Cameron: We’re screwed.
Michael: No, hey, hey, no, I don’t want to hear that defeatist attitude. I want to hear you upbeat!
Cameron: We’re screwed!
—10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
In the preceding six chapters, I’ve tried to give some structural context for the development of the Millennial character. As Jean Twenge writes, when we’re born into a society has a large impact on our personality. We are products of our environment: country, family, but also era. American Millennials come from somewhere—we didn’t emerge fully formed from the crack in an iPhone screen. Tracking the changes in the institutions that have the most influence on children’s development gives us more clarity into kids’ lives than trying to generalize from cherry-picked behaviors that adults find unnerving. Major national trends like the increase in average worker output, rationalization, downward pressure on the cost of labor, mass incarceration, and elevated competition have shaped a generation of jittery kids teetering on the edge between outstanding achievement and spectacular collapse. What we’ve seen over the past few decades is not quite a sinister sci-fi plot to shape a cohort of supereffective workers who are too competitive, isolated, and scared to organize for something better, but it has turned out a lot like that.
So far, things are going pretty well for people who own companies or shares of companies. Profits are up, labor costs are down; unions are on their back feet and workers are more productive; there’s more inequality, and more jails to house people from the wrong side in case they get any bright ideas. The institutions that sort American children don’t necessarily care who wins and who loses—anyone can technically climb from the bottom to the top of the national caste system, and it’s possible to fall from the top to the bottom—but the number of podium spots is determined by larger forces than individual effort or merit. Like Calvinists who thought the heaven-bound were preordained but unknown, everyone has to act as if they are saved, even though most are damned.
Whatever problems they encounter along the way, the public and private institutions we have set up are equipped to function indefinitely into the future. The collapse of the housing market and the 2008 financial crisis smudged the rose-colored glasses, but to the surprise of some commentators, owners were once again able to shift the costs onto the backs of workers. Housing prices are back where they were, and rents are up. We are only in the early days of the Donald Trump administration, but the expected market collapse that was to follow the election of the nation’s least-qualified candidate to its highest office hasn’t come. That tells me that Trump’s promises to shake up the political and economic establishments aren’t about to be fulfilled. The social tendencies I’ve described may be intolerable or unsustainable, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to stop happening to us.
One of the most difficult things we have to imagine is how the national situation will change if the trends we’ve examined continue. As in the composition of generations, quantitative change eventually becomes qualitative change. The America that Millennials will eventually lead will be unrecognizable to our grandparents’ generation, not simply because of all the technological development or climate change, but also because our basic social relations will be different. Soon “Millennial” won’t refer to those rascally kids with their phones, it will be the dominant character of a new America. And it probably won’t be pretty.
No single drastic change has to occur; this is the path we’ve already taken. If we keep going the way we are now, if we extend out the graphs for another few decades, some seriously wild shit will happen. Here are seven slow-motion disasters I fear many of us can look forward to in our lifetimes:
We’ve seen how central workers’ ability to work has become to the economy, and to the lives of young Americans. Human capital is the government’s largest financial asset and the population’s largest source of debt that isn’t backed by land. But right now, with the student lending system nationalized, private capital is more or less locked out of the market. Capitalists could invest in workers as employees, but that’s risky, as employees are free to go work elsewhere. What they want is to invest in workers as capital, to get a return no matter where the worker works, the way the government gets returns on student loans now. And if they invest in the next Zuckerberg, they want a piece of that multibillion-dollar upside, not just a 4 percent return.
It will begin with a few very-well-qualified students: math prodigies from working-class families or athletes bound for the pros, say. The federal government offers the same loan rates to everyone regardless of their promise, but these top-rated kids are better investments. Why should they live poor in their twenties if they’re going to be rich for the rest of their lives? Algorithms will point lenders to the right kids, and the capitalists will make them better offers than the government can. When lenders start demanding a percentage of future earnings from borrowers in return for money up front it will seem sensible, a private version of Pay As You Earn tailored to individuals.
For the first few cohorts, I imagine these human capital loans will be genuinely win-win: better than student loans for the borrowers, and invigorating for the economy. But as investment sprints into this new space, the standards will decline. The student loan system treats everyone as equal, but that can’t possibly hold. First it’s Harvard students at 1 percent of your lifetime income, then it’s Boston University at 5 percent, University of Maryland at 10. By the time we get to what investors will consider the bottom half of kids, I don’t want to think about the percentage of their future income the lenders will require. But those students will still need the start-up money, no matter the future cost. Get used to the idea of “subprime human capital.”
