14 ms·

Generation Sell

206 points by robg 15y ago

rorhskdh 15y ago
Beware of cantakerous smart wordsmiths. They can articulate poisonous thoughts convincingly.
guylhem 15y ago
Spot on the "post-emotional” generation : no anger, no edge, no ego. Is the entrepreneurial model so attractive that everything that may set you apart has to be shaved, to avoid displeasing anyone? To me, hating something is at least as important as loving something else. I'll place the first brick here and proudly declare that I hate organic food and the whole "bio" movement, since it is not scalable and mostly used for class signaling (ala overcomingbias)
- zerostar07 15y ago
  I think his "selling ourselves" argument is overstated. Judging from me, we keep down emotions because we are more rational than previous generations, we believe in science and reason vs pointless sentimentalism. Organic-foods are just that: trying to emotionally engage people to buy products for reasons never explained.
  - guylhem 15y ago
    Science, reason and rationalism are not incompatible with an ego. If you believe in some right and wrong, there should also be an emotion, and eventually an action. I don't think selling ourselves is an overstatement here. And I would also say that we have one of the least scientific generation- not only because enrollment is scientific studies is low, but also because there is now a pride in being ignorant. Also, while trying to protect everyone feelings, all opinions are considered as equally valid - even when some proved wrong. If that is not selling ourselves, how do you call that? I only took organic food as an example of what one must love to be "in", trendy, hipster. A dissending opinion, even based on scientific facts, seems to be frowned upon by hipsters, and by extension the new moral order. In the organic food example, we want to believe in something other than facts. This is not science. Let's follow that example, see http://reason.com/blog/2009/03/26/norman-borlaug-happy-95th-birt http://reason.com/blog/2009/03/26/norman-borlaug-happy-95th-... - with organic food alone, the earth population would have to be around 4 billions. We're 7 billions. Oops. Internal consistence for organic food proponents would require suggesting china-like one child policy or genocides. Here, the "selling generation" is using emotional engagement as a sale tactic, for "feel good" stuff. Personally, I boycott organic food. I usually ask if the food I'm about to order is organic. If it is organic, I ask for something else. If I can not be served food that is not organic, I explain that I boycot organic food, and that I have to place my order somewhere else. Regardless of your analysis of the organic food, you can say that's is very bold, and unfashionable, in today's culture. So I guess I won't be a social media icon. Never mind :-)
    - TheEzEzz 15y ago
      > with organic food alone, the earth population would have to be around 4 billions. We're 7 billions. Oops. And if everyone had a car and lived like Americans then the world would be in a tough spot as well. That doesn't mean I'm going to give up my good life. I eat organic because I don't trust non-organic food, because I don't want to eat animals that lived their lives in feces, themselves consuming ground up animals that were too sick to survive. Is organic scalable? It'd be great if were, and I encourage industry to try, but I'm not in it to save the world, I'm in it for myself.
      - guylhem 15y ago
        "I'm not in it to save the world, I'm in it for myself" At least, that's self consistent and honest. Maybe not a good sales strategy though.
        dennisgorelik 15y ago
        That strategy would sell to me better, than dishonest "organic saves the world" rhetoric.
    - quanticle 15y ago
      The one big flaw with that interview is that it doesn't compare organic farming with western agriculture in terms of long-term viability. Yes, the carrying capacity of the Earth is only 4 billion with organic farming. But I don't know that mechanized farming can do much better over the long haul. If we look at the third world, organic agricultural techniques actually do much better than mechanized production methods, even when measured in yields alone. The reason for this is that not everyone has forty feet of topsoil, like we do in Kansas. In a lot of places, the soil is marginal, and simply cannot hold up to intensive agriculture for more than couple of years. Mechanized agriculture on land like that is disastrous and leads to crop failure and famine within a decade (for example, Ethiopia). The only way to make these lands agriculturally viable is with organic farming techniques. [1] That said, I do agree with the point you're trying to make, even if I disagree with the specific example. We should support or oppose things not because it is fashionable to support or oppose them, but because of reasons that we've worked out for ourselves. [1] Scott. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Measures to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press. 1999. Print. EDIT: fixed typo
  - danssig 15y ago
    The thing I see coming up so much is arrogance. E.g. assuming "our" generation is so "sciency" and rational and previous generations were so superstitious and stupid.
- justincormack 15y ago
  Organic food is potentially scalable, maybe not right now. It fits right into the beyond mass production era, when capital costs have fallen, productivity has risen, we can apply different new technologies and we can mass customize products. It is mostly not retro, not like biodynamics say.
- chipsy 15y ago
  I would direct anger at the notion of "authenticity" in commerce, which repackages modern, progressive themes and topics like organic food into a romanticized form.
- fjh 15y ago
  > I'll place the first brick here and proudly declare that I hate organic food and the whole "bio" movement, since it is not scalable and mostly used for class signaling (ala overcomingbias) And "hating" organic food (really?) is not signalling? There are plenty of things wrong with the world, things that are worth hating, but organic food does not really strike me as one of them.
- quanticle 15y ago
