will be cast off like a used condom when it suits the suits. They probably saw their boomer parents grind through things in the 80s, or heard about things in the 70s.
So you might as well take that time off. Don’t work much more than 40 hours in a week. Don’t have work shit on personal devices. Don’t check email and IM and text messages from work during off hours. It’s rare when I get to talk to a Gen Xer that seems to cop to this - or at least is willing to let down their guard and admit it to others…another cynical defense mechanism, I guess.
Because boomers were ground under all this, they stayed in the workforce for a very long time. They are even still in the workforce. Also, people are living longer, as a general rule (a recent dip in the U.S., though I’m not sure that’s going to be a trend). Gen X is a smaller pop than either Gen Y or boomers, so yeah, we got squeezed.
I think one of the more poignant moments about corporations and age groups was a moment in Microserfs where one of the characters’ dad gets laid off from IBM…anyway, it is very interesting to see how this cycle keeps repeating, and the same stories seem to be sold to/told about each upcoming generation. Seems a lot of it rhymes.
This is exactly why I keep beating the drum for critical thinking and media literacy, steeped within a rich liberal (in every meaning of that term) educational program.
I’ve actually begun work on an essay about that exact thing. One that I’ve put off for a very long time because the last time I dared to imply a causal relationship between the rise of Trade-Schools, where you learn to do one thing and one thing well, but have no real education otherwise, and the dumbing down of the electorate, I got shouted down for being “elitist”. But with recent events, I’ve decided to expand on my idea and throw some more research behind it because fuck it, I’m feeling vindicated.
I’m not saying that everyone who attends a trade-school is intellectually incurious; just that a broader understanding of the world is not a part of the curriculum and it’s left up to the students themselves if they want to be a well rounded individual on their own time.
Is there a link to a PDF or anything?
It’s not done yet. I’ve only just written the abstract and started collecting my sources. When it’s finished it’ll likely just go collect dust in a substack somewhere like everything else I shout into the void.
I write this stuff because if I don’t, I’ll go mad. But I hardly expect it to get widely distributed.
I’m not saying that everyone who attends a trade-school is intellectually incurious; just that a broader understanding of the world is not a part of the curriculum and it’s left up to the students themselves if they want to be a well rounded individual on their own time.
I read “Shop class as soulcraft” a while ago. I highly recommend it. I don’t have a problem with trade schools per se. Not everyone is cut out for white collar work, and there is no shame in doing other work. Smart people are required in skilled work that isn’t at a desk, IMHO. Also, I object to what university has become, and that’s essentially treating it as a trade school!
But if I were to have my ideal situation, it would be this - starting early, children are taught to question things and given a sound framework to base that on. By the time they are in high school, everyone should be able to easily spot a logical fallacy. This is not hard stuff. It’s also not airy-fairy stuff. It’s an essential life-skill, like learning to balance your checkbook and manage a household budget. This would be woven into nearly every class, where possible.
By the time someone leaves high school, whether they go to a trade school, or uni, or directly to a job, or to be a homemaker, they should hopefully be equipped to discern the wheat from the chaff and be able to use this skillset for life.
I think the major roadblock would essentially be Republicans. They basically want obedient workers, and they want people to fill their churches. Raising a set of citizens that are questioning the claims made by everyone, including qons, and who are able to spot the logical fallacies constantly employed by corporations and by Republicans would be a threat to the qons.
I agree completely. Trade-Schools are as good or as bad as the person attending. You’re going to have people like my best friend, who went to a tradeschool for bio-tech lab assistant, but reads constantly and is generally well versed in critical thinking. And then you have people like my brother-in-law, who’s a damn good Welder but doesn’t know, or care, about the wider world around him and just believes the words of whoever happens to agree with him.
Critical thinking is the most basic skill that needs to be reinforced in a democracy. But you need knowledge in order to participate in a proper dialogue, whether it’s political, social or economic. Knowledge that doesn’t come from learning how to weld good.
It’s like every generation loses the ability to do something in computer technology that was just abstracted away somehow. I as a millennial have never soldered a PC mainboard (modding an Xbox doesn’t count), but I’d say that otherwise, my understanding is pretty good. And I think all of my friends understand the concepts of files.
I recently asked someone about 10 years older if he knew what partitioning and formatting means in the context, and he knew, despite initially saying he has no clue about computers, to show someone 10 years younger (who didn’t know) that such knowledge was just basically required back in the day. And it’s not like these terms are obsolete, the concepts are still the same, even though we went from MBR to GPT and from FAT32 or whatever to better filesystems. It’s no different for phones, but not required and even hidden.
I’d say generally, the technology userbase broadened while average knowledge in the group declined, however I’m not sure whether the absolute numbers of people with a certain knowledge level actually went down.
