TECHNOLOGY

Millennials are the technological bridge generation, connecting the analog Boomers and Gen Xers to the digital Gen Z. Like Boomers and Gen Xers, and unlike the Gen Zers whose births might have been broadcast on Instagram, Millennials largely spent our childhoods without smartphones, tablets, or laptops. We have the context of a less-connected earlier era: a time when most experiences went undocumented, years when entertainment was not always at your fingertips, life before everyone sat around the dinner table tapping and swiping their phones after photographing their food. The older among us grew up without home internet; as adolescents, we were lucky if we had AOL dial-up. But once the technological innovations of the internet and the handheld computer arrived, we were quicker than older Americans to integrate them into our lives. It didn’t hurt that we were younger: About half of Americans were using the internet by the year 2000, when the oldest Millennials were in college, and the youngest adults were the most likely to be online. When the first iPhone hit the market, Millennials were preteens, teenagers, and young adults, and we remain the most likely adult generation to own a smartphone.

Millennials text about five times as often as Baby Boomers.

While Boomers also grew up in an era of rapid technological advancement, the innovations of their time came with a sense of wonder and optimism: from the dawn of color television to the space race to the invention of the microwave oven, Boomer childhoods were marked by advances that promised brighter, better, aluminum-shiny futures, and these discoveries often delivered.

Millennials, on the other hand, have seen the great promises of digital technology and connection—often created by Millennials and then sold to Millennials—quickly turn sinister. The great hope that the internet and social media would make us better informed, better connected, and more empathetic has been thoroughly dashed as bad actors have exploited these tools for personal gain, while many technology companies have been slow, inadequate, and often shockingly blasé in response. The results have been devastating: the rise of authoritarian strongmen and the breakdown of liberal democracy; the proliferation of misinformation campaigns; sustained and sometimes coordinated acts of bullying and harassment, and victims who find themselves traumatized, financially ruined, socially isolated, even suicidal; and the widespread embrace and weaponization of rhetoric that fuels bigotry, violence, slaughter, and ethnic cleansing.

Do Millennials deserve all the blame for this? Of course not. But when it comes to the transformative power of technology and the internet, we royally screwed this one up. And now a lot of us are wondering how we fix the future.

The Great Promise

Millennials came of age in an era of almost unprecedented technological growth. From the internet to smartphones to social media, we have seen nearly every aspect of life revolutionized at breakneck speed. While older generations experienced these same shifts alongside us, the young tend to be quicker to adapt and adopt. And given that many of these changes occurred when Millennials were just entering adult life, they also shaped how we live as adults.

Communication is the most obvious shift. For young people, landlines are a thing of the past; even picking up our iPhones to place a call instead of sending a text is a rarity. A full 93 percent of Millennials own a smartphone, compared to 68 percent of Boomers. Millennials text about five times as often as Baby Boomers. The proliferation of social media has also kept Millennials connected, and helped us to forge new relationships in ways unimaginable when our parents were young.

Much of this is good. Though we don’t spend our Sunday afternoons catching up with friends over hours-long phone conversations, we can easily check out, for example, what a huge number of our high school and college classmates are up to more than a decade after graduation, which helps to sustain long friendships and occasionally reignites new ones. The ease with which we can communicate with people who do not live in our immediate vicinity is revolutionary, allowing us to socially sort by interests and values rather than by previous vectors of division: class, location, race. This doesn’t mean those previous factors are no longer in play—race, socioeconomic status, and location also shape one’s interests and values. But social media platforms specifically, and the internet more generally, make it easier for all of us to find our own version of “our people.” While Boomers see significant socioeconomic divides when it comes to social media use—the Stanford Center of Poverty and Inequality found that wealthier and middle-class Boomers are a lot more likely than poor ones to be on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter—for Millennials, the haves use social media only marginally more than the have-nots. These platforms also make organizing and information distribution more effective. Movements including March for Our Lives and Black Lives Matter, for example, were able to leverage this power to bring attention to what was happening beyond the spotlight of mainstream media attention.