As the entry costs continue increasing and competition keeps intensifying, more American parents will look at the odds, look at their small child, and decide not to enter them in the game. Even middle-and upper-middle-class families will point their kids toward specific careers from a young age, and I don’t mean star quarterbacks and violinists. (I can’t pretend to know what future livable jobs will look like, but I guess a high proportion of them will involve servicing robots.) The default goal of doing better than the last generation will change; adolescents will hope not to be too much worse off than their parents. The calculations and projections about student debt and future income we require teenagers and their families to make now will become more complicated, but their conclusions will be, perhaps, more direct. Instead of encouraging every child to be all they can be and imagine themselves rich and famous, the authorities will start to talk about everyone “finding a place” in society.
Once again, for some kids, this will be an improvement. Making school blatantly preprofessional dispenses with nice fuzzy liberal notions of what education is for, but it’s easy to see how a childhood spent preparing for a secure career in, say, home electronics repair might be more enjoyable than being set up to fail in a giant contest for a tiny number of really good lives. Compared to the levels of anxiety and work it will take to compete at the highest levels, having a path chosen for them may come as a relief.
At that point, however, America is basically an explicit hereditary caste system, the one thing we’ve always claimed we’re not. We won’t tell every child they can be anything they set their mind to, because that will sound ridiculous. Not even a kid will be able to believe it.
Here are two things we know for sure about global warming: It’s real and we’re not stopping it. We humans—and Americans in particular—have made irrevocable changes to the ecosystem that have destabilized the climate. Arguing about those facts while sea ice melts is ridiculous. The Environmental Protection Agency predicts the following between now and 2100, basically regardless of what we do from this point on: a national 3°‹F to 12‹°F increase in temperature, with extremely hot summers; an increased prevalence of exceptionally heavy rainstorms and hurricanes; a 15 percent decrease in American snow cover and a foot increase in sea level; and a decrease in coral production over 50 percent.1 Fuck, right?
But nothing is experienced by everyone the same way, not even the weather. The market will price insulation from the climate crisis just like it prices everything else. The rich—and the people they need around—will live in relatively hospitable areas, while the poor will live on the edges of habitability. As automation progresses, the rich won’t need the poor so physically close. They could live in whole separate climates.
More than the rural-suburban-urban divide, zones of climate intensity will structure the domestic movement of populations. This will include increased regulation of homelessness and vagrancy, so as to prevent freeloaders from enjoying the temperate zones. I’m not sure if the guards will be robots or humans (or, more likely, what combination of the two), but there will be a lot of gates. For a while we’ll comment on how weird it is that our behavior is so strongly determined by the weather, and then we won’t anymore.
One of twentieth-century America’s greatest self-proclaimed feats was the elimination of officially sanctioned discrimination. Man, woman, black, white: No matter who you are, you are now supposedly equally entitled to public services and accommodations, as well as whatever private ones you can afford. Women can get credit cards and mortgages—if they’re eligible. And it’s illegal to put in a covenant when you sell your house saying the buyers can’t sell it to nonwhites. We are, as a nation, very proud of this accomplishment, even if it’s uneven and unfinished. But as with the reduction of elder poverty, we may have mistaken a cyclical dip for a permanent accomplishment.
As so much of American social and economic life has migrated online, we don’t really know how well any of our antidiscrimination codes are holding. The more advanced an enterprise, the more it can tailor the individual customer experience. When I look at Amazon.com while I’m logged in to my account, I don’t necessarily see the same prices you do. How exactly Amazon determines who sees what is not only incomprehensibly complicated to nonexperts, it’s a constantly evolving corporate secret. Innovation has triumphed over regulation, and people are voting for Amazon with their dollars. We don’t honestly know if they or any other online vendors are offering better prices to, say, white customers. But it’s a fact that discrimination that was explicitly disallowed has wandered through the tech back door—it was recently discovered that Facebook was letting users target ads for housing by race.2
I don’t think regulators will be able to catch up, and in a world based on individual customer profiles, the idea of ending discrimination will seem quaint. The algorithms see us less as individuals than as confluences of probabilities. We don’t have races per se, we have “ethnic affiliations” based on how our observed behavior compares to large data sets of other people’s observed behavior. Americans will understand less and less the exact ways in which we’re being profiled and discriminated against (or in favor of), and even when we do know, we’ll have a hard time proving it. Human capital lenders won’t have to add race—give them enough proxy metrics (think of how racially coded arrest records are based on the data in Chapter 4, for example) and they’ll be able to figure it out most of the time. To every accusation of discrimination, they’ll be able to respond, “No, that’s just you.”
We will come to understand that every interaction each of us has with a computer system is also a statement about our value as individuals, as measured by stereotyping. This will (understandably) drive us mad.
More people will be unable to keep up with the baseline demands of American society. Some will experience mental breaks as they’re pushed past prime productivity levels; others won’t be able to find a place in the labor pool and will become estranged from mainstream society. Another group will be labeled crazy because they’ll be unwilling to tolerate the various trends we’ve already discussed and will strike out violently or unpredictably. Of course, all of these types of people exist now, but we don’t deal with them in a unified way, except through the criminal justice system. And I don’t think that imprisonment (as we think about it now) will be able to scale to the necessary level.
