ok, sure, this is kind of superficial, not overly analytical. but somehow i responded to it, probably because i have always been one who attributes a lot of influence to generational characteristics. (as opposed to genetics, birth order, astrology, etc.)
is there a next generation that can be described by the attributes suggested in this piece? i'd like to believe so, but then overly simplified generalizations are dangerous. i cringed when my generation ('x') was slapped with all the slacker stuff 10-15 years ago. (we seem to be redeemed, now, by the way.)
short answer, no. what i like about the piece is that it recognizes that there is not an age distinction per se, but a way in which groups of people across various generations respond to the given moment. what i find particularly problematic is the idea that those of us that are in generation 'm' are more better, yes i said more better, than the "old people." i find it problematic because it reminds me of the hippies of the 60's and early 70's, and i find those people contemptible; they are fighting the old wars, not interested in dialog and increasingly entrenched in "old" ways. so, if generation 'm' wants to avoid finding itself marginalized, then they need to continue to embrace new trends, and not become entrenched in another fleeting ideology.
That sounded like a glorification and whitewashing of people & firms that have been able to exploit the global tastemarket and the shift in ways of spending money that the information-era has brought.
And just a big list of great stuff that all agree with, compared with straw men of all kinds.
This was the most shallow and blindly narcissistic piece of writing I have read in a while. And the douchebag holding the pen obviously wants to be the firts who coined this new generation - "M".
both answers consistent with how i felt upon reading it - BUT there was enough of the zeitgeist in it that i wanted to see what else might arise out of a discussion of his points. i.e., if you get past the self-righteous tone, is there something in this?
i should also say that there is a separate and parallel conversation about 'this generation' at various places where i've been talking to instructors/faculty and it has less to do with their ideals and more to do with an inability to commit, believe in anything, focus, produce work .... but that may be simply a 'when i was your age...' sort of problem.
i agree, beta, about the tendency among a generation to zero in on the issues of a certain time as their own issues and then fail to move on. there is a book about the boomers called 'destructive generation' that i need to pull back out again - haven't cracked it in several years. so what are our generation's sticking points? how do they differ from what we could be picking up now?
quite a lot of straw dogs to kick in that article. i had a hard time finishing it, it was so bad. dude should take page from the lazy generation who dominate new york times op-ed pages. they are able to say smart stuff and have content too without coming off as poseurs like this guy.
I also had to stop before reading it all - I skimmed to the bottom, then skimmed again to try to make sure I was getting it all. But then, that's the way manifestos are, right? They are supposed to be inflammatory and angry?
Sadly I think blaming "old people" is just as misguided as blaming "black people" or "female people" or "rich people". There are people of all ages who want exactly the same things Mr. Haque wants. And setting every battle up as an us v. them is a good way to make noise without getting any closer to any solutions.
I guess as I get older, to make a broad generalization, I am more impressed with actions and less with talk (not that I do anything but talk, though I'm squarely in the M-generation in actions). The discussion taking place here is asking the question, to paraphrase bryan (boyer?): how do we move from thinking to doing? I mean jeez, look at Cameron and Arch for Humanity! Talking about issues is necessary to get things moving, but this manifesto reads a lot like taking-my-toys-and-going-home, or rather, you old people take your toys and leave, rather than let's agree about where you know you screwed up (because yeah, there are a LOT of problems in the world) and figure out how to fix it.
adam's discussion is obviously a lot more thoughtful and arises out of his very thorough background in his topic, but isn't it also a sort of us vs them?
why does he name architects as the ones missing the big picture? many people think about aspects of the issues he addresses. i'd argue that though urbanism is an architectural pursuit that we've largely given away to others, part of the reason is that it's a topic of such complexity that no one discipline could have addressed it. similar with a networked urbanism - moreso, even.
it's actually partly because of his discussion - and a bunch of other discussions about technology, younger generations, and scenarios of a future - that made this 'old people' article trigger my interest.
