The Kids Are Not Alright, actually (6 minutes)
I’ve spent the last 30 years or so working with people in their 20s:
Today’s young people are not better informed than their predecessors were 10, or 20 years ago.
They have less regard for truth as a value.
They are more pessimistic about societal change – which is to say, functionally conservative.
But what about the polls…
Yes, Gen Z and younger Millennials (or Zillennials) have absorbed the values of an affluent, mostly secular, mostly tolerant society.
That society, however, is changing because there are very effective, very powerful people intent on doing so as fast as possible.
For the last decade, if not longer, the right wing has effectively broken government, on purpose. Government Shutdown Showdowns are the gobs of blood that our political body spits out from time to time. That cancer has spread everywhere.
(Mitch McConnell did great work. Thank you also Leonard Leo.)
We are months away from possibly electing a President who has promised to be a literal dictator on day one, purge career civil servants, and eliminate the rule of law for those who carry out his illegal, violent agenda.
We are not in a cartoon. The rules of gravity apply to the USA as well. (cf Brexit).
Culture is not enough to protect us.
Every wave can wash it away. It must be continuously rebuilt, but only if people know how to.
Personal / Professional.
I’ve been teaching a group of very smart, very capable zillennials to produce a thrice weekly news program; TV in the age of social media.
Unwittingly, they have shown me just how much the corrupting influence of “content creation” has seeped into their every decision.
They regularly pitch stories based on single TikTok videos that are often not based on facts.
When I point out that the story being told in the video is a myth, they do not look in horror at the device / platform / process that led them astray. They shrug and move on.
Today’s young people – who came of age with media dominated by ruthlessly “efficient” engagement bait – are not only less informed than their cohorts of the last two generations, they cannot care to know what they’re missing.
They grew up in a world where no one who is "successful" in (social) media has a contract, let alone a formal job. These "winners" are not even permalancers. They are day laborers.
A very few, very lucky "creators" will get hired by a brand to make commercials for a few weeks or perhaps even months.
But there is no security. Get what you can while you can.
Nor is there a professional society that rewards excellence in "content creation". (No Pulitzers, No Emmys. No National Book Award.) There are only fan conventions.
Commerce Rules Everything Around Me. Neoliberalism won, we all lost. Except for the very wealthy, of course.
The Internet has been broken.
When I was in my 20s, we made fun of AOL for being a walled garden. The real Internet, the real world wide web, was so much bigger, bolder, better.
There are only walled gardens now.
Even Google has become a walled garden. (Increasingly useless.)
Yes, younger people can get a good overview of current events from video sharing websites like TikTok and YouTube.
No, those web sites are not the equivalent of newspapers or television news programs.
At best, you are watching a new kind of TV news presenter giving an age-appropriate summary of what they learned by reading other sources; these could be well-funded journalistic enterprises or well-curated summaries like Wikipedia.
But just as often, they are repeating wisps of an idea; hearsay. A human centipede of bias that results in arguments.
I love arguments. Politics is my jam.
But facts – especially inconvenient ones – are what keep us alive.
Climate change, mass migration, housing crisis, electrification: these are all complex problems. They must be understood in order to be solved. Understanding requires bringing in new information – what you don’t know you don’t know.
That’s not what the attention economy algorithms are designed to promote.
Arguments require good guys and bad guys. The facts rarely break that way. (Take, for example, Haiti.)
(Earlier I wrote “just as often,” the stories to be found on walled gardens like TikTok are editorials, not news. But in reality, I’m being optimistic; because this data is getting near impossible to gather.)
Editorials are truthy. They are at best a gateway to discussion but most often they are its substitute. Video news has always been about producing feelings – why you should care about something – rather than producing facts.
I don’t even want to get into disinformation because we’re in bad enough shape if all that happens is the continued hollowing out of our information space to make room for “engaging content”.
Yes, this is cause for despair, but, incredibly, this is a solvable problem.
We need structural, lasting interventions to protect ourselves from the tsunami of pink slime about to engulf us.*
I’ve spent 24 years at least serving news in this country and if there’s no video, there’s no story. And while I’m personally up for this challenge –today we’ll be covering the abuse of dairy workers with a tall glass of milk that turns brown – I am in a very, very small group of workers.
In fact, I may not even have a job in this business for long as the business itself appears to be imploding.
While the very wealthy will still have access to their Bloomberg terminals those benefits will not trickle down.
As the brilliant movie The Zone of Interest makes stunningly clear, you can operate quite efficiently while literally burning the world down.
Not X, not Meta, not TikTok, nor Alphabet
Two days ago, a billionaire, who (thankfully?) owns one of the few remaining papers that still produces facts, gave a very large dollar amount to a movie star to tackle poverty, or some such.
On the one hand, I know that direct transfers are the most effective way to alleviate poverty. And I hope every penny goes into the hands of the poor, the mentally ill, the subjugated.
On the other hand, I hope someone invests some money into improving the information space for young people. Because we won’t survive the catastrophes ahead of us on vibes.
Thank you for reading!
p.s.
After I wrote the above, Semafor posted How American news lost its nerve and Garbage Daily sent today's newsletter: The traffic firehose isn't coming back [for news].
Music
a new rock song (90s)
a sort of Cuban song, reworked. (86s)
And a song that our 10 year-old likes which is thus probably the only good song in this batch. (1m48s)
Footnotes
*We are now experiencing the information space equivalent of Pink slime:
also known as lean finely textured beef or LFTB,[1] finely textured beef,[2] or boneless lean beef trimmings or BLBT[3]) is a meat by-product used as a food additive to ground beef and beef-based processed meats, as a filler, or to reduce the overall fat content of ground beef.[4][5]
p.p.s.
What do I think the TikTok ban 2024 is about?
Never mind the mouthbreathers in the GOP who no longer have to say anything factual or useful to get elected.
You can ignore them at the onset, when they oppose all useful policy, and afterwards, when they take credit for its positive effects.
Instead, read between the lines of comments made by intelligent people like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: "any national security concerns should be laid out to the public prior to a vote."
The US security apparatus has good reason to fear that the (unelected) government of China will use TikTok to sow discord in the USA should China's leadership follow Putin's example w/r/t its lebensraum: Taiwan.
My best guess is this bill was messaging.