America will need institutions for people who just can’t make it. Based on the trends as I read them, I don’t think this will be “funemployment” on a guaranteed minimum income. It’s more likely to be an unholy combination of mental asylum and work camp. These places will seem humane compared to prison or living untreated on the streets, and the move into them will probably be sold to the public (and the families of captives) as caring reform. They’ll be breeding grounds for private-public partnerships, with their captive, choiceless consumers and pools of potential labor.
My real fear is that authorities will find a way to break down the perceptual distinction between being alive and doing work. Maybe it will be Black Mirror’s rows of treadmills, but I’m thinking more like very advanced video game design. Tech enthusiast Shane Snow controversially suggested that we’d be better off if prison inmates were just sucking on Soylent dispensers and living through Oculus headsets.3 Giving asylum inmates games to play all day will seem generous, and if we can somehow extract value from their playing (the way Google uses CAPTCHA verification to gather street addresses for their Maps program), then it’s a win-win, at least compared to incarceration as it exists. This puts us on the Matrix path, where living in reality is itself a privilege.
Starting in 1977 and continuing yearly after 1985, the NORC research corporation has conducted the General Social Survey, as a part of which they have asked Americans four questions in particular about gender relations. Three are about women working outside the home, one is about whether men are more emotionally suited for politics. In 1977, fewer than 50 percent surveyed took the progressive position on any of the questions, but by 2012, every question scored at 65 percent or above.4 Millennial attitudes reflect this social turning point; most of us have always believed that women could perform wage labor without destroying families.
However, 35 percent is still a lot, and it’s not evenly distributed. All things being equal, the less education an American has, the lower they score on these gender equality questions. That makes sense, and not because we learn gender equality in college. More than an index of knowledge, education is a proxy for success in the contemporary labor market. (Not that all college graduates do great, but they’re generally doing better than those who don’t graduate from high school.) I think the past correlation between a larger share of GDP going to labor and women’s low participation has turned and will turn to causation in some minds. As job polarization intensifies, I fear an increasing number of Americans will blame feminists, working women, and just women in general.
Among currently surveyed age cohorts, Millennials hold the most progressive attitudes with regard to gender equality, and we’re the first generation to grow up holding these as majority views. Which is good. But I worry that misogyny will acquire a countercultural sheen. Hatred for women could replace hatred for Jews as what Ferdinand Kronawetter called the “socialism of fools” and confound efforts to clarify what is really happening to American working people. If that happens, the Millennial legacy will be very different from the progressive vision with which we began.
With the right authorizations, an interested party could find out anything they want to know about me. Whom I’ve talked to, when, about what. Every single place I’ve been for years. Whatever I’ve bought or thought about buying. All of my work, ever. What the theorist Rob Horning calls the “data self” is continually approaching the real self, especially when it comes to Millennials like me who don’t leave the house without our phones. I don’t have a fitness tracker that keeps constant tabs on my body, but lots of people do, and more will.
This vast tracking apparatus is already being used to guide our behavior in innumerable ways, but I believe both sides will become increasingly open about the arrangement. The data self is an amazing accountability tool, and as tech developers race beyond the regulators’ imaginations, I think government will take the “if you can’t beat them…” tack. Public-private tech partnerships will become the norm, with corporations willing to trade safety from the law and big contracts for some good branding and policy collaboration. And it will be presented to the people as a bargain.
Here’s how: Right now, my health insurance (bought on the Pennsylvania Obamacare exchange) gives me $150 toward a gym membership. Healthy insurees make for low costs; it’s a win-win. But to get that subsidy, I have to comply with onerous reporting requirements to confirm that I actually go to the gym. I don’t bother, and I don’t imagine a ton of other people do either. But if we were offered free Fitbits to wear to the gym, the barriers would fall. Nothing about that sounds bad necessarily, but all of a sudden we’re in a world where people are hurrying to the gym so they can run long and hard enough to afford their health insurance.
These are some of the major changes that will happen if nothing changes. None of them is a huge leap from what’s already come to pass; some would say everything on this list has already happened, which is true to a certain extent. But over the next couple of decades, I believe we’ll see some quantitative-to-qualitative jumps, in which today’s normal is superseded by a new way of life. I predict the transitions will be more or less smooth, not in terms of human suffering, but in terms of social and political stability. And barring a revolution, these may be the kinds of major changes that define our generation.