so, it's simplistic, made up of one-liners and no real analysis. (sim. to twitter and texting.)
and, yes, it's narcissistic and self-righteous. (sim. to, well, almost any media figure these days.)
is it an indication that there is a growing tendency to diverge into black and white understanding of things, instead of the post-modern grey that we've become used to over the past two decades? is us vs them a knee-jerk reaction - a positioning of each individual as either for-that or not-that?
is adam's challenge a similarly black/white challenge, suggesting that some one representative group (i.e., someone else) should do something about the need he's described - almost an all-encompassing modern view - the digital age gesamtkunstwerk?
i should also say that there is a separate and parallel conversation about 'this generation' at various places where i've been talking to instructors/faculty and it has less to do with their ideals and more to do with an inability to commit, believe in anything, focus, produce work .... but that may be simply a 'when i was your age...' sort of problem.
are these faculty that have been around for a while?
if instructors/faculty are experiencing lack of commitment with their students, then they probably need to take a closer look at how and what they are teaching.
it's true that more students these days are ill-equipped to take on ambiguous and open-ended assignments - but there are ways to help students overcome their fears about not doing something the correct way.
also - if these are younger faculty, they probably don't realize that they were among the few top students in their class - and never really noticed how much most of their classmates were struggling.
It's not so much that I think of Adam's article being a call to action as I think that's what people in the discussion after are looking for. And, of course, having followed Adam's writing for a long time I know already he seems to have an overall optimism about the future. Mr. Haque's article seems to want to be optimistic, but only by finding an "other" to blame/overcome.
But yeah, not to derail the thread and to try to answer some of the initial questions: is there a next generation that can be described by the attributes suggested in this piece? No, I don't think so. I think within every generation (class, ethnicity, country) there are people who question the status quo in an effort to make it better for everyone, and those who question it in an effort to exploit it for themselves.
I'd also venture that most of us do both those actions in various activities in our lives.
While the piece does not describe a new kind of generation, it does describe very nakedly the declared ideals and heroes of a new generation or class of people.
-
Of some reason started to think about the Baader-Meinhof Complex -movie and the Weathermen - that's something springing straight from us-vs-them thinking without considering the meaning of specific actions but using actions as speech (monologue). Hate it.
-
And yeah Jump - the writer should totally call up D.Brooks and ask about cultural/political/social/economic oppositions & extremes, and what he thinks about them... spank.
sorry steven, i am concerned about all of the things the kid is talking about (i guess i am old, so he can be the kid - it should make him feel legitimate).
there is nothing to talk about because he is full hot air and all his arguments are against strawmen. there is nothing to react to and as manifestoes goes is rather lame tired and pitiful. he is trying to be smart but is not actually smart enough to actually say something worth reading. it is like he knows how smart people are supposed to write but doesn't have the ability to pull it off. so he comes off as a prat more than anything.
frankly i see it mostly as a cry for attention rather than actual honest attempt to move things forward. little better than the dingbat who pretended his kid was in that hot-air balloon.
I should post this at the article but...well, I don't feel like it.
Oh please, Mr. Haque, just please....using age as the only definer of human foibles, or human virtues, is beyond stupid. Any one human lifetime is, in the scale of world and universal time, very small, and not nearly enough time to change anything permanently as you suggest, and definitely not enough time to change human nature in the way you propose. As a better writer than me once said "we're all doing what we can" in the little time we have. Hell, I was 22 about a week ago, 40 a couple of days ago and I'll be 72 in the blink of an eye...and I'm only just kidding.
Oh, all of your generation are, en masse, changing human nature in one lifetime, are they? Yea, right. But this part makes me just laugh out loud:
"We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful."
The first part is just ridiculous, an overstatement of any group of any age, pure exagerration. Oh, no one in your generation will EVER do something for a less than noble cause, will they? just to survive, maybe, or just to make a buttload of money...will never occur to any of you, ever, will it?