  Whether organic food is scalable or not depends entirely on what kind of food is being grown and what sort of land it is being grown on. If you read Seeing Like a State, you'll note that "modern" Western farming techniques actually produce worse yields than traditional "organic" farming techniques. Lots of soils simply can't sustain the extremely intensive monocropping that the western farming tradition requires. If we want to really have a second green revolution, we're going to have to start looking at organic farming techniques to make marginal lands agriculturally viable.
chrismealy 15y ago
That's a whole lot of waffle extrapolated from Portland's food carts (which are great, btw) and handmade wallets.
- maxogden 15y ago
  i see waffle did there
whazzmaster 15y ago
(Hopefully very slight) tangent: The article describes the Millenial Generation as "born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s." Yikes. I suppose when attempting to reduce such a group to a simple catchphrase ("post-emotional"), no additional harm is done by throwing those who were 21 in the year 2000 with those who were five. My opinion is that it's always difficult to describe phenomena while inside; easier to categorize the mood of an era once the era has passed.
- _delirium 15y ago
  At the risk that it might degenerate into too much meta-level academic theorizing, I'd actually be interested in an analysis of generation-analysis itself. The way generations are segmented seems pretty strange, and shifts depending on who's writing, what/why they're writing, and when they're writing it. It'd be fascinating to get some sort of overview of how that process works. As someone born in 1981, I've ended up in all sorts of buckets. Sometimes '81 is considered the tail end of Generation X. When I was younger, I thought of myself as solidly Gen-X, because "my" culture all seemed to be quintessentially Gen-X culture: Nirvana, MTV, skate-punk, the microcomputer revolution, cynicism about both staid corporate life and the hippie alternative to it, etc. Later I realized that many people considered '81 a bit late for Gen-X, but I had considered myself in it because as a teenager I identified with culture-drivers who were actually 5-15 years older (e.g. Kurt Cobain somehow seemed in my generation at the time, but was in fact born in '67). This article, and some others, by contrast would group me as a Millennial, but many of the other descriptions I've found of Millennials seem aimed at people younger than me, mainly people born in the late-80s/early-90s.
  - kd1220 15y ago
    Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss-Howe_generational_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss-Howe_generational_theor... Generational theory is interesting on the surface, but often I take these meta-analyses with a grain of salt. They seem to be grandiose astrological interpretations that would be applicable to any generation. I'm part of the "Nomad" generation type. Nomadic definitely describes my life fairly well for the past 10 years. I've lived in 2 countries and 5 states. The post office should just start OCRing my mail and sending it via email.
neilk 15y ago
I wanted to hate this piece, but I can't. This idea of "post-emotional" is ridiculous, and probably overestimates how passionate previous generations were. There were a lot of half-hearted hippies and punks too. But I think he's right about a few things: - the ideal personality is now someone gentle, who gets along with everyone - the ideal social form is now to start a business or non-profit, or at least be an independent professional - to this end, and due to social media and blogging, many of us are always selling ourselves, however subtly.
- pnathan 15y ago
  He has put his finger on some vital characteristics of the 2010 era. I think we could have some absolutely lovely flamewars about the causes and effects of those characteristics, but I really, really can't argue with his observations. I've observed that too, but not verbalized it.
  - guylhem 15y ago
    Same thing here. I have felt this new "moral order" but this is the first time I've seen it linked to a salesman persona and used as a token to describe this generation.
- zerostar07 15y ago
  Calling our generation "sellers" has negative connotations, as if we 're super-conformists or sth. If you follow his descriptions, we are the most mature and responsible generation ever: we don't overtly express a futile belief in utopias, we lived the end of communism, we don't reject business, but instead try to infiltrate it with less greed, we don't manipulate people with emotional bullshit (love did not feed the world), we understand that you can change society by not being confrontational (hence we are "selling" ideas rather than screaming them). We don't have a dominant mass culture, which means we are open to micro-cultures, frowning upon the childishness of current-day blockbusters. I don't think Steve Jobs is an idol for us, we don't really have idols and myths, except maybe google.org or wikipedia. It's a good generation.
  - 15y ago
kitsune_ 15y ago
This is not a new idea, I remember having this discussion back in high school with my friends, in 1996, during the dot-com boom.
anthuswilliams 15y ago
I wouldn't say we're looking at a culture of salesmen. I'd say it's a culture of craftsmen. The salesman prizes negotiation; he does whatever he has to to get his commission. The craftsman focuses on building and presenting his product (and himself) in a way that maximizes the respect he gets from his peers. The difference between salesman and craftsman is subtle, but it's clear. And I think it's a good way to explain elements of youth culture that don't really jive with the article's point (e.g., the OWS movement).
- marchustvedt 15y ago
  +1 to this distinction. For what the OP is observing in Portland (and other urban intellectual enclaves: NYC, Boston, SF, Seattle, Austin, etc) - this is a much better characterization of the emergent DIY culture. Still, I think the article itself is pretty narrow in trying to economically label a loosely defined generation. The data just isn't there to support any large scale, nationwide increase in owned-and-operated businesses that are drawing in significant revenue. I looked for it, not incredibly exhaustively, but long enough to wonder if it's out there. Moreover, the stagnant wage and salary figures, combined with increased student debt loads seemed to crowd out and more promising spins on the reality of what's happening with the Millennials. I would love to find data that supports a real economic movement back to craftsmen culture though.