There is a seam between here and there—lines we will cross—but we probably won’t recognize them until we’re on the other side. We don’t know how the Millennial generation will be remembered, but when I think about this list, I’m not confident we’ll like it. Think about the Baby Boomers: They were proud of their (comparatively) broad experimentations with drugs as part of their resistance to stolid midcentury American culture, and though I’ve never seen the appeal of Easy Rider, some of their pride seems justified. However, in the long run, their age cohort’s relationship to drugs will probably be defined by some members’ willingness to poison the others to death with pills for money. I don’t think that’s what Boomers were shooting for (so to speak), but it was a somewhat predictable outcome in retrospect. I’m not warning that everyone “sells out” when they get older; my point is that every birth cohort confronts real and specific historical challenges, and our better angels sometimes lose.
So what can Millennials do to avoid becoming the nightmare version of ourselves? If we don’t want to live in a dystopia, how can we step off this path and go somewhere else? After all, books like this are supposed to end with a solution, right?
Is it even possible to change the path we’re on? Based on the evidence so far, it sounds difficult. According to conventional wisdom, our society has a number of mechanisms and apparatuses through which we can bend its operation to our popular will. If we are unhappy with the way this country is managed, with its priorities, with its distribution of resources and feelings—as so many of us seem to be—we should be able to change them. Isn’t America a democracy? At the very least, we have consumer choices. I believe it is worth the time to think through some of the blueprints for change we have at hand.
In 1996, when I was seven years old, Hasbro released a toy called Bop It. A plastic stick featuring a button in the middle and knobs on the ends, Bop It directed players, through a speaker, to fiddle with one of three parts depending on the command: Twist one knob (“Twist it!”), pull the other (“Pull it!”), or bop the center button (“Bop it!”). It sounds easy, but like a tongue twister, it gets harder the longer and faster you go. (A couple of years later Hasbro introduced the Bop It Extreme with additional “Flick it!” and “Spin it!” commands; the 2010 Bop It XT added “Shake it!”). I mention the game not just as another example of our tendency toward accelerating difficulty and complexity in childhood tasks, but because Bop It is a good metaphor for how social change is supposed to work under the present system. If we want to make a change, we select a move from the menu: Buy It!, Vote It!, Give It!, Protest It! Just as soon as you do one, another cycles around. The series doesn’t have an end.
In the conclusions of books like this one, authors tend to land on some sequence of those moves: Buy It! Vote It! Or Give It! Protest It! No matter how deep and intractable the problems laid out by the writer, some combination of these tactics sounds like it should be able to address them. At the very least, calling out some progressive Bop It moves gives a bummed-out text an end that’s distinct from the preceding pile of despair. “The people united can never be defeated,” and it might be true, but a reminder that a change or solution is always still possible usually functions as a cop-out. Following hundreds of pages of focused analysis with Bop It—no matter how soaring the rhetoric—feels almost dishonest. Instead, I’m going to look at these concluding strategies (consumer politics, electoral engagement, charitable giving, and expressive protest) one by one and see where they actually go, rather than suggesting where it’s possible they might lead under a set of imaginary circumstances.
For Millennials, wide-ranging social change is a material question. Every generation has a historical window when its members are tasked with directing the country, and we are just beginning ours. If Millennials are going to alter the path we’re on, it’s realistically going to happen in the next ten to twenty years. That’s a limited time frame in which to get from here (which is to say, everything I’ve described up until now—a path to dystopia) to anywhere else. The series of historical disasters that I’ve outlined, the one that characterizes my generation, is a big knot. There’s not a single thread we can pull to undo it, no one problem we can fix to make sure the next generation grows up happier and more secure. The Bop It moves are holistic, their ranges are wide, and their potential impacts are profound. But if they’re going to work beyond an academic or a theoretical conversation, they also have to be plausible for us.
Say there are some of us who want to change the world in a positive way. We want poor people near or far to have more than they have now. We want women’s equality and respect for trans people and an end to white-supremacist aggression. We want environmental sustainability and/or good jobs. In American society, there is one principal mechanism for the fulfillment of desires: the market. If you want a hamburger, you can buy a hamburger. If you want a $1 hamburger, you can buy it. If you want a $30 hamburger (and have $30 to spend on a hamburger), you can buy one of those too. Theoretically, companies can bake social values into products that consumers can buy. If you want a Christian hamburger, you can get that (if you’re in California it’s particularly easy), and you can grab some self-identified gay ice cream for dessert in New York.
The market’s ostensible purpose is to provide an efficient match between people who want stuff and people who produce stuff to meet those wants. If Americans really want to stop carbon emissions, they will always buy products that are carbon-neutral when available, which will cue producers to change their practices, and then we’ve done it. We can apply this same consumer logic to any social problem. If movies with women protagonists are objectionably scarce, we can generate a virtuous cycle by backing up our values with our dollars. In this vision, our society is incredibly democratic: Each of us trades our time and effort for votes on how everything works, which we cast by spending. Sometimes when I see certain advertisements I think people really believe this is how the world works. But it’s not.
