The thing that strikes me most about them is how nice they are: polite, pleasant, moderate, earnest, friendly. Rock ’n’ rollers once were snarling rebels or chest-beating egomaniacs. Now the presentation is low-key, self-deprecating, post-ironic, eco-friendly. When Vampire Weekend appeared on “The Colbert Report” last year to plug their album “Contra,” the host asked them, in view of the title, what they were against. “Closed-mindedness,” they said.
Here’s what I see around me, in the city and the culture: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet.
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.
Bands are still bands, but now they’re little businesses, as well: self-produced, self-published, self-managed. When I hear from young people who want to get off the careerist treadmill and do something meaningful, they talk, most often, about opening a restaurant. Nonprofits are still hip, but students don’t dream about joining one, they dream about starting one. In any case, what’s really hip is social entrepreneurship — companies that try to make money responsibly, then give it all away.
Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.
And that, I think, is the real meaning of the Millennial affect — which is, like the entrepreneurial ideal, essentially everyone’s now. Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the original business guru, make yourself pleasing to others.
They say that people in Hollywood are always nice to everyone they meet, in that famously fake Hollywood way, because they’re never certain whom they might be dealing with — it could be somebody who’s more important than they realize, or at least, somebody who might become important down the road.
Well, we’re all in showbiz now, walking on eggshells, relentlessly tending our customer base. We’re all selling something today, because even if we aren’t literally selling something (though thanks to the Internet as well as the entrepreneurial ideal, more and more of us are), we’re always selling ourselves. We use social media to create a product — to create a brand — and the product is us. We treat ourselves like little businesses, something to be managed and promoted.
The self today is an entrepreneurial self, a self that’s packaged to be sold.
I am guessing that most of my fellow Gen Y’s are either angry or uneasy right now, or probably some of both. If not – if you’re just bored or confused – then this is apparently foreign to you and so I will recommend that you stop reading now. Angered/uneasy people, read on.
What’s wrong with selling? We’re producing stuff of value!, otherwise people wouldn’t be buying it. And what’s wrong with being kind? What’s wrong with making friends? We are the first generation to be doing meaningful stuff! We are producing valuable things, lobbying for social change, and making lots of friends in the process. You’ve really got this wrong, old man.
(That was my guess at something like the average Gen Y reaction.)
Deresiewicz addresses the primary objections here, and then again here, and then again in an article called @FranzKafka (my favorite). Here’s part of it:
What’s wrong with selling? one of them said. Selling just means putting something out there, something that embodies your passion and creativity. Well, what’s wrong with selling is that it’s potentially corrupting. In fact, it’s inherently corrupting.
Because you don’t just put something out there, effect a seamless transfer from idea to product. There is packaging; there is advertising; there is marketing (now, with the Web, more than ever). And all of those are designed to create the illusion of value. There may be genuine value underneath, but the whole act of selling—as everybody knows who’s done it and thought honestly about it—is designed to make things appear more valuable than they really are.
That so much of this process happens now in social networks doesn’t make it better; it makes it worse. The buzzword now is authenticity—“people are great bullshit detectors,” one of my respondents said, a phrase to gladden every huckster’s heart—but the authenticity that social networks confer strikes me as rather fake. If anything, turning ourselves into miniature entrepreneurs only allows commercial values to infiltrate spaces that were previously free of them. All of a sudden, people I thought were my friends are trying to sell me shit. In any case, the rhetoric of authenticity is just a more insidious form of commercialism. David Foster Wallace saw this long before there was a Web: how, in an age when everybody’s hip to the pitch, the pitch simply disguises itself as an anti-pitch. Authenticity my ass; the pitch abides.
But the corruptions of commerce do not begin at the point of sale. Selling corrupts the product itself. If you know you’re going to have to sell it, then you’re going to make it salable. For a gadget, this is fine: all it needs is to be useful. But what about art, or thought? The whole purpose of social criticism is to say things that make people uncomfortable, that they don’t want to hear—that they, in both senses, don’t want to buy. The whole idea of the avant-garde is to create art that offers resistance to its audience, that isn’t easily consumable. But if everything needs to be sold, then everything needs to stay within the limits, moral or aesthetic, of what people are comfortable with. So you alter the wording. You drop a controversial idea. You put in a dance beat. You don’t take chances beyond what you think the market will bear. You don’t need a record executive or Hollywood producer to dumb things down or tart them up, because you’re doing it yourself. And worst of all, you may not even realize it.
This explains why our generation is simultaneously producing the best gadgets and the worst art, and it explains why we can be surrounded by oodles of amazing technology and oodles of people who seem to like us while producing “valuable” products toward “social” causes and yet still not feel much of anything like “satisfied.”
We are striving like hell to do/find something meaningful, to find freedom and self-actualization, to pursue our passions while still being “socially conscious” unlike our boring and greedy parents, and yet look who we end up looking like:
The feeling seems to be that you’re entitled to do exactly what you want, when you want it, on your own terms. To judge from the responses I’ve gotten, Millennials like to define themselves against the baby boomers—in other words, their parents. They fail to see, apparently, just how much they resemble them, for good and ill. The same idealism, the same countercultural mindset, but also the same self-regard, self-absorption, self-congratulation.
We fancy ourselves as independent-thinking and generous intellectuals, thinking globally and acting locally, spurning authority and forging our own paths. But what we really are is a generation of world-class sheep, thinking critically and independently (all while making sure to squeeze in plenty of extracurriculars) precisely because the adults want us to:
Being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework. If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.
Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. A friend who teaches at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to.
