“Under ordinary circumstances, the institutions built by the old are repopulated by the young, who adjust them for new circumstances but leave them basically the same, in turn handing them over to the next generation. The possibility of successful passage through the institutions of society is what makes a person follow a normative rather than deviant life course... On the other hand, if the institutions aren’t processing enough people into the proper form—if too many can’t or won’t do family or school or work or sex approximately the way they’ve been done before—then large-scale historical continuity can’t happen. The society can’t look tomorrow like it does today...
In Harris’s view, we are, down to our innermost being, the children of neoliberalism. The habits so often mocked and belittled in the press are in fact adaptations to tightening repressive and exploitative pressures, the survival strategies of a demographic “born into captivity.”
Capitalism’s generation-long crisis, in Harris’s diagnosis, has imposed enormous competitive pressure on the young to produce “human capital.”...
When they do schoolwork, children labor on themselves. “By looking at children as investments, we can see where the product of children’s labor is stored: in the machine-self, in their human capital.” The steady increase in homework, the growing apparatus of testing and school accountability, and the pressure for longer schooldays and schoolyears is just what you would expect once children have been turned into financial assets. Many of the observed social-psychological attributes of the young generation result from undergoing such processing into a human commodity-form. Childhood is a “high-stakes merit-badge contest,” teaching kids to be “servile, anxious, and afraid.”...
Indeed, the meme itself conveys something distinctively millennial: not just precarious employment, but awareness of our own precariousness, which our elders refuse to accommodate or even acknowledge...
It is, in its way, a generational question. If you kill your parents, you won’t hear their warnings, and then you’ll eventually just become them by accident later on without realizing it. If you listen to them, you’ll become them on purpose. The question is how to become new and stay that way, how to be a stable point moving steadily from past into future without a neurotic relation to either—neither clinging nor leaping. This is the existential core of the strategic question on the left. It’s a question about growing up.”
Exactly what it became to grow up in Palo Alto. Exactly.
The article also mentions Chief Keef, and there is a great article on the super self-aware self-capitalizing that is happening with rap in Chicago gangs *link*
related: “The Mental Disease of Late-Stage Capitalism”
FB: this essay is too true “The hidden hand shaping millennials, producing our seemingly various and even contradictory stereotyped attributes, is the intensifying imperative—both from the outside, and also deeply internalized—to maximize our own potential economic value. “What we’ve seen over the past few decades is not quite a sinister sci-fi plot to shape a cohort of supereffective workers who are too competitive, isolated, and scared to organize for something better,” writes Harris. “But it has turned out a lot like that.” Capitalism is eating its young. It’s only feeding us avocados to fatten us up first.”
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