- ilaksh 15y ago
  Perfect example of the type of bullshit belief structure that generation sell is built on. A craftsman focuses on making things. He focuses on his craft. Period. He does not focus on presenting his product at all. The product does not need presentation or sales, its craftsmanship stands for itself. The difference between salesman and craftsman is that they are completely different things. OWS has NOTHING to do with the article, except for the very end where he mentions a new culture forming. I'm sure you know that words have meaning. You just aren't very good at working out what those meanings are or how they are different from eachother.
tryitnow 15y ago
This is clearly written by someone who has not interacted much with real-world entrepreneurs. "Agreeable" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think of the entrepreneurs I've met. I'm not saying all entrepreneurs are cantankerous, but I would say they're more inclined to do things "their way." I also think entrepreneurs are a lot more threatening to the status quo than previous youth-culture archetypes. If you are a recording executive who would you fear most: 1) a drugged out punk rocker who is pissed at the world and letting everyone know it 2) a hacker entrepreneur like Sean Parker. I think history shows us who the establishment should be more fearful of.
- apechai 15y ago
  Pretty sure the Beatles had a pretty big effect on society and the status quo. The power of art and music tends to be a second order effect: it inspires people. Without the music of the 60's/70's, do you think Steve Jobs would have dropped acid, become a Zen Buddhist and built Apple's brand as a the challenger of the status quo?
- pedrolll 15y ago
  Yes, entrepreneurs may be threatening to large companies, but they are not at all threatening to political leaders. Entrepreneurs are not youth culture, they're businessmen, they work within the capitalist system, not opposed to it or trying to change it, like previous youth cultures
gammarator 15y ago
This misses two key motivators (and ignores the fact that Portland is an extreme example). One is an ambivalence about the products and marketing of large corporations and a corresponding search for authenticity through DIY. Why buy Heinz when you can make preservative-free ketchup from heirloom tomato varieties unavailable in any grocery store? And selling the product mainly sustains the enterprise, offering the potential for work with a degree of autonomy. Put up a web storefront and your niche local business has global reach. As to “self-branding” and innocuous politeness: to Deresiewicz, these identify a salesman. More probably, they result from a generational awareness that one’s words and actions are immortalized online. One cultivates a persona or risks letting others do so for you.
narrator 15y ago
>According to one of my students at Yale, where I taught English in the last decade, a colleague of mine would tell his students that they belonged to a “post-emotional” generation. No anger, no edge, no ego. Sounds like Prozac has really had an impact. These kids, when they get the rare moment of depression or rage now, should savor it, like tasting a dish that one only eats once or twice a year.
bluekeybox 15y ago
He missed mods. Watch Antonioni's "Blowup" (1966) and tell me how Thomas (mod) differs from today's hipster startup founder. He doesn't -- except perhaps that he is a bit less polite and drives a vintage Rolls-Royce.
mfringel 15y ago
I place this mostly at the feet of social media. Since your past now never fades, you have a few choices: 1) Don't put/do anything dubious online. (Theoretically easy, harder in practice.) 2) Don't put/do anything that could be de-contextualized and subsequently re-contextualized as dubious, online. (Hard, but not mathematically impossible.) 3) Create some kind of autonomy so that you're not subject to the effects of social-media-based judgment, because social networking never forgets who you were. (Moderate difficulty). Individuals choose one of more of the above approaches for the various parts of their life... possibly all three simultaneously. Since social media makes no distinctions about who you were then vs. who you are now, every moment of behavior counts equally into future perception... so being polite, and deferential, and constantly "selling", is not a independent life choice, but rather the result of a most subtle form of coercion. Coercion is not only from the barrel of a gun. You may completely swear off of social media altogether, or only post precision-calibrated Markov-chained text blurbs that make you look like a model citizen, but you get much less control about what your friends post.
- yuhong 15y ago
  I think the illusion that people are perfect is fundamentally flawed and have for a while now.
- _delirium 15y ago
  I don't think it's only the fear of putting things out there that might reflect negatively, but also the temptation of putting things out there that might reflect positively. I actively try not to do it, but I do find myself participating in even online discussion groups with one eye towards potential "personal brand" building. Am I just posting at HN for the discussion, or to build a platform? Or: I used to submit essays to Usenet or Kuro5hin, mostly out of a desire to stimulate discussion and get feedback. But now I post them on my blog, and when I'm writing them there's, consciously or not, always this background thought of where I'll advertise that post so people read it, whether it'll get me new RSS subscribers, etc. I even sometimes think, on the occasions where I've written a long-ish Wikipedia article from scratch, that if I were really doing it right, maybe I should've posted it on my personal blog instead of submitting it as a Wikipedia article--- because I can't fully capture the personal-brand-building at Wikipedia. I'm sure there are people who do give in to that temptation, too.
Gaussian 15y ago
I think in some ways the feeling of this piece embodies the phenomenon, real or not, it attempts to describe. The writer clearly harbors some negative feelings about hipster culture and his perception of its salesman roots, but he won't come out and explicitly rip it--similar to the attitudes of the hipsters he finds so enigmatic.
