Gen X: The Rise of Techno Sapiens
Generation X at its narrowest, 1965–1980, played the first electronic games on Casio watches, TV consoles and in arcades. They used the first personal computers in the 1980s and in the 1990s trailed cyberspace with the dot.com or websites as island’s in this new terrain. Companies they developed include Ebay, Wikipedia, PayPal, Instagram, Twitter, MySpace, Google and YouTube. Amazon’s founder was born in 1964 and Facebook’s in 1984, on the cusp years of Gen X. Gen X enjoyed the same analogue childhood that humans had enjoyed since the agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago. However, as adults they helped create the digital world the generations after them were born into. When the final member of Gen X dies the last analogue human will have left the Earth forever. Homo sapiens sapiens, the specific form of human that has lived since we began farming, will have given way to a new type of human, techno sapiens. Gen X is the last of the old and the first of the new.
Here is a twenty year span of the birth years of the founders of many technology companies today. 1964: Amazon, AliBaba; 1965, BionTech, Dell; 1966, Moderna; 1967: Indeed, LinkedIn, Ebay, Paypal, Slack IMdb; 1968: Baidu, Wikipedia, Yahoo; 1969: Virtual Fixtures, Linux, Xiomi, Spotify; 1970: Myspace, Zoom, Shazam, 1971: Tesla, TenCent, Hulu, Mosaic; 1972: WhatsApp, Weibo, Mozilla; 1973: Ubuntu, Google, LeEco, LastMinute.com; 1974: Badoo, JD; 1976: Twitter, Kazaa, Skype, Just Eat, Khan Academy, Philly Truce, Uber; 1977: Binance, Yelp; 1978: Napster, PlentyofFish; 1979: Youtube, Meituan, Deliveroo, WeWork; 1980: Clubhouse, Change; 1981: AirBnb;1982: Kuaishou, Tiktok, Pinterest: 1983: Instagram; Reddit, Dropbox.
Here are some of the things they did and, I suggest, will do. In their childhood years only children, often in single parent families, made friendships across gender and racial divides. In their teens they gravitated to dark fantasy and angry musical forms, such as Hip Hop and punk. In their 20s they invented the internet, Third Wave feminism and political correctness. In their 30s they insisted on work-life balance. In their 40s they failed to have mid-life crisis as they devoted themselves to their kids. In their 50s they became a sandwich generation making peace with their parents while continuing to support Gen Z. In their 60s they will redefine retirement as they cannot afford to retire. In their 70s there will be even newer forms of family as these friends with or without benefits establish new networks and relationships as old friends and lovers die. In their 80s they will look back at the world they made and be pleased.
What do they have to be happy about? This digital space is simultaneously a global space and it was possible to talk from the 1990s about a borderless world with global identities shaped by brands such as McDonald’s and MTV. While Baby Boomers were named after the post Second World War baby boom that lasted between 1945–1964 in the USA there was no similar context in, say, India or China. However, the spread of digital technologies means that it is meaningful to speak of Gen X experiences in India and China in the 1980s. They are, therefore, the first global generation. in 1989, the young people who stood in Tiananmen Square acted in the same frame as those smashing the Berlin Wall, anti-Poll Tax demonstrators and riots in the UK and Public Enemy’s anthem, ‘Fight the Power’ in the US. In 1991 the song was played on a loop by rebel radio station B92 during the 1991 protests in Belgrade.
These two features — digital and global — are as significant as the change from hunting and gathering to farming. When Hunter Gatherers turned to farming new concepts of space and time framed their practice. While they could have wandered freely now the new idea of property limited routes. Settlements might be marked off with burial sites of ancestors that helped justify the restricted access. While Hunter Gatherers might find what they need in the present, farmers need to obsess about the future, with times for sowing, harvesting and storing. The first writing involves record keeping for agricultural goods and the farming revolution introduced specialisation of labour in larger communities than had existed before. Over time these imagined communities have taken the form of ‘nations’. Our bodies are not designed for farming and we lost perhaps as many as 30,000 smell senses as we tried to adapt to it. The new global, digital space, instantaneous communication, social networks and working patterns challenge the ideas of space, time, groups and bodies that emerged in and through the farming revolution. Space is no longer national but global and digital. Time has become compressed and groups are no longer based on physical proximity but are networks of shared interests and talents. Digital selves are an extension or augmentation of our physical bodies. Gen X rightly rejected the outdated ideas of a previous world but have not yet developed the ideas for the new world they made. This is unsurprising as ideas reflect and codify practices. Cyberspace was not empty and then filled but created through networks of practice. Gen X are developing the practices that their children, younger Millenials (1981–1996) and Gen Z (1997–2012), will rationalise and systematise as and through ideas.
