From the New York Observer's
BetaBeat:
In times of culture upheaval, it seems the best tool for
understanding something is to label it. Although attempts to pin down
Occupy Wall Street with a single moniker or motivation have failed, the
press have moved onto an seemingly easier target: today’s youth.
Sometimes, as in the case of New York magazine’s recent cover story, the powers that be let the youths label themselves. But the cover of the New York Times
Sunday Review this weekend took a different route: letting essayist,
Yale professor, and critic William Deresiewicz do it for them. The label
he came up with? “Generation Sell.”
Not sell as in “sell out” mind you, although that implication comes
later. Rather, he identifies a turn towards the entrepreneurial.
“Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the
movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small
business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works,
what have you — is expressed in those terms.
Call it Generation Sell.”
In comparing the Millenials/Hipsters (he uses the terms somewhat
interchangeably) to the Hippies (who were motivated by love), the
Beatniks (who were motivated by ecstasy–the emotion, not the drug), the
Punks (who were motivated by rage), and the Slackers (who were motivated
by angst and aimlessness), Mr. Deresiewicz finds that “the millennial
affect is the affect of the salesman,” remarkable primarily for its lack of rebellion against what came before it.
“It’s striking. Forty years ago, even 20 years ago, a
young person’s first thought, or even second or third thought, was
certainly not to start a business. That was selling out — an idea that
has rather tellingly disappeared from our vocabulary. Where did it come
from, this change? Less Reaganism, as a former student suggested to
me, than Clintonism — the heroic age of dot-com entrepreneurship that
emerged during the Millennials’ childhood and youth. Add a distrust of
large organizations, including government, as well as the sense, a
legacy of the last decade, that it’s every man for himself.”
But there’s none of Startupland’s high-minded rhetoric about changing
the world, or waxing poetic about bootstrapping a venture that will
disrupt and improve society as we know it....MORE
BetaBeat adds:
So, youth of America? Do you agree with that generational character
assessment? Feel free to argue with Mr. Deresiewicz blandly and politely
on Twitter . . . and then eviscerate him in the comments–that is if
you want to prove him right.
Also at BetaBeat:
Trim the Fat, But Keep the Flavor: The Problem With the Lean Startup Model
