Brontoforumus Archive
Discussion Boards => Thaddeus Boyd's Panel of Death => Topic started by: Mothra on September 11, 2013, 03:06:07 PM
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Thought this article (http://robertjacksonbennett.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/generation-dread/) on how our generation has adopted a sort of persistent, bracing dread pretty interesting. It is mighty depressing, mind you, but I definitely thought it was worth a read.
It’s this sense of inevitable destruction, this floating paranoia and devout belief that disaster and massive, massive wrongdoing is unavoidable, that I think increasingly defines my generation, if not the world. It’s been 12 years since 9/11, and a horrific war rages on in the Middle East, and we’ve more or less retreated from most of the heroic postures we struck there less than a decade ago. It’s been 5 years since the financial crisis, and everyone who was responsible for it not only got away with it, but actively profited from it, punishing civilians while the authorities looked on, either helpless or attempting to assume the image of helplessness. And it’s been less than a year since we discovered that, yeah, actually, the government is recording every single thing you do. We haven’t yet experienced the consequences of this, not fully, but we all seem to agree that we will.
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I think there's also a segment of the population that actively craves for a disaster to hit some big reset button. Zombie fantasies, yahoos hoping for a world economic collapse or WWIII, stuff like that. They feed the fearful and in turn feed off of them.
There's also the issue of people being outmatched by the power of modern western governments and multinational corporations like never before. I'm not sure this is the right thread, but there's also the issue of the vast refinement of practical mind control. I don't mean like sci-fi brain probes or syringes full of sopalamine, I'm talking about the hundreds of thousands of little programs put forth to shape our behaviour in subtle ways, usually for really stupid pedestrian things, like getting us to buy doritos or trinkets in video games.
We're actually in the middle of a vast experiment to look into the way our brains react to stimuli, only it's not an experiment anyone agreed to, it's been spontaneously crowdsourced to thousands of different companies and organizations. That research could also be put to positive ends, or at least we could better guard against the worst effect, but because there was no discussion about this, we understand only vaguely and there's no conversation about how to handle it. THAT'S the shit I find scary, myself.
I don't know if that's really appropriate for this thread or if that's a different topic. I think I should make a separate discussion, but I can't help but think it contributes to the sense of powerlessness that contributes to this zeitgeist. There are other things too, just as important: Real declines in material prosperity, losses in security beyond just government spying, social dissatisfaction (there's another whole argument about how social media have affected our interactions, potentially negatively).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that in shitty times, everything goes down together in a slow-moving shit avalanche. Sometimes you can see specific things in there like bits of corn, yesterday's old boot, or a cold glistening chunk of raw fear, but it's part and parcel of this whole fucking greater mess we're in, social, environmental, economic, international, etc.
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I guess the writer of the article forgot about the Cold War and the omnipresent Red Scare? The only period in contemporary history Americans were raised without fear of some vague impending death is 1991-2001.
Even the resurgence of zombie movies is timed to a general feeling nobody knows what the fuck they're doing - end of Vietnam War, 1975, end of Bush government, 2008.
I would be loathe to point to any single successful movie as a stamp of the zeitgeist. You need to look at trends, not directorial marks.
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Hello, this is the author of the above mentioned post. Your comment was interesting to me, and I wanted to ask you some questions:
How many unsuspecting American civilians did the Soviet Union, or any other national authority for that matter, manage to kill on American soil?
If the Soviet Union was to kill American civilians en masse, what do you think their strategic goal would be? And would this strategic goal be comparable to those of the perpetrators of, say, the Boston Marathon Bombing? If the Soviet Union put a bomb on an American plane, do you think they would do so with goals similar to those of the Underwear Bomber?
How do you feel the leadership structure of the Soviet Union, or any other opposing national authority we've dealt with in the past, is similar to the leadership structures of the myriad, nebulous, and ever-changing terrorist organizations we've been opposing for the past 15 years?
