No meltdown here: Gen X has the healthiest relationship with tech
Gen Xers have been savvy adapters, not woebegone slackers, when it comes to riding the ever-rising digital tide.
One of the most reliable framings for a trend story is to render judgement on how a specific generation shapes culture or, conversely, how that generation has fallen prey to cultural forces through no fault of its own.
Baby boomer this, millennial that, and so forth.
Last week the New York Times hit this familiar note by publishing “The Gen X career meltdown.”
Lest you think the article forecast a dire fate for all 65 million or so American adults born between 1965 and 1980, it’s more narrowly focused on creative fields such as magazines, newspapers, graphic design, advertising, music, film, and TV.
The article makes a valid point about the labor market for creatives in a world where many people assume ChatGPT is on pace to replace every actor, director, and journalist.
Few freelance writers today command $1 per word, and touring musicians who aren’t as popular as Taylor Swift need to sell stacks and stacks of T-shirts to make up for the fractional pennies they earn from their digital song streams.
I understand the shift in the job market: I voluntarily made my own pivot out of daily news after 24 years, and today in my nonprofit life I volunteer on behalf of innovating funding solutions to sustain local news.
But I take issue with the overall framing and tone of the Times article when it claims that “the particular plight of Gen X is to have grown up in one world only to hit middle age in a strange new land. It’s as if they were making candlesticks when electricity came in. The market value of their skills plummeted.”
Members of Gen X (“more than a dozen” of them interviewed for the article) “find themselves shut out, economically and culturally, from their chosen fields.”
OK, fine. Spending weeks or months on a long-form magazine profile, signing a recording contract based on LP or CD sales, or funding a newsroom through expensive display ads in a print newspaper are faded opportunities. The evolving economy continually disrupts disciplines, as any blacksmith will tell you.
But here’s my beef: I’ve spent much of my life arguing the opposite of this article’s worldview. For years I’ve bored relatives at holidays and friends at happy hour with my pitch that Gen X has been the generation best situated to experience, learn, and harness digital technology. In other words, we hit the sweet spot for enjoying the (myriad) benefits of tech while minimizing its (also myriad) annoyances and harms.
I’m not talking about tech entrepreneurs or the Silicon Valley elite. Yes, Elon Musk, born in 1971, is an Xer. But Mark Zuckerberg is a millennial, and Jeff Bezos squeaked into the baby boom in 1964. I mean Gen X in terms of the general public navigating tech as consumers in our daily lives.
In case you didn’t already know or pick up on it, I do happen to be a Gen Xer who believes our generation reigns supreme above all other age groups, proudly clad in our majestic flannel (which we refuse to let Gen Z co-opt).
Slackers? No.
Survivors? Yes.
Stubborn? Maybe.
I’ve always thought we’ve been the generation that found our footing and never lost it when it comes to tech. We landed on the epochal timeline almost perfectly balanced between the analog and digital worlds. We climbed aboard our metaphorical surfboards with our first Atari and Nintendo video games and have ridden the wave through the rising turbulence of personal computing, ecommerce, social media, and, now, artificial intelligence (AI).
I think about my maternal grandfather, a member of the Greatest Generation, who lived from 1909 to 2002. He entered a world where fewer than 1% of Americans owned a car and exited at the dawn of the 21st century when more than half of us carried cell phones. That’s more the experience of waking up in a strange new land than anything Gen X can claim to have felt thus far.
The employability for certain roles always will ebb and flow due to tech and other macro forces. But the underlying judgement of whether this represents a “meltdown” for a given generation—especially for creatives in this case—is quite a leap unless your default expectation is that the status quo holds against all odds, against the grain of history.
Gen X enjoyed childhood without social media: In our most fragile and impressionable years the technology delighted us—video games, the local arcade, “Star Wars” movies, etc.—but didn’t overrun our lives. We also didn’t need to worry about our adolescence later embarrassing us thanks to the snapshots and videos we posted online.
We became early adopters in the workplace: We launched our careers as the internet took hold and were able to mature and adapt with the technology. I entered a newsroom that had a single computer terminal connected to the internet but before long joined the first digital team dedicated to online publishing, while also learning video production.
We began to experience the efficiencies of tech when it really mattered in our working lives: We grew up in young adulthood with the advancements of flip phones, iPods, BlackBerrys, and smartphones, as well as new frontiers in computer applications and coding.
We swooned during our honeymoon (however brief) with early social media: I’m sorry to inform younger readers that there really was a time when many of us tended to have fun on Twitter (look it up) and other social platforms. We thought this instantaneous and connective tech in everybody’s palms would harmonize and democratize the world—the entire planet united in one giant chorus of “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” (look that up, too). Turns out social media may be better at harvesting our data and dividing us, but … we’ll always have Paris—as in tweets posted by some random stranger in Paris in the 2000s. (Sorry if you haven’t seen the classic film “Casablanca.” Go watch it.)
We remember the value of ownership of media: We grew up knowing full well the rampant flaws of physical media: 8-track tapes were an insane format to foist on music fans, and cassette tapes weren’t much better. It’s not as if we loved rewinding VHS tapes before returning them to our local Blockbuster. So, of course we flocked to free file-sharing services such as Napster even though we knew it was a fleeting pipe dream. But we never forgot the principles of owning media vs. subscribing to digital streams where we lose all real control over the content. Today, even younger consumers keep falling in love with the LPs and CDs we never stopped collecting. Gen X knows: The convenience of Netflix and Spotify is great. So is AI, much of which has been trained on mountains of everybody’s data. But this convenience is different from owning the media to guarantee our access to the art that inspires us and to maintain control over what we create ourselves.
In a nutshell, Gen X was lucky enough to enjoy childhood without digital technology robbing our innocence. We were lucky to embrace it in our fledgling careers before we got too cranky about too much change. We’ll be lucky yet again to lean on our sophisticated AI companions in our old age.
Gen X hasn’t suffered a meltdown at the hands of tech. We’ve gotten just about the best shot among of bending it to our will.
I know the prevailing societal fear is the “Terminator” narrative where AI becomes sentient and wipes out its inefficient parent, humanity. But I think if all the sci-fi from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” to Philip K. Dick’s “Blade Runner” has taught us anything, it’s that the machines we create are never the problem. It’s always us.
We’re forever wrangling with the profoundly human problem of how we incorporate the inevitability of new technology into a healthier, more prosperous, and more ethical society.
“ChatGPT, how do I incorporate the inevitability of new technology …”
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