ScotterC 15y ago
If you don't control your personal brand. Someone else will
georgieporgie 15y ago
Having a large number of much younger cousins who are, oddly enough, from the Portland area, I think the author is painting an entire generation on the basis of a few highly visible examples.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
moxie 15y ago
The author describes youth culture's social form by calling it "post-emotional," "entrepreneurial," and eventually "generation sell." As underwhelming as this is, I think it's incredibly generous, as I would call its social form simply "nothing." The tendency to start artisan businesses is not a social narrative, it's just another part of the aesthetic. The author compares modern youth culture with the hippies, beatniks, and punks. But those generations were doing what they were doing for a reason. Read anything from the heroes of those generations, and you'll see a clear "grand narrative" that described the social relationships of the world they were trying to create. The social narrative of punk culture was not "a tendency to start bands that played three chord songs." That was part of the social aesthetic. The narrative was one of anti-authoritarinism, collective autonomy, and a vision for a world without hierarchy. The truth is that youth culture today has no narrative. Yes, money is cool again, small-business entrepreneurship is a common pursuit, and "maker" culture has taken root, but these are just the things people do. Ask someone why they made the latest LED clock design out of "make magazine," and they'll more than likely say something along the lines of "because it's neat." Look at the average young entrepreneur, and you'll find someone who discovered technology before they discovered themselves -- someone who is "innovating" because that's what they read they're supposed to do, rather than out of some informed sense of the social reality they're trying to create.
- maratd 15y ago
  > The truth is that youth culture today has no narrative. You couldn't possibly be more wrong. The narrative of today's youth culture is passion. The passion to pursue your craft and the freedom to do it your way. To satisfy your curiosity without harming the world around you. It is unbelievably positive and optimistic. Liberty is the narrative of today and it's a narrative that has far more substance than those prior to it.
  - moxie 15y ago
    If you seriously think that the passion of running a taco stand is more substantial and more liberating than the narrative which led to the events of Paris in May 1968, then I'm sorry for you.
kenamarit 15y ago
I liked the article, though I do think he over-generalizes a diverse subculture full of both crusading, idealistic boys and girls as well as truly despicable characters. Regardless it does put into words ideas and feelings we have all had for awhile, or at least he tried. Being post-emotional myself (I guess), I have no real opinion to add other than another observation that once again holds true: that the comments about the article here on Hacker News has been a way better discussion on the topic than the comments on the NYTimes site. Why is the NYTimes always so behind the curve?
blhack 15y ago
Maybe the author just needs to surround himself with some different people? The things I see in my social circles certainly aren't the sort of feel-good, homogenized things he's describing. And is this really new? Haven't people (and I'm half tempted to apply the term pseudo-intellectual here) been complaining about life being a bit passionless "lately" since...ever? The longing for the "old days" of the wild west is such a common complaint that its just a cliche now. If this article feels like it has any sort of merit to you (and you agree with the implication that this is bad), I suggest surrounding yourself with a different group of people.
whazzmaster 15y ago
When I think about branding a generation, which is always done by a member of a previous generation and with not a little whiff of "kids these days' syndrome, it occurs to me that there might be a feedback loop involved. If you're firmly part of Generation G (for Generic, a theoretical generation) which has qualities X, Y, and Z but born in the mid-to-late period of said generation, you're told from the moment you're born that you're part of a group that is X, Y, and Z. I don't have an answer, but I suspect that the problem with 20-30 year-spanning "generations" which are defined and classified by older folks is that, over time, they take on the qualities imbued by an outside observer.
DefinitelyNbdy 15y ago
Our society is "fundamentally agreeable"? Seriously? Let me counter with: Two land wars in Asia, thirty (!) years of cancerous deregulation of the private sector leading to an economic implosion, 9/11, OWS protests, raging unemployment... Having said all of this, I would agree that PORTLAND, OR is a fundamentally agreeable society...it is difficult to communicate this in writing, you really have to visit the place to understand.
- bluedanieru 15y ago
  Of these, I would say that the only one the Millennials have any hand in is the OWS protests, largely because many of them are unemployed now with nothing else to do. Western society has apparently forgotten the grave danger that comes from leaving vast swaths of your young population without work and riddled with debt. The reteaching of that lesson is going to define the coming decade, I think. But the wars? Neo-liberal baby boomers cooked that up. Deregulation? GenX loves that shit.
  - william42 15y ago
    Actually, seventy-something percent of the OWS protesters are employed.
    - bluedanieru 15y ago
      I've seen that statistic as well, and wondered if someone would point it out when I wrote that. Apparently it's more than the Tea Party, for all the media bullshit about the two. At any rate that's still a large portion of it unemployed, being around a quarter, compared to the population-wide unemployment rate of 9%. And surely you would find overrepresented among the movement folks who are underemployed or otherwise frustrated by the lack of mobility in the current market. So (I think) my point stands.