The second part is what EVERY generation does, over and over again, and most people in any generation - past, present, or future - never do learn it. I would suggest you run at some other windmills than age...maybe look yourself in the mirror a little more carefully.
It is more difficult, as a matter of course, for the young to assess the old than vice versa. And even an honest ignorance is self-concealing -- another fact of nature. But neither of these inevitables will prevent youth from attempting the difficult (note that I do not say impossible -- selected poets of every era have succeeded in depicting at least pieces of the Big Picture).
dear god, lighten up, people. seems reading comprehension is not this board's strong suit. he starts the post dear old people who run the world. it's not targeted at "old people" in general; it's targeted at people who have a dated or retrograde perspective on what leadership means in the 21st century. look it's not particularly well written or inspiring , but i think if you can get past the "old people" comment, you will find that you likely agree with most of the points he is trying to make.
still don't agree, jaf, since the "old people who run the world" are continually being replaced by younger people coming up, yet things don't get remarkably better...so no, I don't likely agree with most of the points he is trying to make...in fact I think it's very bad writing, so you lighten up about defending it.
jafid, i agree with you, i think anyone that becomes entrenched in any one ideology is "old" in my book. hence my point above. i don't take offense as a 41 year old, that the piece is about me, in fact i am constantly telling myself not to become one of those people. i like pushing boundaries.
I think it's a bit like that ad I get on hulu/tv with the little girl lying on a bed and saying "you promised me the world, is this what you had in mind?" while images of ecological disasters are projected on the walls.
Kind of annoying actually.
Thanks, LB. Of course it goes without saying that the old can misperceive the young -- and their own peers and just about anything else, too, even before senility sets in. But the odds are perhaps as I stated them, all other things being equal (one of my favorite clichés).
Oct 20, 09 11:08 pm ·
·
Maybe some old people in power are thinking of making cloning and abortion mandatory so that new young people just stop coming into existence.
Oct 20, 09 11:47 pm ·
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Maybe "pushing boundaries" is their favorite clichés even.
"Every generation has a challenge, and this, I think, is ours: to foot the bill for yesterday’s profligacy—and to create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity."
Well, it's a little hard to argue with that. The problem with this piece is that he gets off on the wrong foot, stating the problem as one of generation, when it's really one of attitude -- attitudes that can be, and are, held by young and old alike.
And it's crazy to charge others with an attitude that you give them.
-
The profligacy of yesteday is not a very good term: the "profligacy" of the last several decades was thought of as "prosperity" by almost everyone for most of the time. Now, the new big financial crisis color our understanding and gives everyone 20/20 hindsight, but for the writer of this manifesto, not an ounce of self-reflection.
The exact thing that the previous generation of losers was also lacking.
the issue is not bad writing even. the dude is just setting up a problem so he can give his answer as he sees fit. its like bush, or, whats her name, the pig lipstick girl...
goes like this:
should we go to iraq?
i am for freedom and democracy and so i say we MUST go to iraq
um...that wasn't the question...
YOU sir must not like freedom and democracy.
that is what i call clever misdirection, or if you prefer "shit on a stick"...which just isn't worth much on the open market.
i don't think that writer understands the world very well. it's not old people who have access to most of the levers of economic & political power so much as it's old families (e.g., rothschild, rockefellers, etc)...and they do a wonderful job of including & ultimately transfering to their younger generations.
on a more general point, it seems that we've become very myopic in our assessments of what is a generation. i generally feel that labels like "gen x" & "baby boomer" are more media baloney than anything substantive. for the most part their are simply too many people being born everyday to really draw even hazy generational lines let alone definitive ones. having said that, there is an exception and it's based on large scale, cataclysmic shared experience. in the united states, for example, about every 70-80 years one of these generation defining events comes along; revolution/nation founding in 1770s, civil war in 1860, depression/world war II in 1930/40s. is it any wonder that that the world war II era generation (grandparents to many of us) are often now referred to as the greatest generation. it's because they actually were a real one in the sense of shared hardship & sacrifice (e.g., breadlines, men being shipped off to foreign wars, women pressed into working at factories, etc).