I recently asked someone about 10 years older if he knew what partitioning and formatting means in the context, and he knew, despite initially saying he has no clue about computers, to show someone 10 years younger (who didn’t know) that such knowledge was just basically required back in the day
I call them Intellectual Oligarchies. The knowledge (of any subject, not just tech) being limited to a circle of elites while the products are made simple enough to operate that the average person doesn’t really need to know how it’s done, just how to purchase it.
The good thing about Intellectual Oligarchies, however, is that they are open to be joined by anyone who wants to learn, or is curious about things. No formal education is required; just intellectual curiosity and the ability to read. They’re entirely self-propogated; not purposefully created by some evil cabal trying to withhold knowledge from the average person. Knowledge itself is open-source, in other words. Anyone can use it if they want.
In the Greek and Roman democratic condition, people who don’t exercise that “right to knowledge” lacked the context necessary to properly partake in the citizen’s primary job…democratic rule.
Ars Liberalis doesn’t translate to “Liberal Arts”. It literally translates to “The skills of Freedom”. A citizenry of a democracy needs the skills (knowledge) to properly function in said democracy; and that included studies of history, philosophy, politics, civics, etc…
It’s like every generation loses the ability to do something in computer technology that was just abstracted away somehow
Yes, I’ve been hearing computer engineers (or those with that mindset) complaining that programmers don’t really understand much about how computers actually work since before I even entered the workforce, but I kind of get what they are/were saying. I’d look around at my peers nearly the entire time I’ve been doing this, and I’d see some that really wanted to know a lot about, well, everything, in some cases, being interested in hardware, and then there were a lot, maybe more than half, that just focus on learning whatever the herd is telling them is the newest shiny object - and this is nearly always vendor-led and a lot of it is less about sound reasoning, and more about being fashionable. These days it might be a frontend JS framework, but exchange the set of terms/frameworks and it’s the same old story.
These days it is increasingly difficult to know much about the actual target hardware, if you work in hosted services like Azure, etc…
I mean, Boomer grandparents did the real lifting if we’re going back…
And some of the prior generation. There were some truly great minds working on this stuff that were the parents of boomers.
If we were able to age out of authoritarian conservatism, it would have happened a long time ago. Possibly as far back as “cooking food over fire is making kids these days weak”. That should never have been a strategy. Doubly so when there’s a time limit to solve global warming.
Fuck Gen Z. Gen Y fo life!
If you want salvation, seek Jesus. The one from Revelations, the one that crushes people and had his clothes dyed red with the blood of his enemies. He is the only one who will save you now. Riding a white horse, and sword in hand, truly the fifth horseman of apocalypse. Only he can bring justice to this doomed world.
They did good. Im sure they will.
Gen Z grew up on social media. The same that spreads the propaganda, the fake information and the toxic masculinity bullshit.
They also grew up with an impossible social economic context where they barely have any hope. Trump’s making promises to make the country great again. What have they got to lose?
Why is anyone surprised?
They also grew up in a time where the education budget was slashed over and over, even some states like Florida getting rid of history and sciences during trumps last presidency. No surprise there.
Well I guess their plan worked
Beyond their wildest dreams. The bad guys have been getting win after win after win the past few decades.
What have they got to lose?
Gay marriage, contraception, porn, legal divorce? Just off the top of my head.
Their POV is that the earth is going to burn to a crisp before they’re out of paying back their college debt whether the tie is blue or red.
Play an online game and hang with some teenagers every now and again and just listen in. I hear some straight depressing shit. They have zero hope for anything.
Kamala might keep the lights on. Trump might accidentally trip over a good idea. Worth a shot if you’re fucked either way, right?
They were wrong, granted… but justified? Sure.
They have zero hope for anything.
And they’re right.
Porn isn’t going anywhere. LoL
Divorce either.
Gay marriage? It’s already dangerous to just come out, let alone get married.
And contraception? They’ren already losing that one too in many states thanks to local governments anyway.
Gay marriage?
The real solution here is to abolish marriage as a state sponsored privilege. It’s a religious ceremony that should have no place in government. It’s pretty gross how there’s so much pressure and so many benefits (eg. tax breaks) from participating in this ceremony. If people want to perform this ritual, it should be like a baptism without any state involvement. Nobody cares about gay baptism, but marriage is a hot button issue because it confers so much privilege. As a non-religious person, it’s super oppressive.
“divorce either”
Just like abortion, right? You realize it hasn’t been that long that you had to prove one party was at fault in order to be allowed to divorce? You hate each other? Denied!
Yup, I remember the parents of boomers bitching about “no fault divorce”. Had to finally ask someone wtf they were going on about. This was maybe the 70s or 80s?