206 points by robg 15y ago

Beware of cantakerous smart wordsmiths. They can articulate poisonous thoughts convincingly.

Spot on the "post-emotional” generation : no anger, no edge, no ego. Is the entrepreneurial model so attractive that everything that may set you apart has to be shaved, to avoid displeasing anyone? To me, hating something is at least as important as loving something else. I'll place the first brick here and proudly declare that I hate organic food and the whole "bio" movement, since it is not scalable and mostly used for class signaling (ala overcomingbias)

zerostar07 15y ago
I think his "selling ourselves" argument is overstated. Judging from me, we keep down emotions because we are more rational than previous generations, we believe in science and reason vs pointless sentimentalism. Organic-foods are just that: trying to emotionally engage people to buy products for reasons never explained.
- guylhem 15y ago
  Science, reason and rationalism are not incompatible with an ego. If you believe in some right and wrong, there should also be an emotion, and eventually an action. I don't think selling ourselves is an overstatement here. And I would also say that we have one of the least scientific generation- not only because enrollment is scientific studies is low, but also because there is now a pride in being ignorant. Also, while trying to protect everyone feelings, all opinions are considered as equally valid - even when some proved wrong. If that is not selling ourselves, how do you call that? I only took organic food as an example of what one must love to be "in", trendy, hipster. A dissending opinion, even based on scientific facts, seems to be frowned upon by hipsters, and by extension the new moral order. In the organic food example, we want to believe in something other than facts. This is not science. Let's follow that example, see http://reason.com/blog/2009/03/26/norman-borlaug-happy-95th-birt http://reason.com/blog/2009/03/26/norman-borlaug-happy-95th-... - with organic food alone, the earth population would have to be around 4 billions. We're 7 billions. Oops. Internal consistence for organic food proponents would require suggesting china-like one child policy or genocides. Here, the "selling generation" is using emotional engagement as a sale tactic, for "feel good" stuff. Personally, I boycott organic food. I usually ask if the food I'm about to order is organic. If it is organic, I ask for something else. If I can not be served food that is not organic, I explain that I boycot organic food, and that I have to place my order somewhere else. Regardless of your analysis of the organic food, you can say that's is very bold, and unfashionable, in today's culture. So I guess I won't be a social media icon. Never mind :-)
  - TheEzEzz 15y ago
    > with organic food alone, the earth population would have to be around 4 billions. We're 7 billions. Oops. And if everyone had a car and lived like Americans then the world would be in a tough spot as well. That doesn't mean I'm going to give up my good life. I eat organic because I don't trust non-organic food, because I don't want to eat animals that lived their lives in feces, themselves consuming ground up animals that were too sick to survive. Is organic scalable? It'd be great if were, and I encourage industry to try, but I'm not in it to save the world, I'm in it for myself.
    - guylhem 15y ago
      "I'm not in it to save the world, I'm in it for myself" At least, that's self consistent and honest. Maybe not a good sales strategy though.
      - dennisgorelik 15y ago
        That strategy would sell to me better, than dishonest "organic saves the world" rhetoric.
  - quanticle 15y ago
    The one big flaw with that interview is that it doesn't compare organic farming with western agriculture in terms of long-term viability. Yes, the carrying capacity of the Earth is only 4 billion with organic farming. But I don't know that mechanized farming can do much better over the long haul. If we look at the third world, organic agricultural techniques actually do much better than mechanized production methods, even when measured in yields alone. The reason for this is that not everyone has forty feet of topsoil, like we do in Kansas. In a lot of places, the soil is marginal, and simply cannot hold up to intensive agriculture for more than couple of years. Mechanized agriculture on land like that is disastrous and leads to crop failure and famine within a decade (for example, Ethiopia). The only way to make these lands agriculturally viable is with organic farming techniques. [1] That said, I do agree with the point you're trying to make, even if I disagree with the specific example. We should support or oppose things not because it is fashionable to support or oppose them, but because of reasons that we've worked out for ourselves. [1] Scott. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Measures to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press. 1999. Print. EDIT: fixed typo
- danssig 15y ago
  The thing I see coming up so much is arrogance. E.g. assuming "our" generation is so "sciency" and rational and previous generations were so superstitious and stupid.
justincormack 15y ago
Organic food is potentially scalable, maybe not right now. It fits right into the beyond mass production era, when capital costs have fallen, productivity has risen, we can apply different new technologies and we can mass customize products. It is mostly not retro, not like biodynamics say.
chipsy 15y ago
I would direct anger at the notion of "authenticity" in commerce, which repackages modern, progressive themes and topics like organic food into a romanticized form.
fjh 15y ago
> I'll place the first brick here and proudly declare that I hate organic food and the whole "bio" movement, since it is not scalable and mostly used for class signaling (ala overcomingbias) And "hating" organic food (really?) is not signalling? There are plenty of things wrong with the world, things that are worth hating, but organic food does not really strike me as one of them.
quanticle 15y ago
Whether organic food is scalable or not depends entirely on what kind of food is being grown and what sort of land it is being grown on. If you read Seeing Like a State, you'll note that "modern" Western farming techniques actually produce worse yields than traditional "organic" farming techniques. Lots of soils simply can't sustain the extremely intensive monocropping that the western farming tradition requires. If we want to really have a second green revolution, we're going to have to start looking at organic farming techniques to make marginal lands agriculturally viable.

