What if the Old Guys Were Right?
I think old people deserve a fair hearing, one they aren\u2019t afforded all too often in the multimedia era. I believe that the elders aren\u2019t always wrong and the young aren\u2019t always right. Growing up, we were lied to about all this, ironically by the people who are now old. The \u201cnever trust anyone over 30\u201d boomer generation inculcated a sense that youth is just a form of incipient correctness. The future is theirs, so therefore they will be right about the future. Inevitably though, the young, while dictating the future, will ruin it in some glaring way. They\u2019re human, it happens. And keeps happening.
Worse than Twitter\u2019s baseline tone is just the omnipresent, reflexive demonization and collective will to hurt outgroup individuals. Connected to that is a panicky willingness to buy into emotionally charged stories that you don\u2019t dare question your in-group on. Did we all become Deadspin? No, Deadspin wasn\u2019t like this in 2008. But, if I\u2019m honest, it was probably one more step to wherever we are. And this current place, perhaps a hell and perhaps a purgatory, is an ever-changing but seldom evolving shit show. It\u2019s been one big refutation of the once-ballyhooed idea that we should all be speaking to each other, constantly.
What the boomers missed, however, was how they created this generation. They promoted an aesthetic of rebellious gatecrashing, then pulled up the ladder once safely ensconced. Moreover, they demeaned their privileged perch out of a moralized pique, all while ceding no purchase. This food is terrible, and such small portions, but none for you. No tradition was upheld because no tradition was offered.
"}So the younger generation responded in kind, not with tradition, but with an all-out assault on it. They beat the establishment, then beat themselves, and in the end, almost nothing endured.