Would you say that the Cold War achieved a definite end when the Soviet Union collapsed? If so, can you envision, given the current global state, a definite, absolute, final end to the War on Terror in a manner that is similar to the collapse of the Soviet Union? Do you think it would be possible for all terrorist networks - which, as I said above, are myriad, nebulous, ever-changing, and nomadic to boot - to totally and utterly collapse, kaput, over, forever, in a region stretching from North Africa to the Hindu Kush, across over a dozen different countries?
If you consider the answers to these questions, would you say that it is possible that the War on Terror might have a very different effect on national outlook and popular culture than the Cold War, or the Vietnam War, or even World War II?
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So basically you mean "People used to be scared, but not in the way -we- are scared, our scared is totally more real". OK.
And sure, I can envision a end to the War of Terror. Follow me:
The government stops using "terrorism" as an excuse for any and all breaches of privacy, and people just go on with their lives.
Sometimes a car bomb explodes, and sometimes a pressure cooker is turned into the world's worst claymore mine. Three or four people die from that. The news has nothing to report because terrorism is not the word of the day, the action is treated like a random event from unhinged individuals, government promises to do things that never actually come into fruition, everyone's convinced the world is crap, and soon things get back to normal. (Except for the two hundred people that need counseling for a few years, of course.)
A one-sided war is over as soon as you stop fighting it.
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Maybe an end of terrorism involves a re-evaluation of how we consider violence and imperialism in society. Terrorism as an act has been less of a problem in our lives - mostly because of its vagueness and complexity - than Terrorism as an idea. It's mere idea, much like the propagandized threat of the Soviet Union, is used to justify declarations of war as well as intrusive invasions of privacy.
Really, my biggest complaint about the article would be that, to quote the dude, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man. If you really want to get the impression of how people feel about the world, it might be good to actually speak with them. I personally don't fear constantly. At least no more than I feel happiness, anger, optimism, cynicism, pessimism, etc. And it seems to me that the fact that people are going on, attempting to make lives for themselves and that Preppers are still a minority in society would suggest that no, people aren't living in constant fear of some destruction.
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I'm still more frightened by the idea of nuclear war than terrorists, for what it's worth.
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I'm still more frightened by the idea of being broke and homeless than terrorists, for what it's worth.
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I'm still more frightened by the idea of being broke and homeless than terrorists, for what it's worth.
Yeah, this seems way more relevant to me. The fear the author describes is a factor, but only as smaller part of a bigger whole.
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I think Zara kind of accidentally hit upon a point, which is that if our generation is exceptional at all it's that we were exposed to a period of time that WASN'T marked by some sort of hanging threat. No ongoing wars, no nuclear scare, no massive civil rights battle, the economy was impeccable, the terrorists were incompetent, and even the far-off confusing tribal conflicts mostly produced amazing cellists. All we had left to worry about was petty crime, gays in the military, and what the President was doing with his dick.
If we feel like we're more put-upon than our ancestors then it's because we've been tricked into thinking that peace and prosperity are the natural order of things, rather than a fleeting prize won at a heavy price.
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There have been some periods like that in the past. It's been a damn long time though.
I'm not really sure that that many people were that "conditioned" though. The window you're talking about was very brief - maybe ten years. You have to be of a very very particular age - narrower than just "generation Y" - to not have spent your formative years during that era and not have had any earlier or later experience.
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Thought about this some more, figured I'd elaborate. Probably needlessly.
The article points out that yes, shit sucks. Nobody knows how bad socioeconomic factors are than me! I guess if robertjbennett comes back I can fill him in, but you guys know what I'm talking about already.
I've just now struggled past the poverty line to take my first ragged, gulping breath of Lower Middle Class. And... I still live in more idle luxury than people did 100 years ago, definitely better than your average medieval king. I don't have as many gold coins in my basement (or a basement...) but I think I have a comparable number of peppercorns in my pantry.
You want to tell someone who lived through the Great Depression that inside 100 years from that event people's main health problems come from eating too much food?
Hell, I'm posting this from a device I keep in my pocket that's going to beam this very text through the air to a central server somewhere. It may bounce off a satellite somebody launched into outer fucking space just so I could look at pictures of cats on my lunch break at work.