Close to 40 percent of American heterosexual couples now meet online; for same-sex couples, it’s 65 percent.

The internet also makes it easier to find a partner for marriage, a date, sex, friendship, or conversation. Close to 40 percent of American heterosexual couples now meet online; for same-sex couples, it’s 65 percent, a 2019 Stanford University study found. For the 60 years following World War II, the Stanford researchers found, couples overwhelmingly met through friends and family. That changed after 2009, and now couples are more likely to meet online than anywhere else. And while traditionalists worry that online dating may lead to an increase of assortive mating—people romantically sorting themselves and marrying within racial, socioeconomic, and educational groups—the Stanford researcher found that the opposite might actually be true: couples who meet online are actually more likely to have different racial and ethnic backgrounds, different religious beliefs, and different educational levels. And while those couples are not more likely to date across political lines than couples who meet in more traditional “real-life” settings, they’re not less likely to do so, either.

The Millennial embrace of nontraditional life paths may also be at least partly credited to the internet. Steph Larsen, the Xennial mother who moved her family from her beloved Montana to a farm in upstate New York because of climate change fears, grew up in a small Wisconsin city where getting married in your twenties and having babies soon after was the longtime cultural norm. But because she had the internet as she came of age, Steph says, “I took a completely different path than what I grew up being told was ‘normal.’ I said I’m going to travel, I’m going to pursue a career, I’m going to try out farming, I’m going to weigh whether I really want to be a parent or not.” For Steph, internet access made her more curious about the world around her, and hungry for travel and new experiences. It also shaped her identity. “I remember when I was ten praying for God not to make me a lesbian. And now that kind of breaks my heart—I want to just hug that little ten-year-old and say it’s fine, and it’s gonna be fine,” Steph says. “As I got to grad school, I realized, oh my gosh, I’m bisexual, there’s this whole community of people who are attracted to different genders, let me try this on. I wish that I had had role models when I was younger that my kids will have because of the internet.” If her kids have questions Steph can’t answer, she can google it. If they have unusual interests, she can look them up. If their experiences diverge from hers, she and her husband can more easily find resources to support them. “If our daughter comes to us and says ‘I’m a boy’ and insists upon it, we can go research that and understand what it means to be trans in a way that previous generations couldn’t,” Steph says.

For Jolie Theall, a late Boomer who was born in 1959, the Boomers-as-tech-dolts stereotype doesn’t quite hold—her kids, she says, call her for tech support. She started a software company in the eighties that continued to prosper through the nineties, until the financial crash of 2008 wiped her out. But she continued to work in tech long after. And the tech revolution hasn’t just given Jolie a job; it has, in very tangible ways, helped confirm her identity and sense of self. Four years ago, Jolie came out as transgender. But as she began hormone therapy to physically transition, she also noticed that, for the first time in her life, she was having a hard time getting work. After a bout of unemployment, near homelessness, and then the COVID-19 outbreak, she wound up at her sister’s house in rural Texas (“They’re playing Fox News twenty-four-seven and I’m hiding in the back room with my RESIST hashtag t-shirt on.” Jolie laughs. “It’s an interesting dynamic.”). But she also got a job—working remotely for a California college on their online learning initiatives. “I just got a doctor via telemedicine,” Jolie says. “I’m working on finding an apartment in Austin with all virtual tours. The pharmacy that I’m working with is drop-shipping my meds; they did it on Friday and it’s arriving Monday here in the boondocks. It’s friggin’ amazing.”

Tech has also largely made work easier, more efficient, and safer, something that came into sharp focus when millions of people were forced to shelter, work, and socialize from home during the 2020 coronavirus outbreak. The virus’s impact on the global economy was devastating. But imagine how much worse it would have been if we didn’t have the internet to work, communicate, shop, and gather information.

