A post-cynic's manifesto

American Demographics, May 1, 2004 by Matthew Grimm

Byline: Matthew Grimm

As I shored up this column, news broke of the Bush administration's disingenuous, if not illicit, use of video news releases (VNR) to sway public opinion toward its Medicare bill. The Government Accounting Office reported that, as of Feb. 12, the VNR aired 53 times at 40 stations in 33 markets. Their source went unidentified.

Here's a decade-old quote: "The apex of Boomer conformism is mass media news, which created the whole Gen X issue. Baboo (Baby Boomer) writers, editors and viewers are constantly looking for trends and movements, making them up if necessary. Today's press corps is largely worthless - a pack of shallow conformists so easily manipulated that it's a joke."

That observation came from Mark Saltveit's "Whatever," an essay in Douglas Rushkoff's GenX Reader, published in 1994. From that compendium of then "alt" voices - Douglas Coupland, Richard Linklatter, Dan Clowes, Peter Bagge, Beavis & Butt-Head - Rushkoff parlayed a keen eye for cultural psychoanalysis into the resume of a Gen X Renaissance man, professor, columnist, author of nine books, PBS Frontline producer and regular essayist for National Public Radio. He has articulated the sea change that Gen X engendered and, at the same time, the confabulation of the thing itself.

"Generation X" as a "market segment" seemed, from the get-go, a paradox. Researchers and consultants suggest that X, instead of marking a target, indicates a blank space, a variable with no easy algebra to ascribe it a value. As high-flying "baboo" marketing and agency execs in headier days sought the favor of Generation X, it meant defining the undefinable, some elusive key to selling "stuff" to people who didn't want it. The ascription of "Gen X" conjures an effort to fence in free-range animals. It's like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle at work: the act of taking a measure of Gen X ultimately altered it.

That irony pervades Rushkoff's writings. He deconstructs "the Merchants of Cool," as he titled one of his PBS investigations, and their obsessive drive for sway among consumer minds. In this obsession lies the central Gen X conflict: it's the generation that wars with corporate America's presumption that the natural state of human discourse is being-marketed-to. Ten years after the GenX Reader, Rushkoff, interviewed via a series of e-mails from various stops along his schedule, put a prescient spin on that notion.

"I don't think Gen X really refers to a generation as much as a newfound ability to resist media," he contends. "The terminology [though not the term] was invented by marketers as a way of excusing the failure of their expensive methods. Their ads stopped working in the early '80s, and it seemed to be high school/college age kids who were resisting them the best."

Resistance is our heresy. "Latchkey" childhoods helped to forge us as consumers earlier than any other generation. Now, our first impulse is disbelief because information's gatekeepers have proved to be so credulous. From our vantage point, the stereotype of the Gen Xer as "cynical" gets flipped. We are recoiling from cynicism. Cynicism hangs your-ad-here on every vacant LED, movie screen and banana, Disneyfies storytelling into "merchandising blitzes," grooms soulless faux rock rebels - and, by the way, inserts blatantly propagandistic (VNR) news reports into a medium we're supposed to trust.

Rushkoff posits an imposing groupthink not just to this "360-degree" assault on our consciousness, but also in the presumption that to object to it is "fringe" sociopathy. "We are so inundated by the free market's rhetorical whitewash that we are fast approaching what can only be labeled 'market fascism': a social contract that can no longer tolerate any opinion or event that doesn't serve the speculative economy," he wrote in Canadian activist magazine Adbusters in the spring of 2001. "Its adherents ... can't imagine alternatives to the logic of capitalism. Those who can conceive of counter-currents become the latest-variety 'enemy of the state.' Market opponents must be eliminated or, better, assimilated."

Generation X does not turn away from "the logic of capitalism" in a specific, monolithic way. The entirety of the 49-million person cohort didn't march on Seattle in November 1999, even if our ranks compose the vanguard of the anti-globalization movement. Still, Generation X did anything but evince the psychographic malaise that confounded culture vultures ascribed to it.

"It wasn't malaise at all," Rushkoff says. "Volunteerism and creativity by all measures went up. There was more zine production, independent media, social volunteerism, by every metric. What went down was participation in mainstream institutional life. So this was recontextualized by marketers and social programmers as malaise. It was a refusal to buy stuff."

Sure, Xers consumed, but they wanted to find their stuff underneath the din, where it said something about them, not about them and 49 million others, or 250 million others. Rather than keeping up with the Joneses, they flipped them the bird. They sought something "authentic" amid the noise, Rushkoff posits. So corporations faked authenticity. As Nirvana's success eviscerated the smug, finger-on-the-pulse illusions of the record industry, major labels purchased or concocted sub-labels to sign edgier artists. They marketed "Alternative" into the mainstream. Macrobrewing corporations conceived or purchased "craft breweries." Corporations, though merging and "synergizing" concocted boutique sub-brands to mask their heft. Waves of new products and irreverent communications aimed at a "cutting edge" segment that wanted something un-big, un-corporate, un-hyped, un-cola.