So yeah, the government is corrupt, we're mired in wars I don't understand and in places I'd have to look up on a map because we're falling behind the rest of the world in basic education, and humanity is pissing into its collective wellwater on environmental issues, and women and racial/religious/sexual minorities still have to fight uphill battles for basic human decency and respect, and the people who make the world like that not only avoid punishment but actively profit off what they do... but those problems are too big for me. I can't worry about them, because there's nothing I can do about them. My existential dread is about whether I can take care of myself and start a family, not whether phantom terrorists might one day blow that hypothetical family up.
I have until the end of the month to decide if I can afford health insurance on my workplace's group plan. I probably can't, but the question is one I actually have to think about now. Things are bad, but I can't buy into something so despairing as things being worse now than they've ever been.
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Well, historical measures are important when it comes to measuring personal prosperity, but relativity to our peers is also important, arguably more so. It's pretty understandable for anyone in your situation to feel less than wealthy.
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I guess I came off as a little TOO optimistic, then. There's certainly no danger of me feeling wealthy.
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It's no great depression, but I would agree that things are the worst they've been economically in over half a century. Since the aftermath of the second world war, anyway. Especially in terms of individual buying power, wealth disparity, and the social safety net. Coming on the heels of a period of relative prosperity that occurred at a point in most of our lives where we were establishing our baseline for normal puts it into sharper relief.
I don't give a second thought to terrorism, other than the encroachments on civil liberties made in the name of fighting it. You're several orders of magnitude more likely to be shot by a cop than killed by a terrorist, justifiably or otherwise, and with an extra zero or two tacked on depending on your ethnicity. Hell, you're far more likely to drown in the bathtub or be trampled by pigs. Sure, there's a case to be made for all the "living in the shadow of 911" noise, but it has more to do with the response than anything to do with actual terrorists.
Mostly I'm pissed that they're starting to call 9/11 Patriot's Day in some places. We already have one of those. It's in April and it's a fuck of a lot more relevant. Though arguably it did concern domestic terrorists, and has been a favorite day for it ever since. Which is why anyone working in a federal building is probably a bit jumpy on the 19th.
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I've thought for a while now that 9/11 was the most successful and damaging attack ever carried out against the American people.
And not because it destroyed some buildings or killed a pretty fair number of folks.
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The only thing i'm afraid of is skeletons, but I live in australia, it's pretty safe here.
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Well, you get used to all the spiders after a while I guess.
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The only thing i'm afraid of is skeletons, but I live in australia, it's pretty safe here.
ARE YOU NOW
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RUN STUSH RUN
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NO STAY
BE FRIENDS WITH ME
I'M YOUR FRIEND
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I'm just going to pretend this is a relevant metaphor for something.
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Beat is awesome, i'll totally be beat's friend!
Also, I am not scared of skulls, just complete skeletons!
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There's one hiding inside you.
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Now all I can think of are Blackwulf's bouncy pet rubber skull things from Wizards.
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Or whatshisdick from Planescape. Oh! Or the clownskull from Chrono Cross. Man, we're just up to our tits in disembodied skulls here.
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Our predisposition to believe the world is falling apart is more worrying than anything that the world is actually doing.
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To be fair, the clownskull in Chrono Cross eventually gets rebuilt into a full skellington playable character who joins your party after a bit of a sidequest. And if you're not willing to go through a sidequest to get a nigh-useless playable character on your team, why are you playing Chrono Cross?
Huh, that's an LP idea. Go through Chrono Cross skipping everything but story sequences and only recruiting required characters. Maybe trimming everything down would make the game better.
Nah. Nothing can salvage the last act.
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Well, there are two things going on here.
One, there's the issue of the pervasive economic insecurity facing Americans under 35 when compared with previous generations. Nobody's ever been in control of their political destiny, which is what the article's talking about, but that did not necessarily affect you on more than an intellectual level if you knew you'd be fed and dry. Economic uncertainty breeds a very personal kind of fear and paranoia, and it seems pretty natural to me that this would color one's larger worldview, especially when that looming spectre of poverty encourages you to empathize with the great mass of poor people worldwide who are ceaselessly fucked by international conflict, no matter who wins.