frankly, (and this is purely my own conjecture) the united states is about due for another one of these generation defining eras. there may well be a generation "M" about to emerge but i don't think it will have any thing to do with the idealistic visions of the writer, more likely it will come out of some massive struggles that require collective effort simply to survive. not all will make it out alive, but those that do may very well bear similarities & traits that compel future writers & historians to refer to them as a generation.
and on a bit of a tangent, i wonder if some of the more recent rifts between young & old people (for example, any of a number of threads on this forum about the role & treatment of interns) might have more to do with shifting demographics rather than generational attitudes.
families have become smaller with many more couples only raising a single child. inevitably that child will be spoiled compared to a child that is raised in an environment of brothers & sisters (where inevitable competition will arise for resources such as food, toys, parental love, etc). many of today's young architects & interns do seem to exhibit an attitude of entitlement. it's probably impossible to scientifically correlate but i wouldn't be surprised if there was a relationship between the expectations of young professionals and the size of families that they come from.
The kinds of dynamics, the cultural and demographic shifts and resulting changes in relationships, that puddles refers to, are constantly shifting and evolving, correcting and re-correcting, in never-ending waves. Seen from space (as it were) the human race in it's to-ing and fro-ing would look like the waves and the tides of the oceans, never standing still and never changing a great deal over time. There will always be rich and poor, strong and weak, many and few, and their interactions take predictable and repeating forms -- with new details and fresh issues, of course.
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I think the reason everyone is so obsessed with generations (I might say it's mostly those who have anything to market that are interested in these things that purportedly define a generation) is sheer numbers.
The baby boomers and the millenial's generations are significant because of their size.
First the baby boomers were going to save the world, then the X'ers, now
Ummmhair says generation "M" will save the world....I thought Jesus was supposed to have done it 2 thousand years ago already........blah, blah, blah...
No one is going to Save The World. No one. It's going to slide smoothly into chaos, one square kilometer at a time, with everyone saying "I didn't see THAT coming. . .!"
So maybe the solution isn't to solve it, but instead to be ready to adapt. Not like the Y2K folk all locked in basements and such, but like... Jews perhaps? Worst case scenario is basically going to be a worldwide holocaust (if you believe in 2012 stuff) or something similarly disastrous like global warming. The Jews dealt with stuff like that, and to this day they're everywhere.
... I can't tell if I'm joking about this.
... But I'm a bit Jewish, so it's okay either way...
Just watched Dudamel conduct the inaugural concert at LA -- the Mahler 1st.
"They'll be talking about this for years." There will be winners and losers, all the way to the end. Where there's hope. . .?
exactly, there's no saving the world. best case scenario is that we, as architects, commence designing & building an artificial planet. like the 'death star' from that star wars movie.
of course that probably is too ambitious. more likely we transform the planet into a kind of half artificial/half natural hybrid like those half man/ half robots from the 1970s, bionic man! except this would be a bionic earth.
dear old people...
ok, sure, this is kind of superficial, not overly analytical. but somehow i responded to it, probably because i have always been one who attributes a lot of influence to generational characteristics. (as opposed to genetics, birth order, astrology, etc.)
http://www.good.is/post/the-good-100-umair-haque/
is there a next generation that can be described by the attributes suggested in this piece? i'd like to believe so, but then overly simplified generalizations are dangerous. i cringed when my generation ('x') was slapped with all the slacker stuff 10-15 years ago. (we seem to be redeemed, now, by the way.)
thoughts?
short answer, no. what i like about the piece is that it recognizes that there is not an age distinction per se, but a way in which groups of people across various generations respond to the given moment. what i find particularly problematic is the idea that those of us that are in generation 'm' are more better, yes i said more better, than the "old people." i find it problematic because it reminds me of the hippies of the 60's and early 70's, and i find those people contemptible; they are fighting the old wars, not interested in dialog and increasingly entrenched in "old" ways. so, if generation 'm' wants to avoid finding itself marginalized, then they need to continue to embrace new trends, and not become entrenched in another fleeting ideology.
