The Spurned Generation

This system still wants us to buy houses, own cars, and pay our electric bills, but it is taking our jobs away. I’m a Gen Xer in my 50s feeling almost as fucked as Gen Z by a system that refuses to hire tenured professionals as much as it willingly cancels entry-level graduate jobs, condemning an entire generation to lifelong underemployment. We have a major social collapse under way, but if you look closer, what is collapsing is not society, but the utopian illusion of society necrocapitalism (a.k.a. neoliberalism) had sold us.

Until fairly recently, the lifestyle people who were entering adulthood aspired to was still possible: get a job, rent an apartment, begin life on your own. Weekends were for going out, dinner, drinks, socializing. Next thing you know, you meet someone. You bring them home and have sex. A relationship begins. Your disposable income increases substantially as you get one promotion after another. Then, you own a house. Your career stabilizes. You start picking up some of your childhood hobbies. You age gracefully.

This pre-pandemic, pre-inflation, pre-necrocapitalism illusion where all of us were exploited under our nose was propagated by Hollywood and milked for all it was worth by Netflix, until it finally collapsed like an acid dream interrupted by a brutal comedown. There is no fucking job, no apartment, and there will never be one. You graduated with a master’s degree (and/or a post-doc) but still live with your parents as you try to figure out what to do with a hard-earned qualification in software engineering that has been cancelled by AI and left you with a massive student debt. Even plumbers and lawyers can’t get enough work: ChatGPT is fixing everything: from toilet flushes to badly-written legal contracts. Food is expensive. Sex? Forget about it. Maybe when you turn 40. Socializing? It has all been replaced by AI slop.

Within just a few years we have transitioned from an unsustainable system that raped the planet and rewarded us with salaries, to a system that rapes both the planet and society and rewards the Epstein class. They call it late-stage capitalism because it becomes as barbaric, genocidal and cruel as late-stage cancer.

As our ability to work, to think, to produce, becomes atrophied, we will depend on AI for everything. Our civilisation will become owned by sentient technology. But before we reach this dystopian destination there are questions some of us will be asking: who was it that we were working, thinking, producing for in the first place? It wasn’t us, but a toxic economic system that had become a planetary demolition project anyway. We were always heading towards overshoot and the enrichment of oligarchs. Perhaps the downtime will help society wake up. Perhaps the destitution will lead to a revolt where people take back power before data centres make the planet uninhabitable even before climate change does.

Behind every revolution there is always a spurned generation, and Gen Z holds the frontline for this one. My advice to Gen Z: stop looking into your next failed job application and start looking towards the tech bros that stole your future and the paedophiles that replaced woke culture with rape, reality with data centres, and relationships with real-time genocide. It was my generation who did it, and the previous one. So stop fucking trusting us. We have failed you. You are still young and you have the power to dream, even in this collapsing world. Take a blank piece of paper and draw the world from scratch, without us in it. What would you have in there instead?

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