The other issue is that people under the age of 35 today don't view US foreign policy as an aberration within a generally right-thinking political culture. With Vietnam, the young could say it was a terrible idea and protest it but at the same time look to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and see a lot they agreed with, otherwise. It was a simple thing to decide that the government was trying to do its best but the existential threat of a nuclear USSR was provoking it to do some dumb, dumb things.
Today, the difference is the young no longer see American foreign policy as independent from domestic/fiscal policy. After Iraq, there is just no way any of us are going to be able to separate war from profiteering, even in a hypothetical situation where a use of military force would be reasonable and just (I would submit Mali as the most recent example). This really cannot be understated; young people today attribute all sorts of malfeasance and bad agency to their government, but very much unlike the hippies or even the Reaganites they feel they can't do anything about it, and this is unspeakably terrifying.
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young people today attribute all sorts of malfeasance and bad agency to their government, but very much unlike the hippies or even the Reaganites they feel they can't do anything about it, and this is unspeakably terrifying.
This comes from both parties being extremely right-winged right now; the big debates in politics right now are over extremist crap like whether poor people should be allowed to go to the hospital. This is not tenable long-term; sooner or later one of the parties has to run out of momentum and reorganize itself in different terms.
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Yes, and I'd very much like to think Bill DeBlasio's nomination is a sign of things to come where younger voters just reject the Reagan vs. Clinton debate of the past 20 years, but we'll see.
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I can tell you already read Peter Beinart's article about the New Left (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/12/the-rise-of-the-new-new-left.html). It's a good read, and definitely shows a real analysis of how the Millenial generation is going to shape things (protip: they're a larger generation than the Baby Boomers, but nobody wants to talk about that).
It's articles like that, really, that make me cast of this idea that people are afraid and think a collapse or great disaster is coming. Liberal environmentalist may be in fear of the long emergency, but I suspect that most people in our generations, while they hate the current economic and political client, are organizing because they foresee a better future.
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Yeah, I did read that article and the spadework makes sense, but he kind of ignores that the hippies who were so deeply opposed to Vietnam were all in on Iraq. I don't think peoples' opinions become as intractable as he claims.
Again, I'd LIKE to think he's right but it's really just impossible to say at this point. If DeBlasio can win in NYC, that's nice, but to extrapolate that into some sort of national shift is typical pundit bullshit. Most self-described liberals I know are still in love with Obama.
EDIT: a DeBlasio win would be a massive victory in the push for living wages for service workers, though
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To be fair, the clownskull in Chrono Cross eventually gets rebuilt into a full skellington playable character who joins your party after a bit of a sidequest. And if you're not willing to go through a sidequest to get a nigh-useless playable character on your team, why are you playing Chrono Cross?
Huh, that's an LP idea. Go through Chrono Cross skipping everything but story sequences and only recruiting required characters. Maybe trimming everything down would make the game better.
Nah. Nothing can salvage the last act.
I played a game of Chrono Cross where I recruited everyone and named them all "Serge"
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Sybil: The Video Game
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That article about the new left was pretty good. I remain moderately skeptical due to the entrenchment of extreme power imbalances, media fragmentation, and the complete disruption and near-total ineffectiveness of the occupy movement, but demographics usually do trump all.
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With ietnam, the young could say it was a terrible idea and protest it but at the same time look to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and see a lot they agreed with, otherwise. It was a simple thing to decide that the government was trying to do its best but the existential threat of a nuclear USSR was provoking it to do some dumb, dumb things.
but
Most self-described liberals I know are still in love with Obama.
but
Yes, and I'd very much like to think Bill DeBlasio's nomination is a sign of things to come where younger voters just reject the Reagan vs. Clinton debate of the past 20 years, but we'll see.
This is an interesting set of contradictions to try and unpack.