That sounded like a glorification and whitewashing of people & firms that have been able to exploit the global tastemarket and the shift in ways of spending money that the information-era has brought.
And just a big list of great stuff that all agree with, compared with straw men of all kinds.
This was the most shallow and blindly narcissistic piece of writing I have read in a while. And the douchebag holding the pen obviously wants to be the firts who coined this new generation - "M".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dial_M_for_Motherfucker
both answers consistent with how i felt upon reading it - BUT there was enough of the zeitgeist in it that i wanted to see what else might arise out of a discussion of his points. i.e., if you get past the self-righteous tone, is there something in this?
i should also say that there is a separate and parallel conversation about 'this generation' at various places where i've been talking to instructors/faculty and it has less to do with their ideals and more to do with an inability to commit, believe in anything, focus, produce work .... but that may be simply a 'when i was your age...' sort of problem.
i agree, beta, about the tendency among a generation to zero in on the issues of a certain time as their own issues and then fail to move on. there is a book about the boomers called 'destructive generation' that i need to pull back out again - haven't cracked it in several years. so what are our generation's sticking points? how do they differ from what we could be picking up now?
quite a lot of straw dogs to kick in that article. i had a hard time finishing it, it was so bad. dude should take page from the lazy generation who dominate new york times op-ed pages. they are able to say smart stuff and have content too without coming off as poseurs like this guy.
I also had to stop before reading it all - I skimmed to the bottom, then skimmed again to try to make sure I was getting it all. But then, that's the way manifestos are, right? They are supposed to be inflammatory and angry?
Sadly I think blaming "old people" is just as misguided as blaming "black people" or "female people" or "rich people". There are people of all ages who want exactly the same things Mr. Haque wants. And setting every battle up as an us v. them is a good way to make noise without getting any closer to any solutions.
I guess as I get older, to make a broad generalization, I am more impressed with actions and less with talk (not that I do anything but talk, though I'm squarely in the M-generation in actions). The discussion taking place here is asking the question, to paraphrase bryan (boyer?): how do we move from thinking to doing? I mean jeez, look at Cameron and Arch for Humanity! Talking about issues is necessary to get things moving, but this manifesto reads a lot like taking-my-toys-and-going-home, or rather, you old people take your toys and leave, rather than let's agree about where you know you screwed up (because yeah, there are a LOT of problems in the world) and figure out how to fix it.
adam's discussion is obviously a lot more thoughtful and arises out of his very thorough background in his topic, but isn't it also a sort of us vs them?
why does he name architects as the ones missing the big picture? many people think about aspects of the issues he addresses. i'd argue that though urbanism is an architectural pursuit that we've largely given away to others, part of the reason is that it's a topic of such complexity that no one discipline could have addressed it. similar with a networked urbanism - moreso, even.
it's actually partly because of his discussion - and a bunch of other discussions about technology, younger generations, and scenarios of a future - that made this 'old people' article trigger my interest.
so, it's simplistic, made up of one-liners and no real analysis. (sim. to twitter and texting.)
and, yes, it's narcissistic and self-righteous. (sim. to, well, almost any media figure these days.)
is it an indication that there is a growing tendency to diverge into black and white understanding of things, instead of the post-modern grey that we've become used to over the past two decades? is us vs them a knee-jerk reaction - a positioning of each individual as either for-that or not-that?
is adam's challenge a similarly black/white challenge, suggesting that some one representative group (i.e., someone else) should do something about the need he's described - almost an all-encompassing modern view - the digital age gesamtkunstwerk?
are these faculty that have been around for a while?
if instructors/faculty are experiencing lack of commitment with their students, then they probably need to take a closer look at how and what they are teaching.
it's true that more students these days are ill-equipped to take on ambiguous and open-ended assignments - but there are ways to help students overcome their fears about not doing something the correct way.
also - if these are younger faculty, they probably don't realize that they were among the few top students in their class - and never really noticed how much most of their classmates were struggling.
oh, and I thought this was going to be about old fart architects
we are, same old. we are.
