Gen X at the end of the Internet party: We need an exit strategy and I have one.

Book art by Jodi Harvey-Brown

Patty says she’s been reading my writing for a long time and she’s sick of reading about parenting. So I feel like the time is ripe for me to slip in stuff I’d normally leave on the chopping block:

The specialty of Gen X is to see a disintegrating mess and take advantage of it. Think: post-Civil War robber barons and their monopolies. Or the speculating and hustling during the morally precarious roaring 20s. If tearing down institutions is cyclical, so is the resulting opportunistic cynicism.

Gen X created a data frenzy and picked up everything they could get their hands on. But today it’s like we’re at a party where the piñata broke two hours ago; there’s not much more candy to find.

Signs we are in the final years of the great electronic land grab

Universities gamified college rankings and bought satellite universities for hiding students with low test scores. IAC gamified dating and bought tons of niche communities to create one efficient hook-up machine. Meanwhile, colleges appear to have no value besides providing access to the hidden marriage market. So, since IAC owns every dating site, they can buy the Ivy League in a fire sale when Trump is done with them.

The only way for us to find all the research we’ve paid for with our tax dollars is through Google Scholar, which we will definitely start being charged for soon. So it’s not enough that we are building Tesla with tax incentives, we’re also building side businesses for Google with our tax grants. If you don’t think we’re living in an era of robber barons, you’re nuts.

The information age has run its course

I’m sorry to admit that my generation, X, has wreaked havoc over identity and privacy. Now Millennials are coming in to save the day. It’s my worst nightmare, really. The Internet was like a gold rush for Gen X. And then while we were gunslinging and leaving ghost towns, Millennials organized everything into nice little towns and social experiences.

I can’t wait for them to legislate the hell out of Silicon Valley like progressives descending on the train tracks of the Carnegie land heist. Because AI is grooming minors, and Meta knows and has done nothing. Roblox is a cesspool of child trafficking, intricately coordinated with Discord, and there are no laws to control this yet.

Get all your AI-ing done now, before it’s too late

Stanford is making LLMs invitation-only because it’s costing them $1.50 a search. Also, AI takes up too much energy. Millennials will view AI just like social security and the electoral college—one more institutional disaster that requires structural change. But seriously, most of the work AI does for us is paper shuffling. So we will stop worshipping the god of information synthesis.

Travel is over: find a new way to avoid your life

There will be something like carbon offsets for AI, where you can stop traveling in order to get more credits to use the AI. Everyone except the super rich will do that, because public air travel is a ridiculous time heist where tourists trample over important parts of history to feel special. Soon people will stop differentiating themselves by where they’ve traveled, the same way they’ll stop differentiating themselves by how much information they can consume and synthesize.

Phones are going away – prepare your voice

We know that screens are physically killing us: from not moving, from eye strain, and mentally, from taking in more information than we were meant to. Even kids want to be off their phones. We will be done with phones in 5-10 years because AI voice is so close to being ready. Millennials will switch everything over to Alexa and friends. And Gen Z will get all ethics on us, like they always do, and tell us that using voice is a moral imperative. Maybe we’ll enter the golden age of book art, since they can’t all go to landfills.

Reality bites for Gen X

I used to be so proud to be Gen X. But I also used to never be able to make sense of generational theory. I understood how Baby Boomers and Millennials fit, but I could never see Gen X in that picture. Now I know why: we are the Gilded Information Age. In the last Gilded Age people took advantage of workers, children, and immigrants. Anyone who could work in unfair conditions was fair game for the industrialists.

And here we are now: Gen X companies took advantage of workers by insanely long hours and low pay, and Gen X leaders sold data from kids, strategically destroyed housing markets, and tossed off all the worst online work to the most vulnerable people.

But look, we had to. We were parented by the most selfish generation and we became the the most neglected generation. So, Patty, I know you’re sick of parenting, but this is why I can’t stop writing about it: there are casualties. Parents who neglect kids end up with kids who scramble as adults for anything they can get, because there’s so much we didn’t get as kids.

I read a course description that said, “Freedom is something we do together.” I think it’s a generational phrase. My generation had the freedom to be scrappy in a lawless frontier. Millennials have the freedom to rebuild our institutions to create stability. I would like to do that freedom with them. I’m trying to get on board.