It is true that there exists an interplay between consumers and producers; some of the owners even let us help decide which potato chip flavors we get to buy. But our choices are very limited, and not just by the selection on the shelves. With few exceptions, Americans either own companies or have to work for those who do. The main use of money isn’t expressing our values, it’s buying the things we need—like food and shelter—in order to stay alive and participate in society. You don’t need to pay for a cell phone plan; there’s no law. It sure helps if you want a job or friends, however. There is, of course, an ethical-branded cell phone provider, but I’m not a customer. Aside from the general corniness with which these companies pursue their idea of politics, they suffer from some obvious disadvantages. Because it tends to cost money to have values—the cheapest way to make something is probably not the kindest or most sustainable—ethical products tend to cost more. (For example, when I was a politically engaged teenager I wanted the Adbusters ethical Converse sneaker replacement, but they were three times more expensive.) That turns political engagement into a luxury people will pay for, and that encourages companies to fake it.
I don’t mean that company founders pretend to hold certain beliefs in order to make their products more appealing, though I’m sure that happens on occasion. I mean that companies will use public relations tools (some no more expensive than a social media intern) and branding to wrap themselves in the aura of values. After all, if people are willing to pay more to feel like they’re enacting their politics, then it’s worth selling it to them, just as long as it costs less than the premium they’re willing to pay. From there it’s a race to the bottom. Buying a product branded as ethical actually encourages this cycle, heightening the incentives for companies to look (rather than be) good. A label race prods marketers to invent and exhaust evocative standards like “organic” or “carbon-neutral” or “GMO-free.” This whole mess makes it hard to distinguish between a product that promotes a set of values and a product that uses a set of values to promote itself. The commercialization of politics becomes its own problem, and it’s hard to buy your way out of that. Millennials know how to play this game—who, after all, is writing the promotional tweets?—and it’s embittering.
Millennials have been raised on consumer politics. In her 1995 study Doing Their Share to Save the Planet, sociologist Donna Lee King examined early-1990s environmentalist rhetoric directed at children and how the kids themselves interpreted it. At the time, environmentalism was just beginning to come into vogue, and companies saw a branding opportunity. Since then, depoliticized save-the-earth rhetoric has been used to sell everything from hamburgers to sport utility vehicles. Pollution became a villain, the kind that superheroes could punch in the face, but when kids tried to join in the fight, they were redirected to bottles of ranch dressing branded with Captain Planet. This is about as mixed a message as you can give kids; as King describes it: “Children are encouraged to be aware of global environmental problems, are provided with simple lifestyle solutions, and then are roundly criticized for demanding the most minor changes in patterns of family consumption.”5
It’s on a more fundamental level that the whole enterprise of ethics through consumerism is a waste of time. The market is not a magic desire-fulfilling machine we can reprogram to green the earth and level inequality. It is, rather, a vast system of exploitation in which workers are compelled to labor for their subsistence, and owners reap the profits. The market offers a variety of goods and experiences that seems infinite, but it’s actually very limited. There are many different flavors of Pop-Tarts, but none of them opens a portal to a world where you don’t have to trade half your waking life to get enough to eat.
At the end of the day, trying to improve society with consumerism is like stepping up to the plate and trying to throw a touchdown. You’re playing the wrong game. The market is built to generate profit, and though there might be room for the occasional high-minded hippie co-op, they are the exception. Businesses that plan to make big profits the old-fashioned way—exploitation—can attract capital investment, giving them an insurmountable leg up on the little guys. As Joe Strummer put it, “Selling is what selling sells,” and selling isn’t going to sell itself out.
It is theoretically conceivable that everyone will get together and decide only to buy products from companies that pay high wages, halting or reversing many of the trends I’ve described so far. It’s also theoretically conceivable that, as you read this, a large meteor is headed our way and will strike the earth and obliterate all life before you get the chance to finish this conclusion. A reasonable observer should conclude that the latter is much more likely.
The free market isn’t the only mechanism we have that’s supposed to respond to our collective desires. This is a democracy (at least at the time of this writing), and if we don’t like our national policies or priorities, if they aren’t in our collective interest (and they don’t seem to be), then we can vote the bums out. No matter how entrenched the powers that be, the American people are ultimately sovereign, and we always hold a big enough crowbar to pry them out of place. And if we don’t like any of the politicians on offer, any of us can put ourselves up for office, either through a party primary or through an independent bid. The system is infinitely adaptable according to the will of the people, and it has survived the Civil War, the expansion of the franchise to women, segregation, Vietnam and the antiwar movement. American society has undergone major upheavals, but our political system works like a set of shock absorbers, flexing and contracting to fit people’s needs. And when things get really bad or complicated, there’s even an emergency switch: The Constitution itself can be amended.