That’s certainly the case for Cassidy Theall, Jolie’s twenty-nine-year-old Millennial daughter. She is a barber in New York City, an analog job if there ever was one. Coronavirus meant unemployment, but Cassidy says she was lucky she got on the state’s unemployment rolls quickly, and received her stimulus check. “All of that, every single penny of that, is going toward rent and food,” she said. I spoke with Cassidy in the midst of nationwide shelter-in-place orders; she was stuck in her apartment with her cat and her roommate. Technology, though, helped her eke out a little extra cash even at home, even in a job that is usually literally hands-on. “In this situation it’s been a saving grace to all of us,” Cassidy said. “We can FaceTime and communicate, and I can talk to my clients and see them face-to-face. I can help them with their haircutting needs and get paid for that.” That’s right: Cassidy used FaceTime to walk her clients through the process of cutting their own hair.

Even outside of pandemic times, technology often makes work better. If you’re a lawyer researching case law, you no longer have to spend hours in the library thumbing through hardcover books; you can do a search on Westlaw, target the most relevant terms, and find what you need. If you’re a nurse, you input medications and vitals not just on a physical chart but into a computer, which in turn keeps long records and decreases the chance of a high-stakes human error. Advertising your small business, doing inventory, reaching out to clients, applying for jobs, filing taxes—it’s all easier.

This has, in many ways, worked in Millennials’ favor. Millennial technological fluency—or the perception of it—is one reason this cohort, despite pretty poor job prospects overall, is flourishing in the tech industry, where the average age of workers is thirty-eight (it’s forty-three in other industries). Millennials make up almost half of the tech work force, and we are much more likely than Boomers to judge employers on how they leverage technology. Boomers, and to some extent Gen Xers, aren’t just getting left out of the tech labor pool; they are often facing active age discrimination, which is perhaps why so many tech workers say they’re anxious about getting older and losing their jobs.

That Millennial love of travel and experiences versus things? Another outcome of technological innovation. Travel is cheaper, more efficient, and more accessible than ever. International flights go for a fraction of what they cost when Boomers were young. The internet has negated the need for a travel agent (another industry felled by Millennials), as anyone with a smartphone can not only book a flight and hotel online but scour review sites for the best places to stay, eat, go out, and sightsee. We are a generation of people who fear we’ll never be able to buy a house or pay down student loan debt, but at least the experience of going to a new place is a little slice of affordable luxury.

Millennials are more likely than Boomers to use their vacation days to travel, but Boomers are traveling more than they used to, and they have more disposable income to travel with. But Boomers tend to see their trips as disconnected vacations, while Millennials view travel as part of life. Boomers set out-of-office messages. Millennials are a lot more likely to tote their laptops with them and work from the road: while close to 60 percent of Boomers told the AARP they don’t think it’s important to stay connected to work while they’re on vacation, close to 80 percent of Millennials say they bring work with them. I may be a sample size of one, but the number of vacations I’ve taken as an adult where I’ve totally disconnected and done no work is zero. I wrote significant sections of this book while on “vacation.”

The technological age has also democratized information and made education more efficient (if not always higher-quality). The proliferation of online learning, pitched to people who may otherwise be excluded from the classroom—full-time workers, busy parents, those who can’t afford traditional higher education—has opened a world of opportunity for anyone who can swing it. When the coronavirus pandemic put Americans across the country on lockdown, millions of schoolchildren and college students continued their learning via Zoom and other online platforms. While clearly no replacement for a classroom led by a trained educator—just ask any parent stuck suddenly homeschooling their kid, or any kid taught by inexperienced Mom and Dad—online learning tools can at least help to fill some educational gaps. And the ease with which tech innovations allow us to move through the world is stunning, from summoning a vehicle via your phone, to mapping the most efficient route to your destination, to finding the closest health care clinic with a few taps.

