this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2024

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264

Gen Z Won’t Save Us (slate.com)

submitted 1 day ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/politics@lemmy.world

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[–] randon31415@lemmy.world 3 points 31 minutes ago

Liberals solve the problems that cause voters to die. Conservatives push for the status quo, even if the status quo kills the voters. The more deaths, the more people move towards the liberals. What, right now, is killing Gen Z?

Gen Z males have been raised in this "men need to be the alpha dog - don't let anyone talk down to you - don't respect anyone" mindset throughout high school. Then, when they get out into the real world, that mindset lead them to flunk out of college, not hold down a job, and not be able to get/keep a girlfriend. With no education/money/girlfriend's house and housing prices through the roof, they have to move back in with there parents who:

A) Are liberal and thus blame it on there attitude, which makes them even more conservative

B) Are conservative and blame it on trans-mexican-CRT-cowfarts, which makes them bond more with their parents.

How do we fix this?

[–] frezik@midwest.social 8 points 3 hours ago

If we were able to age out of authoritarian conservatism, it would have happened a long time ago. Possibly as far back as "cooking food over fire is making kids these days weak". That should never have been a strategy. Doubly so when there's a time limit to solve global warming.

[–] thisphuckinguy@lemmy.world -1 points 3 hours ago

Fuck Gen Z. Gen Y fo life!

[–] stoly@lemmy.world 41 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

I have been saying for the past 6 - 8 years that Gen Z is the future, they are different, they are compassionate, etc. My opinion changed on that Tuesday in a bad way.

[–] samus12345@lemmy.world 4 points 41 minutes ago

Turns out that growing up with a phone in their hand made a lot of them particularly susceptible to right-wing propaganda.

[–] LunarVoyager@lemmy.world 33 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

As an elder gen Z, I've long noticed that the younger half of the generation is different. Gen alpha act like they have actual brain damage. We're doomed.

[–] vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 10 points 19 hours ago

I am also elder Gen Z and im really fucken hoping its just our version of Gen X and Boomers being confused about Dragon Ball Z fights. Otherwise I hope the runts get trial by fired and knock it off.

[–] kerrypacker@lemmy.world -4 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

They've been raised to believe their thoughts are valid and they should speak up, instead of shutting the fuck up and listening until they have enough experience.

[–] stoly@lemmy.world 8 points 3 hours ago

Sorry, but that was a "kids these days" moment.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 29 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

“Crazy how Millennials were the only ones to learn how to use computers and we apparently are also the only ones who learned to see through disinformation,”

Whoever this Dylan jackass is can piss right off. Gen-X built your fucking computers.

[–] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 17 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

Well, TBF, the boomers helped bootstrap what Gen X was working with, and then there are the Elder Gods like Turing, Hopper, John McCarthy, Neumann, etc...

In any case, if someone thinks that learning computers means they can see through disinformation....LOLOLOL. This is exactly why I keep beating the drum for critical thinking and media literacy, steeped within a rich liberal (in every meaning of that term) educational program.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 hours ago (3 children)

This is exactly why I keep beating the drum for critical thinking and media literacy, steeped within a rich liberal (in every meaning of that term) educational program.

I've actually begun work on an essay about that exact thing. One that I've put off for a very long time because the last time I dared to imply a causal relationship between the rise of Trade-Schools, where you learn to do one thing and one thing well, but have no real education otherwise, and the dumbing down of the electorate, I got shouted down for being "elitist". But with recent events, I've decided to expand on my idea and throw some more research behind it because fuck it, I'm feeling vindicated.

I'm not saying that everyone who attends a trade-school is intellectually incurious; just that a broader understanding of the world is not a part of the curriculum and it's left up to the students themselves if they want to be a well rounded individual on their own time.

[–] WoodScientist@lemmy.world 2 points 14 minutes ago (1 children)

You could throw in some Sam Bankman-Fried's 'philosophy' which was just freshman-level ethics. The tech bro version of deep revealed moral truth is just they would have seen if they hadn't all dropped out of college before taking their gen-ed classes.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 1 points 7 minutes ago

I majored in Near Eastern Classical Archaeology, but the truly life-changing course for me was honestly a Philosophy elective I took in third year where I was introduced to the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant as well as a few writings on Ethics by Locke and Hume.

[–] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 1 points 53 minutes ago (1 children)

Is there a link to a PDF or anything?