It's not so much that I think of Adam's article being a call to action as I think that's what people in the discussion after are looking for. And, of course, having followed Adam's writing for a long time I know already he seems to have an overall optimism about the future. Mr. Haque's article seems to want to be optimistic, but only by finding an "other" to blame/overcome.
But yeah, not to derail the thread and to try to answer some of the initial questions: is there a next generation that can be described by the attributes suggested in this piece? No, I don't think so. I think within every generation (class, ethnicity, country) there are people who question the status quo in an effort to make it better for everyone, and those who question it in an effort to exploit it for themselves.
I'd also venture that most of us do both those actions in various activities in our lives.
I think,
We are just as old as the previous generations are,
and just as new as they had been at their time,
and just as greedy as they were.
Only thing has been changed is the way how to satisfy one's greed.
We are not special, yet.
People whose paragraphs are consistently one sentence long (or less) clearly do not have the fortitude to actually change anything.
While the piece does not describe a new kind of generation, it does describe very nakedly the declared ideals and heroes of a new generation or class of people.
-
Of some reason started to think about the Baader-Meinhof Complex -movie and the Weathermen - that's something springing straight from us-vs-them thinking without considering the meaning of specific actions but using actions as speech (monologue). Hate it.
-
And yeah Jump - the writer should totally call up D.Brooks and ask about cultural/political/social/economic oppositions & extremes, and what he thinks about them... spank.
the love of vampires
sorry steven, i am concerned about all of the things the kid is talking about (i guess i am old, so he can be the kid - it should make him feel legitimate).
there is nothing to talk about because he is full hot air and all his arguments are against strawmen. there is nothing to react to and as manifestoes goes is rather lame tired and pitiful. he is trying to be smart but is not actually smart enough to actually say something worth reading. it is like he knows how smart people are supposed to write but doesn't have the ability to pull it off. so he comes off as a prat more than anything.
frankly i see it mostly as a cry for attention rather than actual honest attempt to move things forward. little better than the dingbat who pretended his kid was in that hot-air balloon.
I should post this at the article but...well, I don't feel like it.
Oh please, Mr. Haque, just please....using age as the only definer of human foibles, or human virtues, is beyond stupid. Any one human lifetime is, in the scale of world and universal time, very small, and not nearly enough time to change anything permanently as you suggest, and definitely not enough time to change human nature in the way you propose. As a better writer than me once said "we're all doing what we can" in the little time we have. Hell, I was 22 about a week ago, 40 a couple of days ago and I'll be 72 in the blink of an eye...and I'm only just kidding.
Oh, all of your generation are, en masse, changing human nature in one lifetime, are they? Yea, right. But this part makes me just laugh out loud:
"We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful."
The first part is just ridiculous, an overstatement of any group of any age, pure exagerration. Oh, no one in your generation will EVER do something for a less than noble cause, will they? just to survive, maybe, or just to make a buttload of money...will never occur to any of you, ever, will it?
The second part is what EVERY generation does, over and over again, and most people in any generation - past, present, or future - never do learn it. I would suggest you run at some other windmills than age...maybe look yourself in the mirror a little more carefully.
It is more difficult, as a matter of course, for the young to assess the old than vice versa. And even an honest ignorance is self-concealing -- another fact of nature. But neither of these inevitables will prevent youth from attempting the difficult (note that I do not say impossible -- selected poets of every era have succeeded in depicting at least pieces of the Big Picture).
