Hello friends! How are we doing this week? I hope you’re having a great weekend.
Quick logic trivia before jumping straight into today’s topic:
Today’s post is one of those that have been sitting as a draft on my laptop for a very long time. The larger issue of “generational conflict” is something that I have struggled with since I was a teenager, and that I use very often in my everyday life when dealing with “broad criticism”. I started thinking about this post before Christmas, when I had two dinners (one with some colleagues in a lovely fish restaurant in Paris, and one with my life-long friends in my home town). In both cases the table “warmed up” with the trigger issue being something like “The new generations are really f**ed up. They live constantly looking at their phones, and glued to TikTok and Instagram. They lost connection to reality and can’t concentrate… back when I was a teenager…”.
I admit that I have always had a natural repulsion toward these generational critics, not only because I hate generalizations, but also because I feel I heard this type of critic and “doomsday scenario” a lot of times in cycles during my life. And in most cases all the negative, foggy, pessimist forecasts of “we are growing a generation of idiots” have actually not materialized. I remember very well as a kid being told that “you watch too much junk on tv! You will all become zombies, unable to function in real life”.
And, additionally, I think there’s still a part of the rebel teenager that used to think “you can’t do the moralist here, your freaking generation built the shit we’re living… you can’t blame me!”.
At the same time it would be short-sighted to ignore the criticism in its entirety, and pretend that the speed at which technology has changed things couldn’t justify a paradigm shift for which “this time, it’s actually true!”. When talking about this with my brother he suggested two books on the topic, both not written by a tech guru or a futurist, but actually by one of the most famous Italian writers Alessandro Baricco. He wrote these two books “The Barbarians” and “The Game” to gather his reflection on the cultural change driven by the digital revolution, writing in the eyes of a “boomer” (he was born in 1958). I found the reading fantastic, the books did for me what great books do: he fed my thinking, providing some structure but more importantly a framework on how to think about this.
I therefore gathered his insights, and my thoughts below, trying to provide my point of view on the big question: “Are the new generations doomed?”.
What is the criticism?
Before starting the discussion on pros/cons of the topic I believe it’s worth defining the problem statement: what is wrong with new generations, in the eyes of critics?
The main comments I have gathered during the years are:
They are too shallow. New technologies and social media form their brains to stay away from depth. This means shallow thinking, no concentration on long texts and structural problems, repulsion of long conversations.
They are glued to their phones. It’s impossible to have a conversation with a GenZ because the phone is a constant interruption.
They are too focused on their phisical appearance: it’s the instagram generation. The most important thing is how you look, how many likes you get, etc.
They do not believe in anything. Religion is faded, they don’t hold political values, they don’t believe in societal change. They are super self-centered.
They can’t take hard work. They take everything for granted and don’t accept working hard for things.
There’s a lot of evidence I could pull but I believe the tweet below sums it up quite well:
As often happens artists have a good way of representing it, and this italian song “Ok Boomer” I think sums up this criticism quite well!
Barbarians at the gate!
I think it’s easy to understand what’s my stance on this issue, but Baricco in his book spends a lot of time discussing this concept of “fear of the Barbarians”. He argues that this fear of modernity is something that has always happened, older generations (or societies, like decading Roman empire) have always been scared of the “Barbarians”. He argues “there finds foundation for one of the great clichés that has always brooded beneath the surface of fear of the barbarians: the thought that they are greed as opposed to culture; the certainty that they move out of a hypertrophied, almost immoral, thirst for sales, for profits”.
This sense of superiority vs the newcomers has always been part of the human nature. And it comes out of fear: “Because civilization's nightmare is not to be conquered by the barbarians, but to be infected by them: it cannot think that it can lose to those ragamuffins, but it is afraid that by fighting them it can come out changed, corrupted. It is afraid to touch them. So sooner or later the idea comes to someone: ideally we should put a nice wall between us and them. It came to the Chinese a lot of times over the centuries.”
He argues, and I firmly agree, that maybe this fear and criticism stems from a misunderstanding (and that’s why I believe it’s important to talk about this!). It’s hard for a generation to understand another one, as the set of values is different and we basically speak two different languages. Or, on a different level, that what we’re witnessing is actually not a “Barbarian Invasion” but rather a mutation of the society: “I was convinced that this was not a ruinous invasion, but an astute mutation. A collective conversion to new survival techniques”.
In other words it’s not really “us vs them”, because we’re part of “them”! And this actually has huge political and societal implications: “If you are wondering, for example, how it is that we end up with this return to nationalism or the revaluation of borders, oblivious to the disasters they generated only two generations ago, you can now begin to give yourself an explanation: because if you're in the middle of the transformation, and you're over your hangover from increased humanity, and suddenly you get the feeling that you're floating in a game that you weren't taught, in which you're losing, and that maybe it's not for you, then all you can do is walk backwards until you find a wall to lean against and at least be sure that behind you you won't get caught”. Doesn’t this sound familiar (walls, anyone?)?