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 2 points 42 minutes ago

It's not done yet. I've only just written the abstract and started collecting my sources. When it's finished it'll likely just go collect dust in a substack somewhere like everything else I shout into the void.

I write this stuff because if I don't, I'll go mad. But I hardly expect it to get widely distributed.

[–] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 1 points 53 minutes ago (1 children)

I’m not saying that everyone who attends a trade-school is intellectually incurious; just that a broader understanding of the world is not a part of the curriculum and it’s left up to the students themselves if they want to be a well rounded individual on their own time.

I read "Shop class as soulcraft" a while ago. I highly recommend it. I don't have a problem with trade schools per se. Not everyone is cut out for white collar work, and there is no shame in doing other work. Smart people are required in skilled work that isn't at a desk, IMHO. Also, I object to what university has become, and that's essentially treating it as a trade school!

But if I were to have my ideal situation, it would be this - starting early, children are taught to question things and given a sound framework to base that on. By the time they are in high school, everyone should be able to easily spot a logical fallacy. This is not hard stuff. It's also not airy-fairy stuff. It's an essential life-skill, like learning to balance your checkbook and manage a household budget. This would be woven into nearly every class, where possible.

By the time someone leaves high school, whether they go to a trade school, or uni, or directly to a job, or to be a homemaker, they should hopefully be equipped to discern the wheat from the chaff and be able to use this skillset for life.

I think the major roadblock would essentially be Republicans. They basically want obedient workers, and they want people to fill their churches. Raising a set of citizens that are questioning the claims made by everyone, including qons, and who are able to spot the logical fallacies constantly employed by corporations and by Republicans would be a threat to the qons.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 2 points 44 minutes ago (1 children)

I agree completely. Trade-Schools are as good or as bad as the person attending. You're going to have people like my best friend, who went to a tradeschool for bio-tech lab assistant, but reads constantly and is generally well versed in critical thinking. And then you have people like my brother-in-law, who's a damn good Welder but doesn't know, or care, about the wider world around him and just believes the words of whoever happens to agree with him.

Critical thinking is the most basic skill that needs to be reinforced in a democracy. But you need knowledge in order to participate in a proper dialogue, whether it's political, social or economic. Knowledge that doesn't come from learning how to weld good.

[–] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 2 points 28 minutes ago (1 children)

I agree. Which is why I think it should be done throughout K-12. Even homemakers that never went to trade or uni should be well-versed in this. It's just as important as being able to manage a household budget.

It can of course be employed throughout uni, too...right now, I think it is for certain tracks, but I'm almost 100% that someone can get a masters or PhD in engineering and still somehow never really have a good grounding in critical thinking. I think it is how you get some of these people getting a degree, and are probably highly competent in narrow areas and have a high IQ, and yet, become denialists when it comes to pretty basic things like evolution and climate change. Because they are basically intellectually defenseless against people employing logical fallacies, they fall prey to complete nonsense.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 1 points 25 minutes ago

Business Degrees are the most popular post-secondary degree in the world right now. Similarly, they learn about money money money and how to make ever increasing sums of it while completely eschewing anything else that distracts from that, like history, or ethics, or critical thought.

[–] Stowaway@midwest.social 6 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Whoa there! Cant have the working class intelligent enough to see through the bull shit.

[–] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I do think that much of the things drummed up about "generations" feeds into the distraction. If you can get boomers vilified and at the throats of millennials, if you can get Gen-X mostly ignored and sidelined, and Gen Z getting feds lots of complete dreck while telling them "you are a magical species who gets 'tech' like no other" and so on (while starting to rev up the propaganda to tell Gen alpha the exact same thing)....it's quite the sideshow from what is really happening, and that is that the upper crust like Elon and donvict are utterly lawless and making off with all the loot.

I think none of this is all that new - setting age groups against one another, setting up a war between male and females, the rural against the metropolitan, the various strata of classes that range from extreme poverty to the middle class (that still desperately needs a job to keep their head above water) and of course the old standby: setting the races against one another.

This is age-old stuff, but the techniques have been sharpened and perfected like never before. And the qons work extra hard to make sure that education won't rise to meet the challenge.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Gen-X mostly ignored and sidelined

We've been ready for that since we realized that our parents were never going to retire soon enough for us to have access to the "good jobs". We went to school and majored in "whatever was available", and then the generation that graduated after us coincided with our parents retiring and freed up the good jobs for them.