And yet, despite such an ostensibly flexible system, most people aren’t very happy with their government. According to the Pew Research Center, the portion of Americans who trust the government to do the right thing most of the time is below 20 percent, a nearly unique low in the organization’s then fifty-seven-year history of asking the question.6 It’s an enduring and bipartisan trend, one that fluctuates based on the party in power less than you might imagine. Despite some big talk about government transparency in the age of the Internet, the American state seems less accountable to its people than ever before—insofar as people are unhappy with their representation and aren’t able to rectify that. Either our democratic institutions aren’t functioning the way we’re told they’re supposed to, or Americans aren’t using them. Or it’s some combination of the two.
The best answer here is probably the simplest, and it’s one most Americans already know and probably even believe: The government is rigged, man. Pew’s report about public mistrust had 74 percent saying politicians put themselves first and 55 percent saying ordinary Americans would do a better job. We are unhappy with our rulers and think we could do better. In a democracy, this is supposed to be great news! Now we get to send Mr. Smith to Washington to clean house and expose the system’s evil machinations.
While I wrote this book, Donald Trump pulled off an improbable ascent to the White House based on a funhouse performance of the reform narrative. He was a man of the people, he was headed to Washington to “drain the swamp.” Against any candidate other than Hillary Clinton, Trump’s antiauthoritarian pose probably would have faltered, but the Democratic primary is structured to the advantage of establishment candidates, and no third-party figure stood a chance in the general. Now we get a con man’s reforms: All of the rhetoric, none of the substance.
For a long time some progressives have argued that campaign finance reform is the silver bullet for all that ails the American political system. If we locked big money out, the people would be free to pick representatives to represent our interests (including the nationalization of the health care system, say, and protections for labor unions). The people’s government would drive the cost of living down and the price of labor up. Society would share collectively in the benefits of technological development. Capitalism and exploitation would melt away over time like disappearing legs on an evolving whale.
It sounds like a good plan, but when you think about it, it’s a little bit like trying to jump by pulling on your shoelaces. If the people had the kind of control of the state apparatus necessary to pass a constitutional amendment (or a policy of its power and significance) to disconnect economic and political power, then we wouldn’t need the reform in the first place! Call it the Bernie Sanders paradox: If he could be elected president, then we wouldn’t need to elect him president. And yet the Senate’s sole socialist, Sanders, spent over $200 million in his quixotic 2016 primary campaign, more than enough to compete. It wasn’t lack of money that cost the left-wing populist the election; he also had the powerful elements of the Party arrayed against him. Money is power, but cash on hand is not the only kind of power. A lasting solution to the problem of big money in politics, then, seems both implausible in the near term and not necessarily effective even if we achieved it. It’s no silver bullet. After all, Donald Trump was outspent by Hillary Clinton two to one.7
Like consumer politics, the electoral system isn’t actually built to enact the will of the people. That’s why people don’t feel like the government acts in their interests: It doesn’t. American politics is a professional realm, and most people aren’t invited to do much more than raise their hands every couple of years. Many don’t even bother with the hand-raising part. Given what we know about the work lives of nonrich Americans, with what time and resources are they (on a massive scale) supposed to get involved in politics? A certain percentage of folks at all income levels will take to activism, but electoral politics has high barriers to entry. Without a genuine labor party, working-class Americans don’t have a reliable path that leads inside, and the professional incumbents have huge advantages when it comes to maintaining their positions. For most people, disengagement with electoral politics is only logical.
It is possible that as the entire Millennial cohort reaches voting age, we will run candidates of our own whose ideas about how the country should be run are drastically different from the incumbents’. Millennials will be the largest generational voting demographic in the coming years; maybe a youth-heavy bloc will vote in a wave of politicians who will take global warming and workers’ share of production seriously as existential issues to be addressed immediately.8 But I don’t think that’s going to happen. Future Millennial politicians—even if most of us haven’t met most of them yet—are already well trained in the current ways of doing business, because they’re the ones who competed their way to the top. Based on what we’ve seen about the kind of preparation Millennial professionals receive, our politicians will be extra craven, and responsive to an even smaller class of superrich influencers.
The young people who could provide the type of leadership we need—kind, principled, thoughtful, generous, radical, visionary, inspiring—won’t touch electoral politics with a ten-foot pole. At least not the ones I’ve met. To unravel our corrupt political system all the way to the local level and build it back up again with a new vision would take more time—and probably a different country—than we have.
Just because our major institutions are almost certainly irredeemable in what I see as the crucial near future doesn’t mean we can’t do anything. People don’t need institutions to change their society, because people and their interactions are society. If we decided to treat each other better, we could have a whole new world without having to infiltrate and reform the market or electoral politics. We can voluntarily improve our collective situation. Be the change you wish to see in the world; the personal is political: Millennials have seen the bumper stickers and the Apple advertisements. What’s more, they seem to be working. While our generational confidence in our state institutions has declined, our sense of personal responsibility has increased.