Turns out this shit gets passed down, now I hear Gen Z bitching about it as well as a few of the crazy influencer types coming out and saying the quiet parts out loud now. Nearly all my life, I didn’t even really hear that many boomers complain about it, and I cannot recall hearing my gen (Gen X) say anything at all about it, if they even knew what it was, except for the occasional really crazy xtian taliban type that went unfiltered and told us normies what they thought about “the state of marriage today”.
What a fucked up world that we now have to worry about this kind of thing again? These people are just fucking crazy. It’s one thing that they have such fucked up ideas about (their) elites trafficking kids in the basement of a basementless pizza parlor, but they cannot even leave anyone else the fuck alone.
They have their stupid book club, and we allow them to have it, because freedom of religion. But they insist that everyone else has to join them because they think freedom FROM religion is not an American ideal that needs to be followed…I hate them so very much. And I was raised xtian…
You have to get married to get divorced, and marriage is simply not on the table for most people. It’s expensive and pointless. Marriage rates have been dropping for a couple of decades. It’s just not important since we completely removed the original purpose… Expanding the economic success of both families.
So you don’t mind if the rights of a minority are infringed upon? You realize it’s a way to control women? Marriage doesn’t need to be expensive either and a man wanting to put a ball and chain on a woman will force her to get married and she’ll be legally stuck with him for the rest of his life if no fault divorce is made illegal again. What about the 62 million married couples that already exist?
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rcna161562
There’s a massive difference between the social stigma attached to coming out, and the revocation of the legal rights associated with marriage.
It’s not even that long ago that people couldn’t visit their life partner in the hospital following an accident, because they weren’t married.Limited access to certain types of contraception in certain areas is a very different beast than overturning the case that ruled that contraception isn’t criminally indecent.
If you don’t know how far civil rights have come even in the past 20 years, or how much further back than that they openly want to push things back, I don’t think you’re paying attention.
Abortion had just as much legal protection as porn or gay marriage, and it “wasn’t going anywhere” until it was suddenly gone.Oh I am paying attention. I know that’s at stake. I was born in the early 80’s so I’ve seen the progress. And I’ve seen the conservatives chipping away at it for the past 20 years. Both in the US and Canada. (I’m Canadian)
I’ve been stuck with the massive democratic power of the boomer masses my whole adult life and saw them vote in these conservative and neo liberal parties that have completely destroyed whatever social safety net that they benefited from and any freedom and equality only for them to have more money to put in their retirement funds.
I was hoping the Gen Zs would join our ranks, but social media, corporate lies, toxic ideologies meant to address their insecurities, and now AI have fucked up their perspective.
Porn isn’t going anywhere. LoL
Give Project 2025 a read. Wild things in there.
Gay marriage? It’s already dangerous to just come out, let alone get married.
Thanks to who?
And contraception? They’ren already losing that one too in many states thanks to local governments anyway.
Literally a direct cause of the last Trump administration.
Man it’s like you’ve never even met any of the dumb crackheads that are cucking for these evangelicals
As a Gen-X I will never blame the later generations. Especially Gen Z and younger, if I was in their shoes I’d be livid. You bring me into this mess and then tell me it’s on me to fix it? F U
As a Gen-Xer, we got the benefit of the boomers taking almost all the air out of the room, and their parents thinking our generation was even worse than the boomers. The boomers mostly ignored us, called us slackers, etc…some time goes by and we are getting lumped in with the boomers and the “greatest generation” and getting blamed for all the problems, so that’s been fun.
Gen X had no future, it was all boomers until…oh, it’s still boomers.
I suppose this was aimed more at the sandwich generation, but still:
But it is nice sometimes to finally get remembered, even if it’s for blame.
Well, the older generation made some of the best movies for us, so there is that. I still say Repo Man represents a moment in time and a certain age bracket in a certain location like few other movies have…
They also grew up during the pandemic so they might actually be less educated than Boomers.
Millenials appear to have been peak liberal.
If this is true, it might explain so much of why they were so angry.
Watching TNG reruns nightly as an 8 year old really gave me some hope for humanity’s potential.
Just remember that according to the cannon timeline, the United States was rounding up people and putting them in “sanctuary districts” and in 2027 it’s the start of World War 3. Who knows, we may be right on track for that brighter future!
Same. Le sigh 😕
We were teenagers under dubya and the iraq war. Depending on how much the country swings into actual fascism this time, gen alpha might wind up standing for general anarchism
I think the ones that elected FDR 4 times have us beat
Hell I’d vote for him a fifth time, but he’s mysteriously not running.
Although I suppose he wasn’t running the first four times either…
Took me far longer than it should have to get this joke.