"Ignored and Sidelined" pretty much sums up my generation. If we didn't have computers, weed, and grunge, we'd have nothing.

[–] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 2 points 40 minutes ago (1 children)

Yes, as I get older, I think about how cynical I've been all along, as a consequence of seeing both how the boomers suffered under corporate rule - many were expecting to be able to be corporate men and then retire with the gold watch and all that, only to be downsized, rightsized, outsource, offshored - because of seeing that, and being a realist about how corporations value their "human resources", I've never fallen for the corporate line when working. Thing is, I cannot say that about all of my peers. Salaried IT staff still work more than 40 hours. They skip their vacations because they are "too busy". Not realizing that those things simply will not matter when it comes to layoff time. And these are people in my age bracket - they entered the workforce - possibly - under the early 90s recession, they've seen the dot-com bubble burst, they've seen the real estate meltdown and so they know exactly how workers will be cast off like a used condom when it suits the suits. They probably saw their boomer parents grind through things in the 80s, or heard about things in the 70s.

So you might as well take that time off. Don't work much more than 40 hours in a week. Don't have work shit on personal devices. Don't check email and IM and text messages from work during off hours. It's rare when I get to talk to a Gen Xer that seems to cop to this - or at least is willing to let down their guard and admit it to others...another cynical defense mechanism, I guess.

Because boomers were ground under all this, they stayed in the workforce for a very long time. They are even still in the workforce. Also, people are living longer, as a general rule (a recent dip in the U.S., though I'm not sure that's going to be a trend). Gen X is a smaller pop than either Gen Y or boomers, so yeah, we got squeezed.

I think one of the more poignant moments about corporations and age groups was a moment in Microserfs where one of the characters' dad gets laid off from IBM...anyway, it is very interesting to see how this cycle keeps repeating, and the same stories seem to be sold to/told about each upcoming generation. Seems a lot of it rhymes.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 1 points 31 minutes ago

being a realist about how corporations value their “human resources

I was (and I guess still am) classic middle management. The day I went from "Cynical" to outright "radicalised" was when my previous employer told me that my staff would not be getting their yearly cost-of-living raise that year because "The Company didn't make a profit." Yet the company actually made 6 billion dollars in profit that year.

The issue is that some eggheads projected that they would make 7 billion, and giving raises would increase that shortfall and cause the stock price to drop by a few more cents than it otherwise would have. So in the corporate world, not making enough profit is equivalent to not making any profit and the workers get fucked.

But damn, did the head office muckity-mucks get THEIR bonus' that year. Yessiree.

[–] Laser@feddit.org 16 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

It's like every generation loses the ability to do something in computer technology that was just abstracted away somehow. I as a millennial have never soldered a PC mainboard (modding an Xbox doesn't count), but I'd say that otherwise, my understanding is pretty good. And I think all of my friends understand the concepts of files.

I recently asked someone about 10 years older if he knew what partitioning and formatting means in the context, and he knew, despite initially saying he has no clue about computers, to show someone 10 years younger (who didn't know) that such knowledge was just basically required back in the day. And it's not like these terms are obsolete, the concepts are still the same, even though we went from MBR to GPT and from FAT32 or whatever to better filesystems. It's no different for phones, but not required and even hidden.

I'd say generally, the technology userbase broadened while average knowledge in the group declined, however I'm not sure whether the absolute numbers of people with a certain knowledge level actually went down.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 2 points 59 minutes ago (1 children)

I recently asked someone about 10 years older if he knew what partitioning and formatting means in the context, and he knew, despite initially saying he has no clue about computers, to show someone 10 years younger (who didn’t know) that such knowledge was just basically required back in the day

I call them Intellectual Oligarchies. The knowledge (of any subject, not just tech) being limited to a circle of elites while the products are made simple enough to operate that the average person doesn't really need to know how it's done, just how to purchase it.

The good thing about Intellectual Oligarchies, however, is that they are open to be joined by anyone who wants to learn, or is curious about things. No formal education is required; just intellectual curiosity and the ability to read. They're entirely self-propogated; not purposefully created by some evil cabal trying to withhold knowledge from the average person. Knowledge itself is open-source, in other words. Anyone can use it if they want.