Comparative survey data from 1984 and 2013 shows a significant increase in the proportion of Americans under thirty who think it’s important to volunteer (up from 19 to 29 percent), as well as those who actually do (up from 14 to 20 percent).9 The phenomenon of secular volunteerism has grown along with Millennials, and now it’s not uncommon for public high schools and universities to require a certain number of volunteer hours for students to graduate. Volunteerism as an ideology and Millennials are a good match. There are opportunities for young people to be of some service in any field they desire, and many of these opportunities can also fit on a résumé. Volunteering (as distinct from simply doing good things) is credentialed and official. It’s an activity that slides into one of the nonlabor slots that ostensibly well-rounded twenty-first-century individuals have to fill with passions, hobbies, and extracurriculars.
It is possible to be a professional volunteer—more possible than ever, in fact. According to the Philanthropy Roundtable, the nonprofit sector has been growing as a percentage of American gross domestic product, from under 2 percent in 1950 to 5.6 percent in 2014.10 That makes sense, since rich people fund nonprofits and rich Americans have done quite well for themselves over that period. It also means that there is a whole other professional field outside government and “ethical” business where people can channel their collectivist spirit within an individualist system without rocking the boat too hard.
I can understand why some people—especially Millennials—really take the volunteerist idea to heart. There’s a lot of need for good to be done out there, and all the “business with a mission” rhetoric from the Buy It! section gets into your brain eventually. But the increase in nonprofit activity and volunteering hasn’t led to improved life outcomes for the least of us. If anything, the correlation looks like it goes the other way: The more official do-gooders we have, the worse off more people seem to be. As a holistic strategy for social improvement, volunteerism seems to lack a solid empirical foundation. That is to say: It doesn’t really work.
That doesn’t mean there are no volunteers or nonprofits that do good, important work. I like to think I’ve worked for a couple of them. Based on my experience, most of the people who work in the nonprofit world aren’t dupes. They’re doing the best they can to make a positive difference in the world while getting from one month to the next just like everyone else. They’re not generally under the impression that their work is going to solve structural problems, and the idea that volunteerism and nonprofit advocacy are our main road forward generally comes from the funders rather than the laborers. At its best, volunteerism is amelioration, and there’s only so far that can go.
We have, once again, the wrong tool. “Volunteering” in general doesn’t require a commitment to any particular cause or world view. It’s easy to imagine a scenario where one student’s volunteering with a prolife group cancels out another volunteer’s time with a prochoice organization, for example. “Nonprofit” is a tax-code designation, and it includes good and bad. As in ethical product labeling, corporations have caught up with the do-gooders, and it’s hard to find a malevolent multinational without a charitable foundation or two of its own. The same business leaders who push down wages, push up competition, and even push dangerous pharmaceuticals would much rather be seen as givers. So when they’re done pushing for a minute, they give a bit, and then they talk about it a lot.
Nonprofits rely on the government, corporations, and the class of people that manages all three of them. At the highest levels, the same individuals move effortlessly through all three spheres. (Just ask Hillary Clinton, whose orbit has included the Senate, the board of Walmart, and of course the Clinton Foundation.) Together they operate as a single apparatus, but of the three it’s definitely the volunteers (amateur and professional) who are subordinate. A lot of nonprofit work (to the chagrin of most of the people doing it) involves sucking up to rich people—whereas sucking up to the government is called lobbying. And it’s the nonprofits that have to scrap everything they’re doing and start over when a new political party comes into power.
For the nonprofit sector and its volunteers to force a fundamental change in direction for corporate America and the state itself would be something like a magician’s bunny devouring him alive: It would be a stunning reversal in character, for one thing, but more important, a rabbit’s mouth is way too small. Implausible doesn’t begin to describe it. The volunteerism trick is well tailored to Millennials, but anyone who answers your desire for systematic change with a link to a nonprofit jobs board is pulling your leg or the wool over your eyes. Or maybe a fast one. Regardless, they’re pulling something.
None of our institutions look as if they will transform American society in the ways we’d need them to in order to reverse the trends described in this book. The Founders foresaw the possibility of such a situation, and they built an emergency button into our system. If the American people find our collective situation intolerable—and I believe many of us should and do—and we can’t find any recourse in our democratic structures—as I don’t believe we can—then we are legally entitled to go outside and yell.
The First Amendment gives us the right to get together and complain until things change or we get too tired to keep going. It’s a time-honored American tradition, and though most people don’t approve of protesters at the time, the ones who end up being influential get the rose-colored-glasses treatment. The protesters of the civil rights movement are official heroes, as are the suffragists. The twentieth-century women’s rights movement is getting there too; antiwar protesters usually start getting credit a few wars later. Protesters for gay marriage helped change the national conversation so fast that we got credit more or less immediately. If things are fucked up and bullshit (as the Occupy Wall Street slogan goes), then the least we can do is say so, and sometimes that’s enough.
