Anyone else born in the late 1970s / early 1980s feel like they're part of a weird generation that slipped thru the cracks?
And I don't even really want to unpack what I mean by "generation" or "slipped thru the cracks" - I feel like alot of people my age share this feeling for different reasons.
For me I think it has something to do w/ the development of the Internet and how it changed economic + social conditions. Like I'm old enough to remember a pre-internet world, but not to have been an adult in that world.
If you were born a few years on either side of 1979 then you and the Internet grew up together - teenage self-discovery and dialup became young adult independence and broadband.
I guess this makes me a part of the "Eternal September" - which is how the adults already online in the 1990s referred to the clueless college kids who showed up w/ their .edu addresses and free campus dialup.
It's weird because that chunk of time is also bracketed by the other "Eternal September" - the wars of imperial re-conquest after 9/11.
(Pynchon riffs on this a little in "Bleeding Edge" and I think if I dug back into those chapters I'd probably uncover it's one of the shadow narratives that the book is actually about)
Like from 1994 through 2001 there was this intense buildout of the work to surveil and capture political opposition and once that was in place the New Pearl harbor could happen.
Join this social network site or that one, constantly re-learning how to do self-presentation every time the medium changed. Get priced out of this gentrifying neighborhood and move to the next one. Constant recapitualtion of socialization *as a settler*.
(also been kind thinking about "irony" and self-presentation on social media and how that gives people a do-over on socialization and internalizing different values from the ones they grew up with)
(i.e. thanks to social media everyone has the opportunity to be a social climbing petty booj teenager)
"Punks are the shock troops of gentrification" etc. You can look at NYC real estate over the last 15 years and see how the big developers figured out how to operationalize that.