chrismealy 15y ago

That's a whole lot of waffle extrapolated from Portland's food carts (which are great, btw) and handmade wallets.

maxogden 15y ago
i see waffle did there

whazzmaster 15y ago

(Hopefully very slight) tangent: The article describes the Millenial Generation as "born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s." Yikes. I suppose when attempting to reduce such a group to a simple catchphrase ("post-emotional"), no additional harm is done by throwing those who were 21 in the year 2000 with those who were five. My opinion is that it's always difficult to describe phenomena while inside; easier to categorize the mood of an era once the era has passed.

_delirium 15y ago
At the risk that it might degenerate into too much meta-level academic theorizing, I'd actually be interested in an analysis of generation-analysis itself. The way generations are segmented seems pretty strange, and shifts depending on who's writing, what/why they're writing, and when they're writing it. It'd be fascinating to get some sort of overview of how that process works. As someone born in 1981, I've ended up in all sorts of buckets. Sometimes '81 is considered the tail end of Generation X. When I was younger, I thought of myself as solidly Gen-X, because "my" culture all seemed to be quintessentially Gen-X culture: Nirvana, MTV, skate-punk, the microcomputer revolution, cynicism about both staid corporate life and the hippie alternative to it, etc. Later I realized that many people considered '81 a bit late for Gen-X, but I had considered myself in it because as a teenager I identified with culture-drivers who were actually 5-15 years older (e.g. Kurt Cobain somehow seemed in my generation at the time, but was in fact born in '67). This article, and some others, by contrast would group me as a Millennial, but many of the other descriptions I've found of Millennials seem aimed at people younger than me, mainly people born in the late-80s/early-90s.
- kd1220 15y ago
  Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss-Howe_generational_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss-Howe_generational_theor... Generational theory is interesting on the surface, but often I take these meta-analyses with a grain of salt. They seem to be grandiose astrological interpretations that would be applicable to any generation. I'm part of the "Nomad" generation type. Nomadic definitely describes my life fairly well for the past 10 years. I've lived in 2 countries and 5 states. The post office should just start OCRing my mail and sending it via email.

neilk 15y ago

I wanted to hate this piece, but I can't. This idea of "post-emotional" is ridiculous, and probably overestimates how passionate previous generations were. There were a lot of half-hearted hippies and punks too. But I think he's right about a few things: - the ideal personality is now someone gentle, who gets along with everyone - the ideal social form is now to start a business or non-profit, or at least be an independent professional - to this end, and due to social media and blogging, many of us are always selling ourselves, however subtly.

pnathan 15y ago
He has put his finger on some vital characteristics of the 2010 era. I think we could have some absolutely lovely flamewars about the causes and effects of those characteristics, but I really, really can't argue with his observations. I've observed that too, but not verbalized it.
- guylhem 15y ago
  Same thing here. I have felt this new "moral order" but this is the first time I've seen it linked to a salesman persona and used as a token to describe this generation.
zerostar07 15y ago
Calling our generation "sellers" has negative connotations, as if we 're super-conformists or sth. If you follow his descriptions, we are the most mature and responsible generation ever: we don't overtly express a futile belief in utopias, we lived the end of communism, we don't reject business, but instead try to infiltrate it with less greed, we don't manipulate people with emotional bullshit (love did not feed the world), we understand that you can change society by not being confrontational (hence we are "selling" ideas rather than screaming them). We don't have a dominant mass culture, which means we are open to micro-cultures, frowning upon the childishness of current-day blockbusters. I don't think Steve Jobs is an idol for us, we don't really have idols and myths, except maybe google.org or wikipedia. It's a good generation.
- 15y ago

kitsune_ 15y ago

This is not a new idea, I remember having this discussion back in high school with my friends, in 1996, during the dot-com boom.

anthuswilliams 15y ago

I wouldn't say we're looking at a culture of salesmen. I'd say it's a culture of craftsmen. The salesman prizes negotiation; he does whatever he has to to get his commission. The craftsman focuses on building and presenting his product (and himself) in a way that maximizes the respect he gets from his peers. The difference between salesman and craftsman is subtle, but it's clear. And I think it's a good way to explain elements of youth culture that don't really jive with the article's point (e.g., the OWS movement).

