This One Is For Mom

We actually have a really great relationship

Recently my mother keeps asking me: What’s going to happen to all the young people? This is an oblique way for her to ask what the hell I’m doing with my life now that I’m in, let’s call it the hangover resultant from life-ruining catastrophe largely of my own making that was a response to the end of the world as we knew it and the ascendance of this cult of depraved ignorance that dominates our every moment. It’s also something much bigger than motherly concern. Genuine despair has taken over these United States. Not just depression from life being shit, but the bone-deep certainty that things will never get better. She’s asking me if she can die knowing that one day the people she knows might be something like ok.

I always say, things are shit, but they’ve always been shit. This is true, and a bad answer, so here’s a better one, mom.

I hate talking about generations, having realized it’s just marketing trash, but that’s the framework we have so let’s work with it. Gen X was cynical because they knew the world was ending. Millennials, my own cohort of perfect idiots, partied so hard we revitalized the psychiatry and drug rehab industries because the world ended. Gen Z came of age in a dead world and in absolute desperation, they’ve been trying to be as nice and kind and morally upright as possible, exacerbating the brain weeds of self-serving activism my own generation so nicely germinated, because while living in a dead world the natural instinct is rejuvenation, even if the project is doomed.

Generation Alpha, as far as I can tell, is fucking feral.

Here’s the thing. This isn’t about the future. It’s about the perfectly reasonable assumption that a dysfunctional present leads to greater dysfunction, and so on, until mutation or total collapse. The central lie of the dominant cult, right wing or left, is that introducing new “disruption” is going to somehow make existing dysfunctional systems go away because they’re obsolete. We won’t worry about food prices and race wars and active genocides, we’ll all upgrade to Life 2.0, a cutting edge developer stack built upon existing reality, running on the blockchain and leveraging new paradigms of machine learning and post-authoritarian governance principles that subvert traditional ownership in favor of collective experiential momentum through gig economy frameworks and crypto assets entirely unmoored from market trends and traditional banking, thereby weakening the influence of geopolitical trends in favor of crowdsourced movements, all of which is of course owned by private organizations which are made up of the absolute meanest and richest motherfuckers who ever lived.

Enthusiastically bashing the already broken machine with a splitting maul while wearing a rainbow colored KKK hood cannot fix the machine, and I’m not going to explain why, and if you need me to explain why, well then you are absolutely part of the problem here.

On a practical level, post the Great Recession of 2008, our economy has been moved largely to invasive, inefficient, rent-seeking computer technologies and financial scams, while culture, during and after the misguided Obama years of blind, gullible trust and optimism and into Trumpian weaponized All-American knuckle-dragging idiocy, has been reorganized into a confusing and alienating nightmare through mass surveillance and a neverending deluge of violent, sexually perverted, very stupid, fascism-themed propaganda and advertising masquerading as Netflix, and Twitter, and blockbuster movies, and OnlyFans, and CNN. Gen Z is a bunch of prudes because Gen Z has been filmed, broadcast, and watched from their infancy, often without consent. It’s not moral fiber, not that they lack it at all, it’s paranoia, entirely justified. Gen Alpha is leaning into brainrot and gooning because there’s literally nothing else for them, now that the relatively unmonitored wells of culture first moved online then got obfuscated or outright destroyed by six websites taking over the Internet. I’m not going to justify my own cruelty or stupidity, just say that I grew up and now live in a deeply cruel and stupid world, and my failure is in following the Millennial wave when I knew damn well I was being an evil, self-destructive cunt.

A better world is possible, but not if no one wants to either repair the machine to keep things slouching towards oblivion, nor rebuild the machine from basic principles, nor smash the fucking thing and just roll with it, but instead stick orphans into the gears because, fuck it, it’ll do something, and everyone in charge is bored, and worst case they’ll all just descend into urban labyrinths miles underground that will, of course, flood, because these people can’t even build a working kitchen appliance anymore without connecting it via WiFi to the generation of unethical pornography in the global south.

What’s going to happen to all the young people? Bad things. But not, as I claimed, the same bad things that always happen. New, mutant strains of the same old bad things, twisted into pleasing shapes, are going to happen to the young people. Naked horror is going to be sold as entertainment. Literal poison sold as food. Where once a little rebellion was indulged by the overlords, now the idea of rebellion is cringe.

There’s no sign of improvement, and there is no consensus on taking the steps to salvage any of this shit, even though we all know what the solution is.

The answer I was too chickenshit to give, mom, my beloved mother, who deserved so much better, is, to quote the Sex Pistols, that industry plant fashion band, harbingers of today’s grotesque artificial pop stars: No future for you.