The trouble with humanity on the whole, is that each generation is convinced that it will be the last one. We remain consistently and stubbornly firm in our convictions that any day now the shit is about to hit the proverbial fan. This was as true of Christ and his followers as it was of the acid-soaked deadheads of the 60’s. It was there during The War to End all Wars and by god it was out there on the fringes of Generation X.
Every generation has been convinced that it was standing on the turning point, the revolution, the big nexus at which everything would change. Only to see that truly nothing does, and there only legacy is the next batch of revolutionary dreamers.
Society doesn’t evolve, it revolves, round in circles for perpetuity.
Each new wave thinks it is throwing off the shackles of the last, and each new wave will bemoan the excess of the one that comes after them. So it has been and always will be.

But then came my generation.

The iPod and .com children, the gruesome offspring of a high-tech post-post-modern society in which every single idea has been tried and tested, and to a greater or lesser extant has been broken on the hard walls of realism. We aren’t Gen X or Y, we pick up and drop such labels on a weekly basis, they have no meaning to us, we aren’t proud of our generation, we don’t even self-identify with it, it’s all just more stuff. We made poverty history and so help us god we’ll do it again next week.
We have no banner and no direction, no ideology and no fashion. Everything we wear and do is recycled from the past.
We don’t think time is ending; we think it has ended.
We are the post-apocalyptic society.
The Neanderthals, living in the ruins of some mighty fallen Rome. We scavenge and use the relics of the past, with no concept of their original intent, purpose or meaning. On Monday we’ll be hippies and on Friday we’ll help fight the War on Terror. We’ll fight capitalism and we’ll do it with all new merchandise.

We are the “Windows has performed an illegal operation” Generation. And we don’t really know or care.

This isn’t a manifesto or a boast, it is a cry for help. Crawling through the debris of yesteryear I find strange relics, and I think: “we used to be like these people.”
The post-moderns were people who stopped believing in the grand narratives of the past, but we are the people raised by the non-believers. The post-moderns had their rejection and non-belief to fight for, but we were only left with the ruins. We aren’t the Last Generation, these aren’t the End Times. These are the Forever Times, now it is finished, it fades into one long never-ending static bleep in which strange half-intelligible echoes will swim.
It’s too late for politicians to reform us, in the same way that it is too late for Santa to reform us. We aren’t stupid, that’s half our problem, we’re cunning little smart-arses. We know too much and the old tricks won’t work anymore. The parents and the statesmen cry for a solution, but they can’t face the simple truth. They can’t control us because we have become stronger than they are. You have created a monster. Here is the place that your decadent cynicism was leading, welcome to your utopia.
I am not talking to the people that came before us, they cannot help us, they failed in everything they did, again and again and again. They like to criticise our pessimism and apathy, talk about the great revolutions of their day, but we are only the children of their failures. So fuck ‘em.

This is an open letter to my own generation. We need to save ourselves.
I think perhaps as a generation we may carry the largest potential of all history. We’re highly educated, technological, in a world where all the interesting taboos have already been broken and published on youtube. But that’s not all, because now the dialectic spinning-top has fallen off the table we don’t need to rebel against those that came before us.
We can build something totally new. We can rebel against ourselves.
I don’t know what form it will take, but it won’t entail hiking barefoot to India or psychotherapy, I think we can do it without celebrity yoga videos or pop-concerts. Maybe we should lock all the famous people away on a desert Island, but maybe we should also consider not telephoning in to let them out again.
Let’s leave the ruins behind, switch off the Blue Screen of Death and restart the computer.
Let’s be Generation A.

And then we’ll have a cup of tea.