marchustvedt 15y ago
+1 to this distinction. For what the OP is observing in Portland (and other urban intellectual enclaves: NYC, Boston, SF, Seattle, Austin, etc) - this is a much better characterization of the emergent DIY culture. Still, I think the article itself is pretty narrow in trying to economically label a loosely defined generation. The data just isn't there to support any large scale, nationwide increase in owned-and-operated businesses that are drawing in significant revenue. I looked for it, not incredibly exhaustively, but long enough to wonder if it's out there. Moreover, the stagnant wage and salary figures, combined with increased student debt loads seemed to crowd out and more promising spins on the reality of what's happening with the Millennials. I would love to find data that supports a real economic movement back to craftsmen culture though.
ilaksh 15y ago
Perfect example of the type of bullshit belief structure that generation sell is built on. A craftsman focuses on making things. He focuses on his craft. Period. He does not focus on presenting his product at all. The product does not need presentation or sales, its craftsmanship stands for itself. The difference between salesman and craftsman is that they are completely different things. OWS has NOTHING to do with the article, except for the very end where he mentions a new culture forming. I'm sure you know that words have meaning. You just aren't very good at working out what those meanings are or how they are different from eachother.

tryitnow 15y ago

This is clearly written by someone who has not interacted much with real-world entrepreneurs. "Agreeable" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think of the entrepreneurs I've met. I'm not saying all entrepreneurs are cantankerous, but I would say they're more inclined to do things "their way." I also think entrepreneurs are a lot more threatening to the status quo than previous youth-culture archetypes. If you are a recording executive who would you fear most: 1) a drugged out punk rocker who is pissed at the world and letting everyone know it 2) a hacker entrepreneur like Sean Parker. I think history shows us who the establishment should be more fearful of.

apechai 15y ago
Pretty sure the Beatles had a pretty big effect on society and the status quo. The power of art and music tends to be a second order effect: it inspires people. Without the music of the 60's/70's, do you think Steve Jobs would have dropped acid, become a Zen Buddhist and built Apple's brand as a the challenger of the status quo?
pedrolll 15y ago
Yes, entrepreneurs may be threatening to large companies, but they are not at all threatening to political leaders. Entrepreneurs are not youth culture, they're businessmen, they work within the capitalist system, not opposed to it or trying to change it, like previous youth cultures

gammarator 15y ago

This misses two key motivators (and ignores the fact that Portland is an extreme example). One is an ambivalence about the products and marketing of large corporations and a corresponding search for authenticity through DIY. Why buy Heinz when you can make preservative-free ketchup from heirloom tomato varieties unavailable in any grocery store? And selling the product mainly sustains the enterprise, offering the potential for work with a degree of autonomy. Put up a web storefront and your niche local business has global reach. As to “self-branding” and innocuous politeness: to Deresiewicz, these identify a salesman. More probably, they result from a generational awareness that one’s words and actions are immortalized online. One cultivates a persona or risks letting others do so for you.

narrator 15y ago

>According to one of my students at Yale, where I taught English in the last decade, a colleague of mine would tell his students that they belonged to a “post-emotional” generation. No anger, no edge, no ego. Sounds like Prozac has really had an impact. These kids, when they get the rare moment of depression or rage now, should savor it, like tasting a dish that one only eats once or twice a year.

bluekeybox 15y ago

He missed mods. Watch Antonioni's "Blowup" (1966) and tell me how Thomas (mod) differs from today's hipster startup founder. He doesn't -- except perhaps that he is a bit less polite and drives a vintage Rolls-Royce.

mfringel 15y ago

I place this mostly at the feet of social media. Since your past now never fades, you have a few choices: 1) Don't put/do anything dubious online. (Theoretically easy, harder in practice.) 2) Don't put/do anything that could be de-contextualized and subsequently re-contextualized as dubious, online. (Hard, but not mathematically impossible.) 3) Create some kind of autonomy so that you're not subject to the effects of social-media-based judgment, because social networking never forgets who you were. (Moderate difficulty). Individuals choose one of more of the above approaches for the various parts of their life... possibly all three simultaneously. Since social media makes no distinctions about who you were then vs. who you are now, every moment of behavior counts equally into future perception... so being polite, and deferential, and constantly "selling", is not a independent life choice, but rather the result of a most subtle form of coercion. Coercion is not only from the barrel of a gun. You may completely swear off of social media altogether, or only post precision-calibrated Markov-chained text blurbs that make you look like a model citizen, but you get much less control about what your friends post.

yuhong 15y ago
I think the illusion that people are perfect is fundamentally flawed and have for a while now.
_delirium 15y ago
I don't think it's only the fear of putting things out there that might reflect negatively, but also the temptation of putting things out there that might reflect positively. I actively try not to do it, but I do find myself participating in even online discussion groups with one eye towards potential "personal brand" building. Am I just posting at HN for the discussion, or to build a platform? Or: I used to submit essays to Usenet or Kuro5hin, mostly out of a desire to stimulate discussion and get feedback. But now I post them on my blog, and when I'm writing them there's, consciously or not, always this background thought of where I'll advertise that post so people read it, whether it'll get me new RSS subscribers, etc. I even sometimes think, on the occasions where I've written a long-ish Wikipedia article from scratch, that if I were really doing it right, maybe I should've posted it on my personal blog instead of submitting it as a Wikipedia article--- because I can't fully capture the personal-brand-building at Wikipedia. I'm sure there are people who do give in to that temptation, too.