I believe that in our society, and especially in the last years, a trend of criticizing the evolution (and particularly the digital revolution) almost just for the sake of it got very popular. It’s become trendy to claim that “before the iPhone life was purer, etc”. It seems to be the unstoppable movement by which a civilization is trying to recover a form of balance after having surprised itself by leaning too far into the future. It is as if those humans need to find the flaw in the system so that they can impose a slower pace on it, so that it can stop waiting for them. I will say more: they seem to have a spasmodic need to find a villain, in this story, perhaps to remove the latent doubt that they all are one. The animosity they feel for the big players seems to have reduced to zero the possibility of reminding themselves that they willingly inhabit a world they helped set up.
In this specific class of barbarians (Gen Z), what are the peculiarities?
Over the holidays I was chatting with my mom, who reads this newsletter and told me something like “The world does not end in Silicon Valley. There has to be more, from a cultural stand-point, that you believe in”. The comment is actually very fair, I recognize that my culture is very biased and influenced by a certain way of thinking (i.e. the business-tech culture that I stereotype as “Silicon Valley”) and I actually try to do an active effort to diversify from that, read other perspectives and expose myself to other cultural inputs. I felt that as a guilt, as a defect. However when reading Baricco’s book, I slightly changed perspective: what if this “Digital Revolution culture” is actually this generation’s philosophy and not only my tunnel vision?
In fact, in a relatively short time (Post Berlin wall), we break a lot of chains and impose on ourselves a new game, in an open field, where movement is the main skill. And it starts to work. For example, an absolutely unprecedented situation is created for Western humans: reversing an inclination that had marked our civilization for millennia, we find ourselves identifying peace as the best scenario for making money. It has always been war. But, from a certain point on, any political instability or risk of military confrontation is seen as a jinx because it suspends the fluidity of the planet, disrupting the circulation of money, goods, ideas, people. One is on the side of peace not so much out of conviction or goodness as out of convenience: which is, after all, the only pacifism that can withstand any emergency.
Let me go deeper into the key features of the “Digital Generation” (let’s call them GenZ, generalizing for simplicity) in my opinion:
Multitasking: the biggest critic I hear to younger folks is they can’t concentrate on one thing and constantly need to do multiple things at once. Baricco has a very interesting perspective on this: what if this shallowness is actually not lack of interest or inability but a new type of experience? He calls this a “post-experience”, which is indeed created by mixing different individual experiences…
Lack of ideology: this usually has a negative connotation (“Your generation does not have values, you don’t believe in anything!”). Now I would argue that this might turn out to be a good connotation (considering all the evil that the 20th century produced!) and actually, from a generational stand-point, one could argue that it is the reaction to a generation that had many times seen “ideas” generate disasters and thus creating some innate suspicion towards them.
Idolatry of technology: the world invented by the digital revolution, differently from other revolutions in the past (hippies, anti-globalists, etc) does not have an ideology, theoretical framework, or even an aesthetic. Since it was generated mostly by scientific-technical intelligences, it was a sum of practical solutions. Tools. It had no explicit ideological assumption, but it had something better, a method. Stewart Brand summed it up best: "You can try to change people's heads, but you're just wasting time. Change the tools in their hands, and you will change the world." Applied with iron rigor and formidable success, this method became, the only true ideological principle. The only quasi-religious belief.
Movement: GenZ-ers live linearity as a constraint, they destroyed all mediations that could slow movement down and systematically prefer speed to quality. Baricco has a very interesting perspective on why that’s the case: “They were escaping from a century that had been among the most horrible in human history and had spared no one.The insight was quite brilliant: the 1900s had taught that fixed systems, left too long in immobility, tended to degenerate into ravenous and ruinous monoliths. An opinion became fanatical conviction, nationalist sentiment turned into blind aggression, elites stiffened into castes, truth became mystical creed, falsehood turned into myth, ignorance faded into barbarism, culture into cynicism. The only thing that could be done was to prevent all these portions of the world from standing still for too long, sheltered within themselves.”
Disintermediation (i.e. “Killing the priests”): one core value of the Digital generation is the value of disintermediation. Generationally we killed all the “priests” meaning all the mediators, journalists, politicians, intellectual elitès… every category that in past generations helped people “understand the world”.
Individualism: Individualism is always, by definition, a posture against: it is sediment of a rebellion, it has a claim to generate an anomaly, it refuses to walk in the herd and walks in solitude against the grain. But when millions of people are walking against the grain, what is the right direction of the road?
At the end of the day the core point of this whole discussion is that we tend to believe that the mental revolution that happened with the digital transformation is a result of the technological revolution, and instead we should realize that the opposite is true. “We think the digital world is the cause of everything, and we should, on the contrary, read it for what it probably is, which is an effect: the consequence of some mental revolution. Let's look at the map upside down, I swear. You have to turn it around. You have to reverse that damn sequence: first the mental revolution, then the technological revolution. We think computers generated a new form of intelligence (or stupidity, call it what you will): reverse the sequence, right away: a new kind of intelligence generated computers”.