Boomers have taken advantage of technology, too, although their tech use looks different. That stereotype of the older person using both hands to hold their massive iPad aloft, shooting a photo with a loud click? Well, it’s kinda true: while Millennials are much more likely to own smartphones and laptops, Boomers are the tablet generation.

The tech revolution has, in so many ways, been a bright one for Millennials, who have reaped disproportionate benefits from all of the new ways we work, travel, meet, date, and learn.

But oh boy, are there consequences.

Did the Internet Break Our Brains?

As Millennials entered adulthood, the social rules of engagement radically shifted as we went from IRL to online. While social media opened new and innovative opportunities for connection and conversation, our phones, and the social media apps that live in them, turned out to be fiercely and intentionally addictive—after all, the greatest minds of our generation designed them to be.

Facebook was honed to give users “a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post,” the company’s founding president, Sean Parker, told journalist Mike Allen of Axios. When building the platform the primary question was “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” The company’s designers, Parker said, were knowingly “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” Each like, retweet, or comment comes with a rush, and our more connected and publicly cultivated lives carry with them cruelty, envy, comparison, competition, resentment, and a lingering sense that everyone else is more successful, better traveled, richer, happier, and better looking than you. Social media connections are also shallower connections: knowing that a college friend now has two dark-haired children with rhyming names doesn’t mean you know her. Being connected to someone via an app is not nearly the same as forging a real relationship with another person. No wonder researchers have found that social media use is correlated with anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, loneliness, and even suicidal ideation.

Some experts wonder whether these always available tools for comparison contribute to Millennial loneliness and low self-esteem. Forget about keeping up with the Joneses; young people today are trying to keep up with half of their high school classmates, coworkers, friends from college, and beautiful quasi-famous people relevant only for having seemingly unlimited resources. And it all comes to us via an ever-refreshing feed of photos of everyone’s best moments and most flattering angles: enviable vacations, well-behaved children, sun-dappled outings, adorable pets, chiseled abs.

Of course, early adulthood has long been associated with loneliness. The loneliness of the early years of parenting; of long work hours with little time for social lives; of a world where there aren’t ambient friendships past college or grad school. But technology has likely exacerbated even age-typical feelings of loneliness. There is first and most obviously the fact that social media use causes loneliness and depression, and reducing social media use has been shown to make people feel less lonely and less depressed. Millennials are the heaviest adult social media users (and those younger than us, who now say they prefer to text rather than talk in person, are even more addicted). We may also be the generation that sees the most significant divide between what we observe on social media and what we have access to. That is, as the brokest generation, with little chance of ever making a full recovery, it’s particularly dispiriting to watch a steady stream of fortunate lives scroll by every time we pick up our phones.

Millennials are much more likely than Boomers or Gen Xers to say they have no friends: 22 percent of Millennials, but just 14 percent of Gen Xers and 9 percent of Boomers, listed the number of friends they have as zero.

Then there is the fact that Millennials may also be the adults most able to isolate ourselves because of technology. The Millennial shut-in posted up in his mother’s basement and playing video games all day is an ugly and inaccurate stereotype, but when a full quarter of Millennials say that they don’t have a single acquaintance beyond their family members or their partner—not even friends, acquaintances—you have to wonder what’s going on.

Not even one in ten Boomers says the same. A majority of Boomers say they have at least twenty acquaintances, and 40 percent say they have fifty or more. By contrast, a majority of Millennials say they have fewer than ten acquaintances, which suggests a lot of us just aren’t getting out much. Millennials are also much more likely than Boomers or Gen Xers to say that they have no friends: 22 percent of Millennials, but just 16 percent of Gen Xers and 9 percent of Boomers, listed the number of friends they have as zero.