How did this happen? If we were looking at social trends we might identify Gen X from 1961 to 1981 and focus on their lives as ‘latchkey kids’. Certainly the experience of looking after the house key, letting yourself into an empty house, feeding yourself, helping with some chores such as cleaning or washing, then completing homework and playing with friends, perhaps practising dance moves such as breakdancing, cycling or skating, and returning home just as the street lights came on, influenced these children. They became independent, resilient and street wise, open to friendships as surrogate families. As many as 40 percent came from divorced families and many were only children in this era of low birth rates.
These themes play out in films about this era. ‘Home Alone’ is a dramatic retelling of the psychological attributes of kids raised in this way. ‘The Goonies’ features a group of young people of both genders working together to raise money for their family. There is a similar gender balance in ‘Stranger Things’ and the ‘Harry Potter’ series. The final example is telling as the books were not published till the late 90s. Tracking back the ages of the protagonists one might have thought that the heroes of the Potterverse were late 1980s children. However, Hermione has her birthday in 1979. If she was not in Harry Potter she would have been in 1996’s ‘The Craft’.
In their 20s the new reality of male and female friends living together became the driving theme of the sitcom ‘Friends’ and these themes continue to define this generation. The Marvel Comic Universe shows the characters overcoming doubts about their heroic qualities, resolving anger and abandonment issues with parents, creating surrogate families with friends and dedicating themselves to their children. It is no accident that in the absence of parents, grandparents or grandparent figures played a significant role in Gen X lives. Captain America’s status in the MCU and Dumbledore’s in Harry Potter is testament to this. When Rowling went for a prequel she went to the grandparents of Newt Scamander rather than the parents. In turn, it is certainly true that Gen X take parenting seriously. Their stealth fighter parenting of Gen Z has produced a different sort of childhood experience than the helicopter parenting given to the Millenials.
If we were using population statistics, as the Harvard Centre does, we might date Gen X from 1965–1984, when birth rates returned to the level of 1964. All the dating methods make sense and I have selected a narrower range only because 1965–1980 is unquestionable. By focussing on technology we can see how the rise of automation contributed to social changes. If the first industrial revolution was in Britain in the 1750s and the second was the mass industrialisation often called Fordism, then the third was the rise of robots, harbingers of the information age. Gen X were the children of men at threat of, or actually, losing jobs to these robots. Financial tensions fed into the high divorce rates of that period. Divorce rates also reflected the increasing power of women as they did not feel obliged by society or compelled by lack of economic opportunity to put up with abusive relationships. First wave feminism was about the vote, the second wave about social and economic rights, such as divorce and abortion. The latchkey phenomenon was an outcome of the second wave and it is unsurprising that Gen X created the third wave in the 1990s, opening up the ideal of equality to hidden and textually erased groups such as ethnic minorities and all social classes, everywhere. Popular forms of this activism were found in Ladette culture, girl power espoused by the Spice Girls and movies like ‘Thelma and Louise’. One aspect of it was the launch of CK One, a fragrance aimed at both sexes.
Policing language around gender, race and sexual choice became hallmarks of the political correctness that survived into the early 2010s. Gen X was also more racially integrated than other generations due to immigration, and Civil Rights and other laws. White flight from areas where people of colour lived had not yet segregated neighbourhoods and before the 1988 Education Act in the UK students went to local schools. After this point parental choice began to feed into racially segregated schools. The way diversity and inclusion developed over this generational time can be seen by contrasting ‘Fame’ towards the beginning and ‘My So-Called Life’ towards the end. Other cultural changes occurred in sports. Most obviously this was through better funding for women’s activities, but at a personal level there was growing use of gyms and the development of new sports, including Parkour, UFC and E-sports. This last category is both product of and helped to shape the digital, global world.
Under-supervised teenagers used their freedom to explore electronic media and rocked the Hip Hop and punk fashions associated with breakdancing and mosh pits. A decade later these broad categories had given birth to various sub-genres, including Indie, Grunge, House, Acid, Techno, Gangsta Rap and Garage. It is instructive to contrast the sound and music videos from Prodigy’s ‘Breathe’ and Tupac/Dre’s ‘California Love’, both from 1996, with equally iconic songs from 2010, which more often feature natural rather than electronic music. Culturally and politically there has been pushback against the new world, ultimately of little more impact than Hunter Gatherers burning a field of crops. Dance music has not progressed much beyond the 140 bpm of Grime. The range of male hairstyles has certainly decreased while the shaved side and styled on top look for men originally seen in the pop video from Limahl’s ‘The Neverending Story’ and later Snap’s ‘I Got the Power’ has become “normal”. The issue is not about the relative merits of different styles but the more limited range of freedom of expression. It is interesting to view the supermodels from George Michael’s ‘Freedom’ and the clothes from ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and ‘Sex and the City’ to see how few of them would fail as fashion statements today. A quarter of a century later, even if we ignore the tattoos, piercings, chokers, boots with suits, zipped trousers and ripped jeans, the pop culture of the past is edgier than the present. This is unsurprising as it was pioneering. What follows is necessarily more tame as it is no longer transgressive, original or new. These themes can be seen coming together in “The Crow” with fashion, music and the occult.
