I wanted to hate this piece, but I can't. This idea of "post-emotional" is ridiculous, and probably overestimates how passionate previous generations were. There were a lot of half-hearted hippies and punks too. But I think he's right about a few things:
- the ideal personality is now someone gentle, who gets along with everyone
- the ideal social form is now to start a business or non-profit, or at least be an independent professional
- to this end, and due to social media and blogging, many of us are always selling ourselves, however subtly.
Calling our generation "sellers" has negative connotations, as if we 're super-conformists or sth. If you follow his descriptions, we are the most mature and responsible generation ever: we don't overtly express a futile belief in utopias, we lived the end of communism, we don't reject business, but instead try to infiltrate it with less greed, we don't manipulate people with emotional bullshit (love did not feed the world), we understand that you can change society by not being confrontational (hence we are "selling" ideas rather than screaming them). We don't have a dominant mass culture, which means we are open to micro-cultures, frowning upon the childishness of current-day blockbusters. I don't think Steve Jobs is an idol for us, we don't really have idols and myths, except maybe google.org or wikipedia. It's a good generation.
I'm much older than the generation he's talking about, and I think you're entirely right. I shouldn't expect too much understanding of grubby commerce from a former English professor, but I think the affect of a salesman and of an entrepreneur are worlds apart.
An entrepreneur is up to a whole thing, and deals with mainly closed feedback loops. A salesman is at best a fragment of a real enterprise, but is often, as in the case of a snake-oil salesmen, backed up by little or nothing. The feedback loops for a salesman are frequently open, allowing all manner of bullshit.
Further, even if he were right about entrepreneurship being more common, it still wouldn't be the dominant experience, so using it to explain a generation's affect is suspicious.
Instead, I think it's much more reasonable to look at the rise of electronic communication (cheap phone calls, texts, email, chat, Twitter, Facebook). It means, in effect, that each of us lives in our own virtual small town. People end up being pleasant to each other because when they aren't, the consequences are more likely to be felt and harder to dodge.
...we are the most mature and responsible generation ever
Just because the hipster ideal is more "mature and responsible" than related social movements which preceded it, does not make our generation more mature and responsible than those which preceded it.
Calling our generation "sellers" has negative connotations, as if we 're super-conformists or sth.
Are those negative connotations necessarily unwarranted? For example, is everyone starting their own business and doing their own PR really the most effective way for us to organize ourselves?
We understand that you can change society by not being confrontational
Really? I count OWS, WikiLeaks, Anonymous, etc. among the biggest contributions of our generation. Certainly these are confrontational?
We don't have a dominant mass culture, which means we are open to micro-cultures
Agreed. This is what I admire most about our generation.
> Really? I count OWS, WikiLeaks, Anonymous, etc. among the biggest contributions of our generation. Certainly these are confrontational?
I think he covers this point here:
"Yes, we’re vicious, anonymously, on the comment threads of public Web sites, but when we speak in our own names, on Facebook and so forth, we’re strenuously cheerful, conciliatory, well-groomed. (In fact, one of the reasons we’re so vicious, I’m convinced, is to relieve the psychic pressure of all that affability.) "
This is one of the silliest claims in his piece. It supports the thrust of his argument that our generation's friendliness is affected and skin-deep, and therefore we need anonymous outlets for our underlying negativity. But in reality vicious anonymous comments are outlets of the insecure and jaded. It's not like the friendliest and nicest people we know spend the most time making nasty anonymous comments on the Internet.
> It's not like the friendliest and nicest people we know spend the most time making nasty anonymous comments on the Internet.
I assume this is true, but can we be sure? What if the people who make nasty anonymous comments on the internet are actually nice in person? I know that I have hated people who hang on the same irc-channels than me, only to meet them in person later, and be surprised that they're not at all like they are online.
- Our generation is not all about hipsters. It happens to be much more fragmented than previous generations, u hear about hipsters because it's the most pervasive (and loud) pattern. I meant that as a generation we haven't created a fake utopia just for ourselves, we yearn for what is possible not just what is ideal (or i believe so, i dont know my generation that good)
- I think it will be, it is possible now to overthrow corporatism for a more ethical model where corporations will be socially responsible. Things like "PR" are slowly fading.