First generation seen moving left as it ages and a reverse tendency might be happening with the Z men while the Z women are much more left leaning. It might also be part of why Z men seem so much farther right, the women of their generation are much farther left than women of previous generations so the division is much more clear. In truth the men might not be much further right than men of previous generations were when it comes to the policies they agree with, we just didn’t pay as much attention to it back then…
Just some stuff they were talking about on the radio a few weeks ago…
That’s generally the consensus, that young men are roughly as conservative as they were historically, but women are more left-wing (although maybe a bit less than expected, given recent election results).
Results from Reagan’s 1980 election win look fairly similar: https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-1980, excepting that women and men were voting in similar ways for each age group, and bigger margins to Reagan in the older groups.EDIT: Nevermind this doesn’t actually show age by gender data.
Idk what that means though. Are you saying men always felt women’s place was in the kitchen and now women are saying it isn’t so they’ve moved more liberal?
Sure…
“Liberal.”
Its never been up to a single generation anyway
When the link snaps open the entire chain is broken.
It is up to every generation.
No analysis of how the older generations that turned out for Obama and Kerry went even harder for Trump than Gen Z ? Gen X went Trump by 22 percent.
Gen Z is doing their best and if you put this all on them then you’re going to lose the next election too.
Depressing as it is, it’s fairly typical for people to skew rightward as they get older. The problem is if Gen Z is already starting at a certain position, right now…where will they be at when they reach the age of today’s boomers or Gen X/Y?
Remember: the boomers brought us the 60s. Over the years, the narrative has morphed from the boomers’ parents (and reactionaries among the boomers) clucking their tongues about the 60s to: OMG, the boomers are all in for donvict, and “okay boomer” and so on. Boomer is now shorthand for Faux News and hate radio addict. Not so long ago, that target demo was the boomers’ parents.
So, if it can happen to them, it is likely to happen for Gen Z, but maybe even worse.
The boomers were actually better than Gen X. The only reason we think people get more conservative is because we had a generation with reliable news. Then as they got older they kept Fox News on whenever they weren’t watching something else, just all the time. They didn’t realize Fox was propaganda and Gen X hasn’t realized CNN was bought out years ago with the specific idea of turning it into Fox News 2.
What we need in this country is some media literacy.
Why hasn’t there been a push to counter the propaganda on social media with social media?
Use short form, humorous posts that integrate facts and ideas that give a different more positive take on others. I would guess there are great writers and actors that have a progressive-ish mindset that could put something like this together.
But honestly what is the reason this hasn’t been done? Or if it is being done why isn’t there more of a push to get it seen?
Algorithms ensure that the only content that ends up getting to your eyes is content that you already agree with for the most part. Or content that you hate so much that you have an incurable urge to respond to it with swearing and vitriol. (or at least that’s why I think TikTok keeps giving me Maple Maga bullshit)
In other words, you can put up whatever you want but thanks to modern social media, the only people who will ever see it are the people who already agree with you.
why I think TikTok keeps giving me Maple Maga bullshit
I mean… it shows the garbage to you, and you keep coming back… maybe it’s time to ditch tictack
Why hasn’t there been a push to counter the propaganda on social media with social media?
Because the dems are also right-wing and have no credibility.
The actual left-wing is constantly pushing counter-narratives but without the massive funding of capital (eg. koch bros). No billionaire is going to fund a left-wing Prager U that talks about how billionaires are trash.
That would require ongoing funding outside of election years. These are paid for by Mercers and Kochs or the Kremlin on the right, and i don’t think Gates or Cuban is too eager to fund left-wing propaganda.
There is Holywood money in the world of progressive actors that could put something together but I don’t know that world and how it works so I have no idea if it’s something that is actually feasible.
The Hollywood elites are full of conservatives and libertarians. The elites are the suits who finance those movies like Steven Mnuchin.
You will be surprised to learn how little money the most famous actors in Hollywood actually have, that’s why they’re all trying to sell vagina candles and tequila.
If you don’t control the platform, it might just be wasted efforts, although I guess they could try. But it might be that those pulling the strings can be sure that virtually no one is reached.
It’s a frustratingly true response… sigh
The establishment wants to stay established, so they only use their established channels, not realizing how disconnected they became.
They about to be thrown off mom and dads insurance and learn the hard way about the “team” they voted for.
Not to mention the fact that inflation is about to go through the roof and there will be food shortages when they start deporting migrants.
“But that is far from a sturdy monolith. It can, and should, be easily conquered. All it takes is a platform that authentically offers something—anything—to youth voters. As they’ve proved, time and time again, they’ll listen.”
Democrats: Sorry, we’ll talk a big game and then just have 2 fuckwit Senators ruin everything. Don’t worry though I promise next time will be the same!
In before Newsom or Shapiro nominee in 2028. (that is, in the far-fetched scenario we still have real elections).
Trump Youth.
It was pretty funny seeing people putting so much faith into these kids
The funniest one was when they thought Taylor Swift fans of all people would save democracy.
