Generation X2

Labels are one thing but attitudes are another.  Marketers create labels and the two chief labels in the last half-a-century have been BOOMERS and MILLENNIALS.  They are both groups that do not defy description because they are a description.  There are people who putty for marketing stereotyping, did the marketer discover them or where they made by the marketer?  It is the same thing as McLuhan saying "first we shape the tools, then the tools shape us".

According to marketers I am a boomer, which puts me in the same classification as Donald Trump.  This is not only absurd, it is meaningless because if it helps sell some tupperware then what the heck does that have to do with me.  I am selling something, which is the message that we need to reclaim our privacy and ironically it means silencing ourselves from the tools.  What we don't tell or document remains private - but to a point, the drive to make us pieces of data continues and digital work trying to understand the human brain wants to create mind-reading technologies, never mind interface our bodies so technology is planted inside of us - but we have not reached that dawn yet - and at such a point, a new counter-culture shall arise.

The name of this forthcoming new counter-culture I think should be called Generation X2.  If Gen-X is a term for a forgotten demographic between Boomers and Millennials, I am not too concerned about that - Gen-X as marketers have borrowed the term is just a marketing term.  Those people who identify themselves as a generation rather than as human beings can keep on maintaining their socioeconomic or marketing segmentation classification, as much as those who identify themselves with a Myers-Briggs classification, but this is not counter-culture.

The term Generation X was not coined by marketers but existed in the 1950's and it is an attitude that was noticed way back then.  It surfaced in the great counter-culture movement of the 60's and was converted from its hippie culture side into the very technology we use today and the attitudes that sit underneath current design.   Boomers continue to rule in the 21st Century because they not only control the money, but they largely have the money and it is boomers who shaped the more facile attitudes of society which includes a worship of youth culture.  They worshiped their own youth culture and now complain against the very ageism they introduced !

In the counter-culture world it is not a calamity if YOU-TUBE went down (which it actually has in the very moment I am thinking this). It is a force that is not defined by generation but by attitude. It is a natural check and balance against prevailing orthodoxy.  Today the prevailing orthodoxy actually is perpetuated by professional groups like marketers and human resource thinkers, all of them sitting in their own little silo, trying to tell us who and what we are and then satisfying their own professional cults that we bought their reasoning or at least have been conditioned to it.  In turn we are subservient beings to authority, taught by our educational institutions to worry more about authority than find freedom in civilization to be creative and innovate intelligently.

Moreover we call these controlling groups servant leaders, as if professional groups are the model group of people who sacrifice their lives for the greater good.  It is a typical and old-fashioned fight for power and all the definitions that these professional cults create, define the reality we live in and keep us in line from how we shop and how we go about finding work.  This level of control is yet again escalating, so much so that ordinary people know something is wrong but in following the meme's of modern media - end up where the Pied Piper wanted them to be or at least not see through the charade. 

So it is we need to re-look at the term Generation X as a term driven from literature and not a label that a particular generation applies to themselves - and then seen as a collective change agent look for signs of a counter-culture - one not driven by ignorance and fear, but understanding and adaptation.  So GENERATION X2 is just another word for a revival of counter-culture, but what the heck was GENERATION X - the real Generation X?

The real Generation X began with people noticing a certain attitude developing with youth in the 1950's.  This has nothing to do with the classification that wanted to know how to sell washing machines later on (which we also call marketing today but back in the day was really mindfucking and people who became experts at knowing how to mind fuck - think "Mad Men").  

Douglas Coupland wrote a novel called Generation X, which was an ode not to the Gen-Xer's of marketing classification but to folks in the 50's.  If the counter-culture reached its epoch in the 60's the Generation X mindset that fueled it had its roots in an earlier time - and by reclassifying GENERATION X as a curve of counter-culture we can connect James Dean with the birth of music movements like Punk Rock and Hip Hop - all of these music movements owe their histories to much earlier phenomena and we tend to downplay the significance of the 50's.

The current epoch is one which is GENERATION Z - or Zzzzzzzzz for asleep.  We can trace back the rise of the Yuppie culture of the 80's and the arrival of Ronald Reagan and the rise of corporatism that followed and we have been in that deep sleep as economic agents ever since.  The arrival of Trump is just an extension of the comfort zone leading economies fell into and which is only now receiving a rude re-awakening.  So it should be that we will experience a new wave of counter-culture and this is GENERATION X2.   Not identified by your birth date but by your sense of humanity and feeling that things have gone out of sync - disorder in the order.

If people want a handle on how Generation X was chosen and who created the term "Millennials" NPR has written a good piece http://www.npr.org/2014/10/06/349316543/don-t-label-me-origins-of-generational-names-and-why-we-use-them

I am sure in terms ageism - that Gen-Xers' don't want to go by their original classification which was BABY-BUSTERS, just as boomers came from the term BABY BOOMERS.

That should not hide the fact that Generation X as a term was being used in the 50's and culminated in a novel called Generation X by Douglas Coupland about 30 years ago which is itself a headnod to folks in the 1950's. 

 Note also what the NPR article quotes Douglas Coupland as saying :

Generation X wasn't the preferred label until Douglas Coupland's 1991 book, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, explained that the letter "X" was meant to signify his generation's desire not to be defined. 

Samantha Raphalson in How Generations Got Nicknames

So if Generation X is a desire not to be defined why call oneself a Gen-Xer?  People want certainty, they want classification, they choose the label but a counter-culture, that is a phenomena and it is a backlash and wave of change.  Why do you think I piss all over the term "personal brand" - because it was coined by the professional groupings who control the zeitgeist today - but today is not a poster-child for tomorrow but a graveyard of thinking from the past.

GENERATION X2 is that same mix of transformations that occurred in the 50's, 60, and 70's.  The fact that the 80's, 90 and 00's and 10's have been absolutely lame, does not mean that the forthcoming 20's, 30's and 40's will be exactly the same.  I look forward to living between 2020 and 2040 as much as I have contempt for the marketers, project managers, politicians, human resource professionals who have defined us all in their image.  They are not gods, they are people.  The backlash we saw in the 60's will be the backlash we see in the new-20's.  Their is counter-culture whisping back in the air and it will be a pure GENERATION X2 mindset not label.