The discussion should therefore shift from the technology and its tools, to the cultural pillars that generated this revolution. And Baricco brilliantly sums it up as follows: “the digital insurgency struck at the heart of twentieth-century culture, disintegrating its fundamental principle: that the kernel of experience was buried deep within, reachable only with effort and the help of a few priests.”
The digital revolution flipped the equation, and probably the best image for this is the iPhone. The iPhone is the paradigm of the revolution: it is an iceberg. It’s very easy to use, thus one could say “simple” on a surface level, but very complicated below surface. The same is true for Google’s home page, super simple but hiding the largest intelligence humanity ever produced. This iceberg is the exact opposite of the culture of the XXth century, and there lies the philosophical aspect of the digital revolution. Complexity is not a sign of depth.
Looking at data, there are actually a lot of arguments that new generations are much better
I appreciate that I might have gone a bit too long on these philosophical considerations and I would actually like to go back to data for a moment and try to backup my position with some facts. As anticipated I do not believe that new generations are doomed, I actually believe that there could simply be a generational mis-communication issue. Furthermore, as I anticipated, one thing that clouds the judgement could be a “tunnel vision” on some aspects of the new generation’s culture that leaves out some very positive points on the new generations.
As I said I do not like generalizations, but I gathered some key facts below:
GenZ are A LOT more focused on health and fitness than previous generations. This is the “soberest generation in history”.
I think is uncontroversial that the importance of environment protection has never been greater, socially and culturally.
Similarly to the point above the new generations have totally embraced inclusivity and respect for diversity like never had happened before. A few weeks ago I listened to this podcast by Bianca Balti and she had this great point on the value of social media: she had a very turbulent (and drug-intense) teenagehood. She argues that the main reason was that, living in a small province town, she felt “different” and could not find people with her same interests. She argues that social media are a fantastic enabler to “find people like you”, understand you’re not “wrong” and enable a social circle (even if just virtually) that is a massive safety net when you’re a teenager and that could be a great factor to prevent drug use and depression.
New generations tend to become less conservative as they age, differently to previous demographic cohorts.
When people believe that they glimpse cultural degradation in a 16-year-old boy who no longer uses the right verb form, yet fail to register that on the other hand that boy has seen thirty times the movies that at the same age his father had seen, I am not the optimist, it is they who are distracted.
That does not mean every criticism is wrong
After defending the digital revolution, and trying to push the spotlight toward a societal change rather than “generational blame” I do recognize that there are some very concerning aspects in this evolution of our culture.
There’s for instance a lot of literature about the negative impact of Mobile Phones usage for the development of children. These days there’s a lot of discussion on media about the negative impact of the proliferation of porn content and how this impacts new generation’s sexual habits. The new generation, especially in the US, is suffering a massive return to opioids, mainly pushed by over medication and an explosion of depression in young age.
More importantly probably, from my point of view, the biggest shortfall of the digital evolution is that despite the original intent it produced a massive fracture between fit and unfit, rich and poor, strong and weak. Perhaps not even classical capitalism, in its golden age, had distributed wealth so lopsidedly, unfairly and unsustainably.
How do we end the debate?
My opinion is that we do not end the debate actually. This is a very important topic that we should keep thinking and talking about. I believe that it is very hard to interpret your own era. That however does not mean that we should stop thinking about it, this is arguably one of the most important debates we should have.
Personally though there’s one conclusion I have landed on, and that I try to use as a compass in my considerations: avoid judgement. And also here, I found Baricco brilliant: “As you may have noticed this is something that, throughout the book, I tried not to do. Make a judgment. It's not that I'm shy, or cowardly, it's not that. It's that when I'm studying something it's confusing for me to waste too much time figuring out whether I like it or not, to make a value judgment.”
A closing consideration is that while we still struggle to interpret the digital revolution we might already be facing the next phase, the AI revolution, without having understood the previous wave. Some believe that the AI revolution will make the digital revolution look like an obsolete fight: far different will be the issues that will be discussed, and far more radical will be the scenarios that will be fought for.
What is you view? Do you think new generations are doomed and culture is indeed being diluted? Or do you have faith in new generations’ energy to change and improve things?
Have a great weekend!
p.s. the other day I was walking my daughter to school and told her that I was thinking about this topic of generation gap and asked her “what is the one thing that you believe adults don’t understand, and that kids believe is important?”. Her answer was “Love crushes obviously! You and mom never understand that one can have more than one, that they change in time and that you do not talk about your crush with the other party… that’s embarassing!!” :)
Trivia solution: this was actually a tricky one, it does not have a straigh-fwd answer, it’s a probability paradox, interesting explanation here.
Reading time: 16’ - writing time 75’