- Compared to May '68, or the Red Army Faction, it is.
i think i've found a way to hate it. the author is spot on, but entirely misses the point by labeling us "generation sell". it's not about the selling, it's about working for ourselves. the band as a self-promoting, self-managing independent entity isn't doing it to make money, they're doing their own sales so that their music remains their own. small-time independent entrepreneurs are very specifically not selling themselves. they're selling a product so they don't have to sell themselves to an employer. being a small business owner isn't about selling something, it's about not selling out.
I suspect most people still want the comfort of a stable job or career. Problem is that for the last ten years it has been hard to find good ones in the general economy, outside a few growth areas of questionable sustainability (housing, finance, health care). So the opportunity cost for 20-30 somethings to doing their own thing has fallen, even if people don't want to admit it.
The other difference is that startups and small businesses give people a more comfortable narrative of how their life is going. It is a lot more comforting to tell yourself, "I'm doing badly now so I will do better in the future," than "I'll never get a job that pays as well as my parents."
If this was not the case, there would be much less romanticization of venture capital and angel investment on these boards, more startups would be focused on revenue-generating than traction-generating products, and lifestyle businesses would not be perceived as failures of boldness for "not swinging for the fences".
While some might desire the comfort of a stable job or career, the world is developing down a path where mobility is what counts and flexibility pays off. Companies can shift production fairly rapidly due to local economic conditions and the people that best adapt to this are generally the winners. I think with current globalization trends we are going to start to see more economic nomads maintaining a sense of community through the internet.
I'm not sure that's the angle many people are actually taking, though. It is possible to take the approach of being independent for creative control, and making money is a means to that end (so you don't have to sell yourself to a corporation). It's very tempting to subtly infuse everything with the selling goal, though, where all your decisions have this nagging backdrop of "will this sell? how will this contribute to my personal brand?" etc.
It's pretty difficult to keep the selling boxed up even if you want to, and really have it be only a means to an end that isn't the main influence on what you do. Even independent businesses that make a conscious effort not to have all their decisions driven by marketing (say, Dischord Records) don't entirely succeed, and it's probably even less the case for people who don't have that kind of active "anti-selling-out" mindset.
It might even be harder, in some cases, than in a normal job. There are a lot of corners of the corporate world where you can make decisions either entirely, or at least mostly, based on technical considerations, because how it's going to make money is someone else's job. The limit case is corporate research labs, where e.g. Bell Labs employees spent very little time thinking about whether their research was sellable; but in a more limited way it appears in lots of places. If you're an independent technical researcher, it's much harder to keep your thoughts off the selling angle, because your livelihood more directly depends on whether your research output will produce revenue.
Agreed. If you are an entrepreneur, it just becomes natural to think about everything in terms of market-value. I guess that this article could be a good alert to remember not to do that completely.
Selling is only a means for "Generation Sell". This fan of David Brooks is off the mark, mefeels. Millennials are not Mad Men. They want to create culture. (He mentions it offhand, in the article, though, so he knows it at some -- probably subconscious -- level. I gather that, as a self-described bobo -- he's kind of envious.) Creating culture -- that goes well with OWS.
"to this end, and due to social media and blogging, many of us are always selling ourselves, however subtly."
I think the dominant belief of our generation is basically that you shouldn't talk unless you're selling something. I don't think that this is because the people doing the 'selling' are superficial, but rather because the general public is becoming less well-educated and capable of independent thought. So the burden of thought is essentially now placed almost entirely in the hands of third parties. It's an extremely troubling trend.
He has put his finger on some vital characteristics of the 2010 era. I think we could have some absolutely lovely flamewars about the causes and effects of those characteristics, but I really, really can't argue with his observations. I've observed that too, but not verbalized it.
Same thing here. I have felt this new "moral order" but this is the first time I've seen it linked to a salesman persona and used as a token to describe this generation.
- the ideal personality is now someone gentle, who gets along with everyone
- the ideal social form is now to start a business or non-profit, or at least be an independent professional
- to this end, and due to social media and blogging, many of us are always selling ourselves, however subtly.