I've quoted these lyrics in other posts, but I just love quoting this guy:
The old men 'round here, sometimes they get on
bad terms with the younger men
but old, young, age don't carry weight
it doesn't matter in the end
dear god, lighten up, people. seems reading comprehension is not this board's strong suit. he starts the post dear old people who run the world. it's not targeted at "old people" in general; it's targeted at people who have a dated or retrograde perspective on what leadership means in the 21st century. look it's not particularly well written or inspiring , but i think if you can get past the "old people" comment, you will find that you likely agree with most of the points he is trying to make.
still don't agree, jaf, since the "old people who run the world" are continually being replaced by younger people coming up, yet things don't get remarkably better...so no, I don't likely agree with most of the points he is trying to make...in fact I think it's very bad writing, so you lighten up about defending it.
jafid, i agree with you, i think anyone that becomes entrenched in any one ideology is "old" in my book. hence my point above. i don't take offense as a 41 year old, that the piece is about me, in fact i am constantly telling myself not to become one of those people. i like pushing boundaries.
I think it's a bit like that ad I get on hulu/tv with the little girl lying on a bed and saying "you promised me the world, is this what you had in mind?" while images of ecological disasters are projected on the walls.
Kind of annoying actually.
Love this, SDR, and god I wish I had understood that when I was young!
Thanks, LB. Of course it goes without saying that the old can misperceive the young -- and their own peers and just about anything else, too, even before senility sets in. But the odds are perhaps as I stated them, all other things being equal (one of my favorite clichés).
Maybe some old people in power are thinking of making cloning and abortion mandatory so that new young people just stop coming into existence.
Maybe "pushing boundaries" is their favorite clichés even.
"Every generation has a challenge, and this, I think, is ours: to foot the bill for yesterday’s profligacy—and to create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity."
Well, it's a little hard to argue with that. The problem with this piece is that he gets off on the wrong foot, stating the problem as one of generation, when it's really one of attitude -- attitudes that can be, and are, held by young and old alike.
It's hard to argue with bullshit.
And it's crazy to charge others with an attitude that you give them.
-
The profligacy of yesteday is not a very good term: the "profligacy" of the last several decades was thought of as "prosperity" by almost everyone for most of the time. Now, the new big financial crisis color our understanding and gives everyone 20/20 hindsight, but for the writer of this manifesto, not an ounce of self-reflection.
The exact thing that the previous generation of losers was also lacking.
I'm disappointed.
I'm old. Am I allowed to be disappointed ?
lol.
the issue is not bad writing even. the dude is just setting up a problem so he can give his answer as he sees fit. its like bush, or, whats her name, the pig lipstick girl...
goes like this:
should we go to iraq?
i am for freedom and democracy and so i say we MUST go to iraq
um...that wasn't the question...
YOU sir must not like freedom and democracy.
that is what i call clever misdirection, or if you prefer "shit on a stick"...which just isn't worth much on the open market.
i don't think that writer understands the world very well. it's not old people who have access to most of the levers of economic & political power so much as it's old families (e.g., rothschild, rockefellers, etc)...and they do a wonderful job of including & ultimately transfering to their younger generations.
on a more general point, it seems that we've become very myopic in our assessments of what is a generation. i generally feel that labels like "gen x" & "baby boomer" are more media baloney than anything substantive. for the most part their are simply too many people being born everyday to really draw even hazy generational lines let alone definitive ones. having said that, there is an exception and it's based on large scale, cataclysmic shared experience. in the united states, for example, about every 70-80 years one of these generation defining events comes along; revolution/nation founding in 1770s, civil war in 1860, depression/world war II in 1930/40s. is it any wonder that that the world war II era generation (grandparents to many of us) are often now referred to as the greatest generation. it's because they actually were a real one in the sense of shared hardship & sacrifice (e.g., breadlines, men being shipped off to foreign wars, women pressed into working at factories, etc).