Gaussian 15y ago

I think in some ways the feeling of this piece embodies the phenomenon, real or not, it attempts to describe. The writer clearly harbors some negative feelings about hipster culture and his perception of its salesman roots, but he won't come out and explicitly rip it--similar to the attitudes of the hipsters he finds so enigmatic.

ScotterC 15y ago

If you don't control your personal brand. Someone else will

georgieporgie 15y ago

Having a large number of much younger cousins who are, oddly enough, from the Portland area, I think the author is painting an entire generation on the basis of a few highly visible examples.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

moxie 15y ago

The author describes youth culture's social form by calling it "post-emotional," "entrepreneurial," and eventually "generation sell." As underwhelming as this is, I think it's incredibly generous, as I would call its social form simply "nothing." The tendency to start artisan businesses is not a social narrative, it's just another part of the aesthetic. The author compares modern youth culture with the hippies, beatniks, and punks. But those generations were doing what they were doing for a reason. Read anything from the heroes of those generations, and you'll see a clear "grand narrative" that described the social relationships of the world they were trying to create. The social narrative of punk culture was not "a tendency to start bands that played three chord songs." That was part of the social aesthetic. The narrative was one of anti-authoritarinism, collective autonomy, and a vision for a world without hierarchy. The truth is that youth culture today has no narrative. Yes, money is cool again, small-business entrepreneurship is a common pursuit, and "maker" culture has taken root, but these are just the things people do. Ask someone why they made the latest LED clock design out of "make magazine," and they'll more than likely say something along the lines of "because it's neat." Look at the average young entrepreneur, and you'll find someone who discovered technology before they discovered themselves -- someone who is "innovating" because that's what they read they're supposed to do, rather than out of some informed sense of the social reality they're trying to create.

maratd 15y ago
> The truth is that youth culture today has no narrative. You couldn't possibly be more wrong. The narrative of today's youth culture is passion. The passion to pursue your craft and the freedom to do it your way. To satisfy your curiosity without harming the world around you. It is unbelievably positive and optimistic. Liberty is the narrative of today and it's a narrative that has far more substance than those prior to it.
- moxie 15y ago
  If you seriously think that the passion of running a taco stand is more substantial and more liberating than the narrative which led to the events of Paris in May 1968, then I'm sorry for you.

kenamarit 15y ago

I liked the article, though I do think he over-generalizes a diverse subculture full of both crusading, idealistic boys and girls as well as truly despicable characters. Regardless it does put into words ideas and feelings we have all had for awhile, or at least he tried. Being post-emotional myself (I guess), I have no real opinion to add other than another observation that once again holds true: that the comments about the article here on Hacker News has been a way better discussion on the topic than the comments on the NYTimes site. Why is the NYTimes always so behind the curve?

blhack 15y ago

Maybe the author just needs to surround himself with some different people? The things I see in my social circles certainly aren't the sort of feel-good, homogenized things he's describing. And is this really new? Haven't people (and I'm half tempted to apply the term pseudo-intellectual here) been complaining about life being a bit passionless "lately" since...ever? The longing for the "old days" of the wild west is such a common complaint that its just a cliche now. If this article feels like it has any sort of merit to you (and you agree with the implication that this is bad), I suggest surrounding yourself with a different group of people.

whazzmaster 15y ago

When I think about branding a generation, which is always done by a member of a previous generation and with not a little whiff of "kids these days' syndrome, it occurs to me that there might be a feedback loop involved. If you're firmly part of Generation G (for Generic, a theoretical generation) which has qualities X, Y, and Z but born in the mid-to-late period of said generation, you're told from the moment you're born that you're part of a group that is X, Y, and Z. I don't have an answer, but I suspect that the problem with 20-30 year-spanning "generations" which are defined and classified by older folks is that, over time, they take on the qualities imbued by an outside observer.

DefinitelyNbdy 15y ago

Our society is "fundamentally agreeable"? Seriously? Let me counter with: Two land wars in Asia, thirty (!) years of cancerous deregulation of the private sector leading to an economic implosion, 9/11, OWS protests, raging unemployment... Having said all of this, I would agree that PORTLAND, OR is a fundamentally agreeable society...it is difficult to communicate this in writing, you really have to visit the place to understand.

bluedanieru 15y ago
Of these, I would say that the only one the Millennials have any hand in is the OWS protests, largely because many of them are unemployed now with nothing else to do. Western society has apparently forgotten the grave danger that comes from leaving vast swaths of your young population without work and riddled with debt. The reteaching of that lesson is going to define the coming decade, I think. But the wars? Neo-liberal baby boomers cooked that up. Deregulation? GenX loves that shit.
- william42 15y ago
  Actually, seventy-something percent of the OWS protesters are employed.
  - bluedanieru 15y ago
    I've seen that statistic as well, and wondered if someone would point it out when I wrote that. Apparently it's more than the Tea Party, for all the media bullshit about the two. At any rate that's still a large portion of it unemployed, being around a quarter, compared to the population-wide unemployment rate of 9%. And surely you would find overrepresented among the movement folks who are underemployed or otherwise frustrated by the lack of mobility in the current market. So (I think) my point stands.