I think it's fairly obvious that sir, Obama's no Jack Kennedy, nor Johnson, but on the other hand he's still fairly popular and I definitely think he's got that thing going where people who want to stay the fuck out of Syria still generally like him and agree with him. Then again, I think domestic stuff like the various surveillance programs may be chipping away at people's opinion of him, and his signature accomplishment, while a step in the right direction, is nothing like the seismic shifts that were the Apollo Program and the Civil Rights Acts. Indeed, I don't think it escapes my generation's notice that both NASA and civil rights are being chipped away.
I'd love to see a shift toward more legitimate liberals as Democratic nominees, and it's not impossible -- hell, it's probably not even quite as much of an uphill battle as it's been these past 13 years since Nader. I think conventional wisdom continues to be that the way to beat a Republican is to run just one tiny iota to his left, but the rise of the Tea Party has probably made that a less appealing proposition. The Right has gotten so far right and so unappealing that the Democrats want to put a more visible distance between themselves and their opponents. I think it also means that you can go pretty far left and still manage to win, because people straight-up aren't going to vote for the other guy.
I think it's safe to say that the Democratic Establishment isn't going to figure this out. But primary voters might. After all, Obama's primary victory in 2008 came partially from a groundswell of support from people who thought he was a lot more liberal than he actually is.
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The problem you run into is, as always, you can't just assume that the Democratic Establishment as a whole actually wants to be liberal. It's easy to find a few shining examples, but most of those guys and especially their leaders are really somewhere to the right of Obama, as is natural for an contemporary elected official.
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With ietnam, the young could say it was a terrible idea and protest it but at the same time look to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and see a lot they agreed with, otherwise. It was a simple thing to decide that the government was trying to do its best but the existential threat of a nuclear USSR was provoking it to do some dumb, dumb things.
but
Most self-described liberals I know are still in love with Obama.
but
Yes, and I'd very much like to think Bill DeBlasio's nomination is a sign of things to come where younger voters just reject the Reagan vs. Clinton debate of the past 20 years, but we'll see.
This is an interesting set of contradictions to try and unpack.
I think it's fairly obvious that sir, Obama's no Jack Kennedy, nor Johnson, but on the other hand he's still fairly popular and I definitely think he's got that thing going where people who want to stay the fuck out of Syria still generally like him and agree with him. Then again, I think domestic stuff like the various surveillance programs may be chipping away at people's opinion of him, and his signature accomplishment, while a step in the right direction, is nothing like the seismic shifts that were the Apollo Program and the Civil Rights Acts. Indeed, I don't think it escapes my generation's notice that both NASA and civil rights are being chipped away.
I'd love to see a shift toward more legitimate liberals as Democratic nominees, and it's not impossible -- hell, it's probably not even quite as much of an uphill battle as it's been these past 13 years since Nader. I think conventional wisdom continues to be that the way to beat a Republican is to run just one tiny iota to his left, but the rise of the Tea Party has probably made that a less appealing proposition. The Right has gotten so far right and so unappealing that the Democrats want to put a more visible distance between themselves and their opponents. I think it also means that you can go pretty far left and still manage to win, because people straight-up aren't going to vote for the other guy.
I think it's safe to say that the Democratic Establishment isn't going to figure this out. But primary voters might. After all, Obama's primary victory in 2008 came partially from a groundswell of support from people who thought he was a lot more liberal than he actually is.
difference:
deblasio was nominated in nyc and i live in the upper midwest
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The problem you run into is, as always, you can't just assume that the Democratic Establishment as a whole actually wants to be liberal.
Wouldn't dream of it.
It's easy to find a few shining examples, but most of those guys and especially their leaders are really somewhere to the right of Obama, as is natural for an contemporary elected official.
Right. I believe now, as I always have, that any change on the party will have to be forced on it against the leadership's wishes.
Which hasn't been working out so well for the Republicans, mind, but again, the "center" has been skewed so thoroughly that the Democratic Party can move pretty significantly to the left and still be in step with the mainstream. They'd need to get a lot better at messaging, though, and it's tough to imagine someone who's got as natural a gift for it as Obama, and while he's been able to achieve reelection he hasn't been able to break gridlock.
difference:
deblasio was nominated in nyc and i live in the upper midwest
And you know where my ass is sitting.