frankly, (and this is purely my own conjecture) the united states is about due for another one of these generation defining eras. there may well be a generation "M" about to emerge but i don't think it will have any thing to do with the idealistic visions of the writer, more likely it will come out of some massive struggles that require collective effort simply to survive. not all will make it out alive, but those that do may very well bear similarities & traits that compel future writers & historians to refer to them as a generation.
and on a bit of a tangent, i wonder if some of the more recent rifts between young & old people (for example, any of a number of threads on this forum about the role & treatment of interns) might have more to do with shifting demographics rather than generational attitudes.
families have become smaller with many more couples only raising a single child. inevitably that child will be spoiled compared to a child that is raised in an environment of brothers & sisters (where inevitable competition will arise for resources such as food, toys, parental love, etc). many of today's young architects & interns do seem to exhibit an attitude of entitlement. it's probably impossible to scientifically correlate but i wouldn't be surprised if there was a relationship between the expectations of young professionals and the size of families that they come from.
The kinds of dynamics, the cultural and demographic shifts and resulting changes in relationships, that puddles refers to, are constantly shifting and evolving, correcting and re-correcting, in never-ending waves. Seen from space (as it were) the human race in it's to-ing and fro-ing would look like the waves and the tides of the oceans, never standing still and never changing a great deal over time. There will always be rich and poor, strong and weak, many and few, and their interactions take predictable and repeating forms -- with new details and fresh issues, of course.
The point being, naming the successive generations is like naming the individual leaves of the trees -- as puddles implies ?
[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytguDdNRy4Y]Hello, Mary Jane, I can't get you off my brain!
Take me higher then a crane,
You're so sweet like sugarcane!
Mary Jane!
Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
Girl, you must be my fairy!
You give me wings like a canary.
Mary Jane I love you dearly!
I always want you near me,
You make me see clearly like,
Jimmy split, I mean Jimmy's clit!
Mary Jane I love you so, I wont ever let you go.
Mary Jane I need you so, I wont ever let you go!
Mary Jane I love you so, I wont ever let you go.
Mary Jane I need you so, I wont ever let you go!
Load it, twist it, light it up!
Load it, twist it, light it up!
Load it, twist it, light it up![/url]
oops!
and then the sun also rises?
I think the reason everyone is so obsessed with generations (I might say it's mostly those who have anything to market that are interested in these things that purportedly define a generation) is sheer numbers.
The baby boomers and the millenial's generations are significant because of their size.
in praise of x'ers
First the baby boomers were going to save the world, then the X'ers, now
Ummmhair says generation "M" will save the world....I thought Jesus was supposed to have done it 2 thousand years ago already........blah, blah, blah...
don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters
No one is going to Save The World. No one. It's going to slide smoothly into chaos, one square kilometer at a time, with everyone saying "I didn't see THAT coming. . .!"
So maybe the solution isn't to solve it, but instead to be ready to adapt. Not like the Y2K folk all locked in basements and such, but like... Jews perhaps? Worst case scenario is basically going to be a worldwide holocaust (if you believe in 2012 stuff) or something similarly disastrous like global warming. The Jews dealt with stuff like that, and to this day they're everywhere.
... I can't tell if I'm joking about this.
... But I'm a bit Jewish, so it's okay either way...
Just watched Dudamel conduct the inaugural concert at LA -- the Mahler 1st.
"They'll be talking about this for years." There will be winners and losers, all the way to the end. Where there's hope. . .?
exactly, there's no saving the world. best case scenario is that we, as architects, commence designing & building an artificial planet. like the 'death star' from that star wars movie.
of course that probably is too ambitious. more likely we transform the planet into a kind of half artificial/half natural hybrid like those half man/ half robots from the 1970s, bionic man! except this would be a bionic earth.
Matthew 28:19
Imagine the worst suburban Otherworld you've seen, then replace all the natural biology with plastic. . .?
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