Sincerely, Rubber (Part 2)

This is Part 2 in a series titled "Sincerely, Rubber".

Late Millenial

"Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

First, before I actually dive in – I am aware of the phenomenon where every generation likes to believe that their generation has had to experience some novel set of challenges that distinguishes them from earlier or later generations:

"Our parents had it so easy. They have no idea how hard it is nowadays to purchase a home." Or:

"Our children have it so easy. Every day, when I was their age, I had trudge 5 miles, in a blizzard, repel down a mountain, answer the bridge troll's 3 riddles, and dance a 'Charleston', just to get to school."

As I am about to indulge in the same claim of generational exceptionalism and grievance, and in an effort to assuage caveat in every sentence henceforth, I will issue the ultimate fence-sitting proclamation (fence-sitters feel free to copy-pasta into your own fence-sittings):

Of course every generation has their own unique set of challenges, and of course every generation has some things easier and some things more difficult than other generations, and of course even the concept of "generation" is contrived, and of course technological innovation has been a boon for mankind, and I of course do not wish we could go back in time and "have died of dysentary" nega-LARPing the Oregon Trail (a truly meta reference given the focus of these ramblings).

With that out of the way --

I am a millennial, a late millennial to be precise. I grew up in the late 90's and early 2000's and came of age at the turn of the 2010's. I remember, as a kid, my mom setting that I come home "when it got dark" which is most likely where my paradoxical love/hate developed for the fall and winter seasons. I loved the leaves, and the holidays, and the cold – I loved not getting sweaty when skateboarding, but hated the cold "shinner" that often accompanied those skate sessions.

This is probably when my love for the "hoodie" started – a truly American garment first manufactured, in it's modern conceptualization, by "Champion", in the 1930's, and marketed to laborers working in cold New York warehouses.

Although I loved these cold seasons, I hated that it would get dark at 5 O'Clock, and that I would have to spend the rest of the evening indoors.

This is probably when my love for video games started. My first console was an NES, with the Super Mario/Duck Hunt combo cartridge. I recall getting in trouble for cutting the cord on the Duck Hunt Gun, so that I could have a cool piece to play with, outside. Where I really fell in love with video games, and the platformer genre, was when I got a Nintendo 64 one Christmas.

I remember having a CD Player, with Anti-Skip™ technology, and buying my first CDs. I got in trouble with my mom when she heard my Static-X "Start a War" CD. She insisted that I "don't buy any of that 'burping' music, with the screaming in it". Shortly thereafter, I bought Mudvayne's "Happy" and my first Hatebreed CD: "Supremacy".

We had the aforementioned "computer room" in our house. I remember using Limewire to pirate System of a Down's discography, to put on my mp3 player that could hold around 30 songs, but only had enough battery to play about 15 of them. That computer died.

I remember my first cell phone. I was in 8th grade – it was a Samsung flip phone. I remember holding it up to my ear with my palm flat, covering the entire top part of the phone, so that no one could see that it didn't have a camera (every cool kid had a camera on their phone). I didn't get my first "smart phone" until I was a sophomore in college, when folks still barricaded their smart phone within an impregnable, nuclear-bomb proof, phone case that doubled the size of the phone.

Later, in high school, I remember hacking together abysmal, all form and no function, atrocious webpages; we called it "Myspace".

I remember creating Facebook and Instagram profiles and making my first posts announcing my citizenship to the digital social media world (Myspace doesn't count, for reasons I hope become clear in the next section)

Fake Plastic Person-ness

"Which brings us at last to the moment of truth, wherein the fundamental flaw is ultimately expressed, and the anomaly revealed as both beginning, and end" - The Architect, The Matrix: Reloaded

Before social media, there were of course chat rooms, and forums, and video game lobbies that each had ways for folks to socialize online – what a fun era of the Internet, but social media was the more evolved beast. Social media enabled each participant to build a web of seeming internet persona – virtual personhood. I subscribe to the things that I am interested in, and interact with other people that are interested in the same sorts of things. The thing didn't have to be a widget – it could be a person, or a place, or a thing, or an idea. The "nouns" were all up for grabs to be digitized and a community formed around it. The digital inhabitants could see "me" as my digital social media presence.

It's no wonder why, at first, social media was so exciting for my generation; it felt as if we were reclaiming our social bonds that had been eroding away due to "real world" widgetization. Electronic entertainment and social bonds outside of widgets and television were things no longer mutually exclusive; one seemingly facilitated the other.

Such hogwashed hubris.

I've now come to conceptualize the mass adoption of social media as my generation's own sort of widgetization. With social media, and a smartphone in each of our pockets, the millennial generation widgetized the thing that our "electronic entertainment" had been hitherto replacing – a "post" is just a widget, and so is a "like" or a "comment" or a "share" or a "follow" or an "unfollow" or a "block" – they're all widgets for socializing.

And this, my fellow apes, leads to a profound conundrum.

A general rule of thumb is that if a product is free to use, that product is not actually a "product" – it's a funnel. In the case of free social media, it is indeed a funnel to a real life product: you – you are the product. Google Search was monetized by using it to present ads to its users; it still accounts for the lion's share of Alphabet's total revenue. Ads could be tailored based on each user's search history. This works amazingly well to predict behavior, but it could be even better.

Virtual personhood means that advertisers no longer need to "guess" what I am interested in visa-vie the old fashioned blasting of an advertisement across every television in the country. With social media, I tell them exactly what I care about. I tell them exactly who I am, at least as far as they are concerned. This is to say that I tell them exactly what I will buy.

This makes hyper-personalized widgetization profitable. Through the use of social media, widget advertisements can target precisely the folks that will be most likely to buy them. And because my virtual personhood also tell them exactly what will capture my attention, this makes hyper-personalized television and media profitable – or as we now call it: content.

And with personalized widgets and personalized media, we could hardly foster what remained of any real-world social bonds that had been hitherto incrementally reduced to being almost entirely predicated upon those homogenized, widgetized, things. All that was left was our digital bonds and our digital selves, which were hyper-niche, by design, along with a mere caricature of any real-world social bonds.

Among other nails hammered into the proverbial coffin, the millennial generation hammered in this final nail. And it was only a matter or time before we all started to feel the absence of the dearly departed.

This is the end of Part 2 in a series titled "Sincerely, Rubber".