For another cultural theme of this generation was association with the occult. Gen X had been greeted as children by their elders with the sub-genre of the devil child, with classics such as ‘The Omen’. In their teenage years they were mocked and then fed to the monsters, with the ‘dumb’ blonde cheerleader first closely followed by the token black boy. However, as with so many things Gen X they turned it on its head. Kids mocked for playing Dungeons and Dragons in the 1980s became adults who created live action versions in Game of Thrones in the 2010s. The inversion was long in the making. In their 20s they became the heroic monster or monster hunter. ‘Lost Boys’, ‘Scream’, ‘X Files’, ‘Buffy’, ‘Blair Witch’, ‘Charmed’ and ‘Harry Potter’ morphed in the following decade into ‘True Blood’, ‘The Originals’, ‘Underworld’, ‘Lost Girl’, ‘Grimm’, ‘Once Upon a Time’ which is set in 1983 and ‘The Walking Dead’. This final title speaks to a generation warned about nuclear holocaust on a weekly basis at school, taught that cockroaches would survive humans and who watched ‘The Day After’ on TV and ‘Mad Max’ in cinemas. I think that this demonizing is easy to understand. Homo sapiens, hunter gatherers, would have found Homo sapiens sapiens, farmers, strange and uncanny as well. If this explains why Gen X was demonized to start with, it does not explain why they kept the label. I think the answer is that the old answers are just not going to work in this new world. If one rejects the light, they are by definition dark, even if that is a twilight before the dawn of new ideas brought by them and/or their children.
Gen X filled the spiritual but not religious category questioning traditional, exclusive, insider-outsider distinctions. As narratives excluded many people they espoused deconstruction, postmodernism and anti-realism in the liberal arts and chaos and quantum theories in the sciences. These methods do not provide answers so much as point to the deficiencies of current answers and ask new questions. For example, the globalisation of space has compressed time. The digital age has brought in a Now that affects all of us while countries continue to operate with conceptual frames derived from territorial pasts. The partial and self-serving narratives of national histories need to be replaced by a global, human history but this task will take much time and frequent re-questioning of existing narratives. Mass immigration and globalization created a world of multiple identities, for example, British, Asian, Sikh, male, all at once. I can and do plug into any of these to enter a different network of friends, relations and experiences. The idealised community of the nation state, of insiders and outsiders, was relevant when economic growth depended on seizing land and excluding the access of ‘others’. It is less useful when including people with necessary skills and networks becomes key to economic survival.
People whose parents had insecure employment were never going to count on one employer or indeed one skill set. Gen X has always had gigs of some sort and has always earned less than the generation before it. Never mind, children in 1970s Britain were the fourth happiest in the world. Economically, times may have been bleak but happiness is not directly correlated to wealth. A minimum is required but after that, freedom from the opinions of others and to reflect and fulfill your own goals as well as spending time with those you love is more important. Sound familiar to life in the 1970s and 1980s? Gen X has huge debts now but is looking after three generations, parents as well as kids, and moreover, often the debt is in real estate so it will prove an investment later on. In workplaces the suspicion of hierarchy meant that there was promotion of open offices, working from home and favouring leadership rather than management hierarchies. As corporations have increasing power in a global, digital world, holding them to public accountability will be an important task of the future but this cannot take place at the national level so a neo-medievalism of third sector actors, non-governmental and transgovernmental actors, supplementing national governments is inevitable.
Farming communities replaced the radical equality of Hunter Gatherers with inequality, most obviously in the person of the Pharoah. While humans had previously been able to move freely to areas for new resources, once land was sectioned off war became linked to economic expansion. While people used to search for two to three hours for food in the present now they needed to labour for a long time to hoard for the future. The global, digital world makes ideas from the age of farming increasingly counterproductive and obsolete. I suspect a living allowance will be given in the future, a basic income that techno sapiens can supplement through creative labour. Our problem is not scarcity but the distribution of abundance.
Where will they fit in the cluster of branches that is the tree of human evolution? In the three million years humans have lived on this planet there were perhaps 1 million to 15 million humans. Since the farming revolution over the last 12,000 years our population has exploded reaching one billion only a few hundred years ago and now projected to reach 10 billion shortly. If 999 out of every humans alive today was to perish our species would still be viable and our numbers near our historic norm. Arguably, our recent boom may be compared to the sort of swarming that turns grasshoppers into locusts. Certainly, we have been a desert forming species turning the North African wheatfields of the Roman Empire into the Sahara Desert and turning oceans into deserts through overfishing. Gen X has ushered in a new digital, global world but it is equally true to say that technology and associated social changes brought Gen X into being, first of the Techno Sapiens.
A related piece: The productivity paradox — how poorly educated Generation X created the 1990s boom and the digital world