Protesting is implied by the Constitution, but it isn’t within the system, at least not conventionally. The right-wing “Tea Party” protests were funded in part by rich Republican donors, and on the left George Soros has long been accused of fomenting dissent for his own unspecified ends. But most protesters are out on the street because they believe in something and they want the world to change. Like volunteering, protest isn’t necessarily linked to any particular ideological agenda—“gay marriage protesters” could mean two different things, for example. The classic examples of successful American protest generally come from the progressive side, however, especially when it comes to large public marches. A classic Bop It–style instruction for Millennials from Baby Boomers is “We stopped the Vietnam War! You just need to get out there [insert a crack about social media here] and make yourselves heard.”
Millennials don’t have one thing to protest; we have a whole way of life. Occupy Wall Street (and the nationwide protests and occupations that followed) was an attempt to protest the whole knot, and Millennials camped out in major cities around the country. Instead of a demand, we had a complaint: Shit is fucked up and bullshit. Instead of one policy, we had an enemy: the 1 percent, the people who are profiting from popular immiseration. Based on the data, it’s a good set of enemies for Millennials to pick, and it was mostly Millennials participating.11
Most of us out there protesting didn’t think of it like this, but the way we were carefully following the rules was characteristic of our generation. We’ve been trained to read the instructions to the end and think creatively. We tried to hit the Constitution’s emergency button, and we did it by taking advantage of social media and poorly structured rules about the control of public-private spaces. For a while, it worked. People around the world took notice, and the message (mostly) got across. The reverberations are still being felt. But the protests ended, and not because the government wrote off student debt and seized ill-gotten gains from a host of bankers. Some people went home because they got tired, but more joined. What stopped us was the police, whose orders changed. If they decide we can’t protest anymore, they can round up many hundreds of us at a time and put us all in cages. Which is pretty much what happened.
Protests aren’t always legal. In fact, the police on-scene can basically declare any protest illegal whenever they want. At that point, protesters can try to leave and/or get beaten and/or gassed and/or arrested. American police departments of any significant size at all (and plenty of insignificant size) have the equipment (read: weapons) necessary to disperse and subdue virtually whatever angry and determined crowd they encounter. As long as the police and politicians are willing to brutalize their fellow Americans, that is. (And they are.)
Police departments across the country used the same aggressive strategies and tactics against Black Lives Matter protesters who took to the streets following the unceasing murder of black Americans by the state in 2013. I remain convinced that, had the National Guard not occupied Ferguson, Missouri, the protesters would have overthrown their city government. But the troops rolled in and the demonstrations were put down. We may have an emergency alarm built into the Constitution, but no amendment will wash the pepper spray out of your eyes if you protest longer than the police want you to. That’s often the price protesters pay, but they can’t do it forever, and there’s nothing in our recent history that suggests to me that a movement of expressive street demonstrations could outlast the cops and remain effective. Hell, the Iraq War still isn’t over, and I started protesting that in ninth grade.
If protest is only protest until the authorities decide they don’t want to tolerate it anymore, then that’s a significant limit on its effectiveness. As distinct from, say, the blockade of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was a struggle over the control of territory, protest is about expressing discontent. Even if it’s not going to transform American society directly, protest seems important, if only to keep the idea of discontent and dissent alive. But if the people in power are willing to use guns before they will capitulate, then protest is not a plausible road to wide-ranging social change.
Whenever activists do organize well enough to start playing progressive Bop It, we find that the instructions keep changing. (That is the game, after all.) FDR once told civil rights activists that they needed to “make me do it” by protesting, a story that former president Obama repeated on the campaign trail (even though it’s actually apocryphal). We can’t just vote for politicians to do the things we want; we then have to protest to the people we elected to make sure they do the things they said they were going to do. But how can we have any credibility if we’re posting about the protest with corporate iPhones or walking in it with Nikes? First we have to put our money where our mouth is and stop supporting the 1 percent’s exploitation. But how can we justify spending $135 on ethical, organic hemp sneakers when there are kids with no good shoes at all, and in our own neighborhoods? First we should organize a community shoe drive. But how can we think charity can solve structural problems in a society full of them? What we really need to do is elect better representatives. And so on, and so on, and so on.
There’s always another move we could be making—that is the entire game. It reminds me of a circular verse from elementary school meant to irritate anyone within listening range: “Crazy? / I was crazy once. / They locked me in a room full of bunnies. / Bunnies? / I hate bunnies. / They drive me crazy. / Crazy?…” Having experienced both, I think progressive Bop It is the less tolerable loop of the two. It’s a string of all-purpose objections that leads nowhere. Anyone who invites you to start playing is clueless, disingenuous, or both. The only way to win is not to start.