In the Greek and Roman democratic condition, people who don't exercise that "right to knowledge" lacked the context necessary to properly partake in the citizen's primary job...democratic rule.

Ars Liberalis doesn't translate to "Liberal Arts". It literally translates to "The skills of Freedom". A citizenry of a democracy needs the skills (knowledge) to properly function in said democracy; and that included studies of history, philosophy, politics, civics, etc...

[–] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 2 points 34 minutes ago

Ars Liberalis doesn’t translate to “Liberal Arts”. It literally translates to “The skills of Freedom”. A citizenry of a democracy needs the skills (knowledge) to properly function in said democracy; and that included studies of history, philosophy, politics, civics, etc…

It's for reasons like this that I say we should strive for everyone to have a liberal education, in every meaning of that term.

The qons have done a lot to demonize the term, but it is a word that should be taken back...and given to the generations in our education systems right now. The point of a good education is not to crank out obedient workers.

[–] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 3 points 17 hours ago

It’s like every generation loses the ability to do something in computer technology that was just abstracted away somehow

Yes, I've been hearing computer engineers (or those with that mindset) complaining that programmers don't really understand much about how computers actually work since before I even entered the workforce, but I kind of get what they are/were saying. I'd look around at my peers nearly the entire time I've been doing this, and I'd see some that really wanted to know a lot about, well, everything, in some cases, being interested in hardware, and then there were a lot, maybe more than half, that just focus on learning whatever the herd is telling them is the newest shiny object - and this is nearly always vendor-led and a lot of it is less about sound reasoning, and more about being fashionable. These days it might be a frontend JS framework, but exchange the set of terms/frameworks and it's the same old story.

These days it is increasingly difficult to know much about the actual target hardware, if you work in hosted services like Azure, etc...

[–] stoly@lemmy.world 5 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I mean, Boomer grandparents did the real lifting if we're going back...

[–] CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world 3 points 17 hours ago

And some of the prior generation. There were some truly great minds working on this stuff that were the parents of boomers.

[–] josefo@leminal.space 1 points 13 hours ago

If you want salvation, seek Jesus. The one from Revelations, the one that crushes people and had his clothes dyed red with the blood of his enemies. He is the only one who will save you now. Riding a white horse, and sword in hand, truly the fifth horseman of apocalypse. Only he can bring justice to this doomed world.

[–] whithom@discuss.online 19 points 1 day ago

Trump Youth.

[–] GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.world 29 points 1 day ago (9 children)

Why hasn't there been a push to counter the propaganda on social media with social media?

Use short form, humorous posts that integrate facts and ideas that give a different more positive take on others. I would guess there are great writers and actors that have a progressive-ish mindset that could put something like this together.

But honestly what is the reason this hasn't been done? Or if it is being done why isn't there more of a push to get it seen?

[–] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Why hasn’t there been a push to counter the propaganda on social media with social media?

Because the dems are also right-wing and have no credibility.

The actual left-wing is constantly pushing counter-narratives but without the massive funding of capital (eg. koch bros). No billionaire is going to fund a left-wing Prager U that talks about how billionaires are trash.

[–] Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 16 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

Algorithms ensure that the only content that ends up getting to your eyes is content that you already agree with for the most part. Or content that you hate so much that you have an incurable urge to respond to it with swearing and vitriol. (or at least that's why I think TikTok keeps giving me Maple Maga bullshit)

In other words, you can put up whatever you want but thanks to modern social media, the only people who will ever see it are the people who already agree with you.

[–] mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 9 points 20 hours ago

why I think TikTok keeps giving me Maple Maga bullshit

I mean... it shows the garbage to you, and you keep coming back..... maybe it's time to ditch tictack

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[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 179 points 1 day ago (33 children)

Gen Z grew up on social media. The same that spreads the propaganda, the fake information and the toxic masculinity bullshit.

They also grew up with an impossible social economic context where they barely have any hope. Trump's making promises to make the country great again. What have they got to lose?

Why is anyone surprised?

[–] scala@lemmy.ml 13 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

They also grew up in a time where the education budget was slashed over and over, even some states like Florida getting rid of history and sciences during trumps last presidency. No surprise there.

[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 5 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Well I guess their plan worked

[–] samus12345@lemmy.world 1 points 38 minutes ago

Beyond their wildest dreams. The bad guys have been getting win after win after win the past few decades.

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