Most Americans with no friends list shyness as the reason for their solitude. Introversion is not unique to Millennials, but it’s now easier than ever to turn natural shyness into total isolation. Even in an office setting, communication tools like email, Slack, and text mean you don’t actually have to talk to anyone. In-person service industry jobs—working the counter at a fast-casual restaurant, let’s say—may include in-person interaction with coworkers, but also routinely come with tracking and surveillance. Friendly conversation decreases efficiency, which hurts the bottom line. Appearing to dawdle can lead to termination.

The gig economy jobs that are staffed by a lot of Millennials—shopping for Instacart, driving for Uber, running an Etsy shop—are nearly all done solo. Outside of work, our phones, tablets, and laptops bring a host of entertainment options—nearly unlimited television and movies, video games, pornography, food delivery—immediately and affordably into your home. This impulse to isolate can be exacerbated by chronic illness, physical or mental, something large numbers of Millennials experience and cannot afford to treat.

Those dating apps? Yes, they’re great for finding a date, and a lot of people meet long-term partners on them. But they can also contribute to a sense that there is a bottomless pool of romantic and sexual partners. That makes app users less likely to invest significant time and effort into any given person. (One study by two network scientists found that close to half of messages on dating apps go unanswered.) And with so many possibilities out there, you may spend more time wondering, What if there’s someone better out there? A plethora of choices, researchers have found, is what we think we want, but too many options overwhelm us and sink us into paralysis.

Take jam (really): one experiment conducted by Columbia University professor Sheena Iyengar found that while more supermarket shoppers gravitated toward a display with two dozen varieties of jam, just 3 percent of them actually purchased a jar. Among the customers who walked over to a smaller display of only six options, nearly a third bought one. People, obviously, are not jam. But when we look at their photos through a screen, along with carefully chosen clever descriptors, we do treat them quite like consumer products. Of course human beings were choosy before dating apps. But the ability to assess so many romantic partners, with so little effort, so rapidly, is unprecedented. And a lot of us find ourselves overwhelmed by the experience and, ultimately, we may give up.

The hustle culture that shapes Millennial work life is also a function of technology. Prita Piekara, who was choosing to keep up with work and networking through her maternity leave, can do so thanks to at-home Wi-Fi. Her husband, Evan, who dedicates significant spare time to networking and out-of-work career development, also relies on tech to keep up when he’s not able to go out. “Now that Prita and I have a four-month-old, our focus has shifted slightly in the sense that we’re not doing the evening things quite as much,” Evan says. “But technology has enabled us to continue to hustle and continue to network.” Even so-called social media isn’t just for socializing; it’s increasingly a reflection of your whole life, including your work—which, for many Millennials, partly defines our identities. “Technology has enabled us to be connected permanently,” Prita says. “And our social media presence is starting to reflect our professions. Millennials are using platforms like Instagram and Twitter to build up their personal and professional brands—sharing their thoughts, defending their perspectives. It’s not a separate platform for when I’m off duty. Our generation recognizes the blending of those two.”

And all this networking and professionalized socializing and always-on working, notes Cassidy Theall, the New York barber, may mean we wind up with fewer friends, which may in turn fuel the Millennial loneliness epidemic. “I’ve been so focused on my job that all my friends are from the barber shop,” Cassidy says. “How do you make new friends? Especially coming to a new city, all of my friends are my coworkers. Sometimes you go to parties with them and that’s how you meet other people, but unless you’re in a relationship with them or see them every day at work, what other time do you have to go out and meet people?” She recalls a recent conversation in which someone called New York “the city of isolation,” and that resonated. Even back in her home town of Boulder, Colorado, she and her friends had drifted apart after high school; people had relationships and jobs, and eventually kids and marriages. They might like each other’s photos on Instagram, but there was little depth to the relationships. “We were so busy with our own lives that we never had time to keep up a solid friendship,” Cassidy says. That changed during the coronavirus shelter-in-place orders. “Now that everyone has time on their hands, I’m reconnecting with all of them. Even people I haven’t talked to in like ten years. We’re talking every day, we’re sending pictures, we’re FaceTiming. So it’s really about time. Nobody has time to create friendships.”