Albeit in one of the more liberal districts of Arizona. We elected an openly bisexual Congresswoman!
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Meant to add links to a couple relevant Stross articles:
A Bad Dream (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/07/a-bad-dream.html) -- wherein he posits that the three major parties in the UK aren't actually Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat, but Left, Right, and Establishment.
Obviously there are rather a lot of important differences between the US Congress and the UK Parliament, starting with the fact that one of them is a parliament (and whose upper house is an actual, literal aristocracy), but I think his general point applies in a lot of ways. Despite posturing to the contrary, the party leadership here -- Obama, Boehner, Pelosi, Reid, McConnell -- have more in common with each other, from an actual policy perspective, than they do with the bases of their respective parties, or with the people who elected them.
And, increasingly, we're seeing that the bases of the parties, at least under certain circumstances, have more in common with each other than they do with their leadership -- drones, surveillance, and Syria are all recent issues where there's been bipartisan support among the leadership and bipartisan opposition among the rank-and-file.
Nothing really to add to those thoughts just at the moment, so on to the next article, Spy Kids (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/28/spy_kids_nsa_surveillance_next_generation).
I intend to discuss this one more when I start blogging again, but it's very pertinent to our discussion of the generation gap. Stross discusses an issue near and dear to my heart, the notion that company loyalty (http://www.corporate-sellout.com/index.php/2012/01/04/tempin-aint-easy/) is dead because companies (public and private) no longer take care of their workers. He argues that, regardless of your feelings on whether Snowden was right or wrong, his disclosure is the inevitable result of an independent contractor who (1) feels no loyalty to the organization he's working for and (2) has not been sufficiently vetted to evaluate as a security risk because that's a lot harder to do with an independent contractor.
It's also the inevitable result of a generation that still believes in the ideals it's been told America is supposed to represent, and routinely sees the state violating them. Stross argues that within a generation or two the former will no longer be the case.
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There's no such thing as company loyalty anymore and there soon won't be such a thing as national loyalty but I do believe that there's still such a thing as professional loyalty. Engineers will still hang together with other engineers, and celebrate the practice of engineering itself. Same with actors, politicians, teachers, mail carriers, pretty much everyone down to baristas. Who you are may no longer matter, but what you do is one of the last defining things we have in this world culture, and I don't see that going anywhere until they invent those instant-learning programs from The Matrix.
So that leads to two conclusions: First, it's more important to evaluate a security contractor's loyalty to professionalism more than any loyalty to company or state. Duke Togo probably hates your face but you can trust him implicitly if he's on your payroll. Second, that there are people out there - more and more people as time goes on - with no profession at all and no chance to obtain one, and they're becoming very worrisome, because it's hard to say that these people are loyal to anything, and it's certain that they're not very happy about it.
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man robert never came back
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The two Stross links were really nice. I really liked the comparison to Pre-1948 Europe. That's the way my thinking has been going as well, that our festering discontent needs a blow-up, something that may or may not succeed, but whose most important characteristic is that it catalyses new thinking and ideas for redrawing our current social contracts (specifically positive suggestions, as opposed to imposed redrawing of the social contract - which is already happening peacemeal now and has been for decades).
Right now there's just a massive dearth of genuinely new ideas, and we're looking at the tail end of a pretty long era without them.
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Join me in a communist revolution. Ever notice how a constant, driving pressure from radical communists made for pretty great workplaces, then things went to shit in the 1980s when the anti-communists won?
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After reading the Communist Manifesto I can't possibly take anybody who calls themselves "communist" seriously. I do not think that word means what you think it does.
...actually, I just realized that it means exactly what my last post described. This is the communist revolution, right here.
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I don't think workplaces were so great in the places where communists won crushing victories either.
The real trick is sustaining a heathy balance. But that's the thing about balances, they tend to be on knife edges pretty frequently.