I am beginning to get sick of rhetoric about today’s youth. And I hope you are too. This “all they do is look at their phones.” “The world’s ending and they don’t care.” “They have no attention span.” “Their slang is ridiculous–no one knows what they’re saying.” “These aren’t jokes, they’re just words.” “You care more about YouTube views than actual friends.” “Your fascist selfie culture has eroded your capacity for critical thinking.”
For one thing, this is nothing new. The older generation always criticizes the younger for anything new and different. People think smartphones are going to ruin the upcoming generation. These are the people who elders thought would be ruined by video games, who their elders thought TV was going to ruin, who their elders thought radio was going to ruin, who their elders thought newspapers were going to ruin, who their elders thought novels from that new printing press were going to ruin. For god’s sake, learn to recognize a pattern.
Hindsight is 20/20, and we’re all looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. “Ew, screentime is a drug. You get hooked on it like crack.” No, it’s called killing time with amusement and entertainment. You had the same. You had Walkmans and radios. Or you sang songs while you were walking eight miles to go fishing by the crick.
“Kids today don’t know any phone numbers”–yeah, because they don’t need to. It’s in the computer in their pocket. You know, the one that has the sum total of all human knowledge? Do you know how to change your oil? No, because you don’t need to. But you know how to change your display settings. You only have so much mental power to use–you have to allocate it, like Vespene Gas in Starcraft.
So obviously, I’m going to allocate it to what needs it and not to what doesn’t. Why keep everything I need to know in my brain, when I’ve got an external hard drive I can write to. I don’t need to know the thing; I just need to know how to get to the thing, like hyperlinks. That’s how memory works–it’s not direct access; it’s a set of linked synapses. That’s why you think of the thing you wanted to think of when you’re thinking about something else.
For me, I freaking love that I can interact with a website or app to get information instead of a human. I want to look at my medical records? Done. I need more painter’s tape and doggy-doo bags? Done. No one trying to hard sell me something or ask about my day. I have chosen some fast food places over others I preferred because they had an app that let me order online. No human interaction needed. No stoned teenager getting my order wrong or mishearing what I say or waiting for me to think.
And thank god for GPS. Even printed directions from MapQuest I could barely handle–I’ve gotten lost so many times on some street that was not actually a street, but twenty feet of an interchange, then back on the same road. And forget paper road maps. No one’s ever been able to read those.
“Things are too safe nowadays.” Yes, they’re supposed to be. Because kids died and got permanently injured from the non-safe things. I’ll let Whitney Cummings handle this one.
I especially love the part where people are worried about kids typing too much, and she reminds you that “bloody knuckles” used to be a thing. And she is MY generation. When I was a kid, we had a thing called “don’t talk to strangers”. Now why do you think that exists?
Jesus Christ, think back to when you were a kid. Wasn’t it the same story? Parents just don’t understand? These damn hippies with their long hair and “groovy”speak? Why do you like those Beatle-kids with their haircuts and “rock and roll”? That’s not music. I listened to music. Like Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. I don’t get these “crooners” today, like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. It sounds so soft and romantic, not masculine. I liked music before radio was invented, when you had to play it yourself. If you wanted to buy sheet music, you had to go to a store and get a guy to play it for you.
Just how far back are you going to go? I’m imagining a medieval bard holding his lute and shaking his head at all these people.
I could go on and on, but the point I’m trying to make isn’t that people are wrong. They are wrong, but that’s not what I’m trying to impart. What I’m trying to impart is that it’s cliché.
This comes from Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, which I saw recently. It was like someone said “Black Mirror, but put it all in a two-hour movie”. But the first thing that happens is a guy with a bomb strapped to his chest barges into a diner and everyone ignores him, staying on their phones. The first vignette is about a teacher in a world where school shootings are treated like fire drills. The teacher assigns Anna Karenina, and his students ask, “Is it short?” “Is it YA?” “Was Tolstoy a boomer?” One finds a movie version, but is disappointed because it’s old. And all of them are on their phones.
The whole thing’s like that–teenagers being dicks to adults, never looking from their screens, either ignoring them or dismissing them. It gets so bad they turn into literal zombies, watching their phones while they attack the heroes. Also, they somehow summon a giant cat-centaur that shoots glitter from its penis, and never explain how. I guess this is absurdist cinema, but the metaphor is as subtle as a Jackass prank.
The movie is full of every cliché from The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and psych-horror like Triangle, Primer, and Tenet, shoves it all into an Aesop that has no real meaning except to make old people feel better about themselves and confirm their fears that the world’s going to shit. Except the movie’s not aimed at old people; it’s aimed at the ADD generation. So no wonder it bombed. Like, what are you trying to preach with this? The only way the heroes win is that one of them can’t use technology. They’re allergic to it. So you’re saying we should live like the Amish? That’s the only way not to become lotus-eaters? And since we won’t choose this for ourselves, you’re going to make us choose it? (By giving the same allergy to the population.)
I have seen too many movies where anyone under eighteen is portrayed as a snobbish, conceited threat. Kids as walking, talking advertisement-absorbing machines that only think about perverted sex (Saltburn, Euphoria) or violence. They’re always disaffected.
Guess what? They’ve been like that since the nineties. But the way they’re disaffected changes. That’s why we perceive it as something different, even though the same thing is happening. Generation X/Hippies were disenfranchised by the Vietnam War. Generation Y/Millennials were disenfranchised by the rampant commercialism (cartoons for toys, the Bush recession, the corporatifying of business/work). Generation Z was disenfranchised by the people who couldn’t get on board with the Internet. Generation Alpha was disenfranchised by the people who couldn’t get on board with cell phones, social media, and the Internet 2.0 (i.e., the all-mighty algorithm). What will the next generation be disenfranchised with? Who knows, but probably something to do with AI.
Can we not drop this conceit already? It’s called evolution. Yeah, maybe you have an instinctual dislike of it. But that doesn’t mean you’re right. It’s not worse or better; it’s just different. Learn to recognize what “worse” means to you, because you might find it’s not worse, just changed.