We also appear to be experiencing significant cognitive changes as a result of the technological innovations we now live with. As obviously world-changing as they may be, we have remarkably little idea of how all these technological shifts are affecting our brains and our bodies. We do know that many of Silicon Valley’s tech masterminds have decided to raise their kids without screens, a choice that suggests they know something about their Frankenstein that we don’t. (“I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children,” Athena Chavarria, a former assistant for Mark Zuckerberg who now works for his philanthropy, told the New York Times; Steve Jobs wouldn’t let his kids use iPads.) What is fairly clear is that, due to our ever-present smartphones and computers, we are more easily distracted, more scatterbrained, and less able to focus our attention for sustained periods. (To anyone under forty reading this: Have you gotten through this whole chapter without checking your phone?) We know that some studies have found that media multi-tasking—like scrolling through your phone while you’re also watching television—is correlated with attention deficits and sleep problems in young adults. We know that social media and skimming a million different things online trains our brains to scan for the top notes rather than learning to concentrate long enough to understand; we’re less likely to retain important information, instead learning simply to remember where we can go find it again. Multiple studies have found that technology can increase or even create symptoms of ADHD in teenagers. UCLA researcher Patricia Greenfield has spent years examining the impact of technology, including social media, on young people. One of her studies found that social media drives narcissism: “Photos including the poster receive consistently more ‘likes’ than those that do not; thus the narcissism of constant self-presentation is audience-driven,” Greenfield wrote. Nor is social media good for our social lives. Communicating via text or video is associated with poorer social well-being than in-person communication, and social media platforms create near ideal conditions for severe bullying. Moving through the world with our noses in our phones, Greenfield’s research suggests, may even make us worse at reading human emotion, a finding that could have profound implications for basic human connection and empathy. What this all means long-term, we have no idea.

Millennials are remarkably self-aware when it comes to the drawbacks of technology. Globally, 64 percent of us say we would be physically healthier if we spent less time on social media, and 60 percent say we’d be happier. Just over half of us say social media does more harm than good. And yet most of us aren’t willing (or able) to stop using it.

There’s something else going on here, too: As Millennials grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, we saw profound cultural shifts toward what researchers call “extrinsic goals”—things like money, status, and good looks—over intrinsic goals, like autonomy, meaning, and connection. Think 1987’s Gordon Gekko, ’90s-era Patrick Bateman, and the various Kardashians who have dominated reality TV culture for a decade. San Diego State University professor Jean Twenge, who has written about her research on generational differences in publications including the Atlantic, and her colleagues found that the steadily declining mental health of high school students from the 1950s to 2007 was largely the result of a culture increasingly oriented toward these kinds of external objectives. Twenge is also the author of a book about Millennials called Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before. So she has a particular perspective on Millennial life. But, Twenge told me, “the name is not meant to be a knockdown. It is meant to convey the influence of increasing individualism in the culture.” In their paper “Birth Cohort Increases in Psychopathology Among Young Americans, 1938–2007,” Twenge and her fellow researchers put it bluntly: “As American culture shifted toward emphasizing individual achievement, money, and status rather than social relationships and community, psychopathology increased among young people.”

The young people of the 2000s were, of course, Millennials. And that was before Instagram debuted and the lifestyles of the rich and famous were delivered directly to your phone; it was before the Kardashians and various other famous-for-being-famous celebrities became ubiquitous; it was just as America was tipping over from tabloid culture into a heavily filtered social media reality that glorifies “influencers” who both tout their love of various brands and are brands themselves. A 2011 study by psychology professors Yalda Uhls and Patricia Greenfield, published in the Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, looked at the values portrayed in American tweens’ favorite television shows from 1967 to 2007 and found some alarming changes over time. The values that declined the most over those fifty years were community, tradition, and benevolence. The ones that increased the most: fame (which was #15 in 1967 and #1 by 2007), achievement (#10 in 1967 and #2 in 2007), financial success (#12 in 1967 and #5 in 2007), and physical fitness (#16 in 1967 and #9 in 2007).

To be sure, Hollywood has always glamorized the rich and famous. The shift, it seems, has been prioritizing fame over other values, at the same time that technology has enabled many more people to be, and aspire to be, “celebrities” or micro-influencers themselves—Andy Warhol’s idea of fifteen minutes of fame writ large. And we’re all putting ourselves on display to be liked, shared, retweeted, pinned, and trolled.

There’s an interesting twist, though. Twenge notes that Millennials became markedly less narcissistic after 2008. “The recession was a reality check,” Twenge told me. “This kind of outsized optimism didn’t work anymore.” There were huge cultural changes, too, also spurred by the financial downturn. “That mid-2000s era was very much a new Gilded Age,” Twenge says, from the Manolo Blahniks and conspicuous consumption of Sex and the City to the sneering rich-girl antics of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie on The Simple Life. “There was all this emphasis on materialism and people seeking attention on reality TV, and then a lot of that changed. It became much less about revering people who are rich and materialistic, and much more about, we’re going to protest them and call them the one percent.” Those changes, she said, shifted us “more toward practicality and away from this overconfidence that characterizes narcissism.”

Whether that practicality will continue in an age of social media is a different question.

“I thank my lucky stars every day that I did not grow up with social media,” says Steph Larsen, the environmentalist and farmer in New York State. She wants to keep up with faraway friends and relatives but worries about putting her kids’ faces on her social media accounts, a problem she tries to solve with careful privacy settings. She has a three-year-old and a one-year-old, and knows these questions are just going to get tougher as they grow up. But unlike questions about, say, how to get a baby to sleep or how to deal with an angsty teen, there’s no one Steph can turn to when she’s grappling with how to guide her children through the brave new world of technology. “My father is a computer science professor but I can’t talk to him about this stuff,” Steph says. “He got his PhD at a time when computer science was barely a thing. We’ve come so far since then. I can’t look to any kinds of cultural norms about what I should do in any given situation. I have to just guess and experiment.”

While Millennials, and increasingly Gen Zers, are participating in and manipulated by the new tech economy, who do you think is really running the companies that sustain it? Who do you think develops and produces the television shows that broadcast the values of fame, money, and beauty?

It’s the same people who profit the most from the tech industry. That’s not Millennials. The largest number of American tech billionaires are Boomers, and many others are Gen Xers. Think Bill Gates (Microsoft), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Paul Allen (Microsoft), and Steve Ballmer (former CEO of Microsoft). Larry Ellison of Oracle and Michael Dell of Dell each missed opposite ends of the Boomer cutoff by a year or two.

While Millennials may be more likely to be employed by tech companies, we are also the ones bearing the burden of an always connected workplace; we’re the ones doing the low-paid and benefits-free grunt work of the gig economy. We are the ones who are going to be living out whatever dystopian future that mass surveillance tech companies develop. We are the ones who will pay even more dearly than we already have for the proliferation of fake news and the authoritarian campaigns to undermine journalistic legitimacy and suggest that facts are malleable. (Gen Z and our kids will pay, too.)

All of this crashes right into the spot where Millennial malaise meets Millennial do-gooderness. On the television show Silicon Valley, a parody of that eponymous tech hub, the tech pioneers declare that their products are going to “make the world a better place.” The promise was that a more connected world would be a kinder, more empathetic world. Instead, it’s a world where women are harassed as a rule, not an exception; young people are bullied into suicide; long-standing bigotries are nurtured and broadcast; and very few of us have any idea what our privacy rights might be, let alone how this is shaping our brains and our futures.

The optimism we were raised on has been dimmed by financial collapse, global conflict, and the very technology we were promised would be our salvation. Millennials, at least, know that we should be worried.