I’ve rather considered myself a fervent traditionalist, for somebody who was born into the computer age, despite the glow of electronic devices pretty much dominating my time: I work IT. I’m a consummate forum troll. I’m rarely more than two hours away from a computer if I’m awake.

But I only just now got a cell phone, eschew the 3G network, maintain a personal library of more than two thousand books – as in the physical objects, not the digital feeds – and hate Web 2.0 with every fiber of my being. I’m friends with people who prefer personal contact and live performances to networking and recordings, and who keep LPs not just for the fidelity but for the social protocol as well.

The reason for this is as simple as it is distressing: I feel that we’re replacing a medium with new one that does not offer everything the former one did. We’re losing something. And not just the displaced jobs – else I’d be a neo-luddite – but something far more intrinsic; fundamental: We’re losing intellectualism.

I mean, sure, there’s already a lot written out there about how, with the decline of newspapers being able to afford foreign offices and investigative reporters, we’re deluged in a wave of amateurs, but that was always the case with the internet. This is a blog. This isn’t my first blog. I know the score. But perhaps I’m a skylarking idealist whose hope that the original precepts of the internet – a frank and open exchange of ideas – would be born out.

I remember in college lauding the internet for being what is essentially a printing press in every living room. The flip side to that is, when printing presses came out, what kept the presses running were not peer-reviewed periodicals and papers of record, but handbills and tawdry literature: The equivalent of “Obama is a Secret Radical Muslim” and Dan Brown potboilers.

How the concept of journalistic integrity came out of this cauldron, I don’t know, but we appear to be, with this shift in dynamics, losing it. It was inevitable, to be sure: What was the wild west of the electronic frontier would be tamed and, eventually, monetized, but short of that right now what we get is not exactly WalMart and not exactly anarchy but instead Abu Dhabi: Two or three big players with their own spurious agendas and a lotta unpaid laborers.

And in the fray we’re reading less (yet owning more “books”), not paying attention to what we read, and care not for the truth but the domination of the message. What matters is not what happened but who’s shouting loudest – in school we denigrate the Soviet Union for their reliance on propaganda to opiate the masses, but our current system of dueling propaganda isn’t exactly better.

Fox excuses itself by saying the NYTimes is a liberal rag and thus we need “balance.” Democrats lament that Republicans are pulling the debate to the right by catering to their extreme, and then turn around and suggest the solution to that is to do the same, reversed. The news is only too happy to “report” on both, which is to say they’ll take quotes ad verbatim and play on the salacious and scandalous attention rather than the veracity of the claims.

What matters is not whether a statistic quoted is correct, but how soon that statistic will become a meme before it is corrected. The Islamic Cultural Center on Park Place lost the media battle the moment Sarah Palin called it a “Ground Zero Mosque,” which it is of course neither, and only in the op ed pages do columnists report on the “error.”

Stephen Colbert reported on the “truthiness” of the current cultural zeitgeist: Nobody reads into anything, so everybody is duped by any ruse that plays to their pre- and mis-conceptions. I think the internet must take its fair share of blame, here. Rather than being the great egalitarian library – the forum (in the original sense of the term) of a new age – it’s instead done the exact opposite: Reinforced ignorance, hyperbolized public sentiment, and self-served prophecy.

We’re looking at ourselves through a funhouse mirror and calling it the world. We’ve become lumpen-sophists, in the ugliest form of the word. Perhaps we should take a step back and figure out what parts of this new electronic age really work and what clearly do not.

Robin Henig wrote a long piece in the NYTimes Magazine about why today’s 20-somethings have yet to reach what she describes as “adulthood,” in words that evoke a similar rant not too long ago.

Again, I note that she spent far more time describing what people wear than the world they inherit: Plenty of time with psychologists but not with economists.

Well, let me give a little bit of insight. What has historically stopped people from leaving their parents’ home? What has historically pushed back the age of “settling down,” getting married and starting a family? Why can’t these 20-somethings start a career?

It’s the economy, stupid.

In times of recession, kids don’t leave home – not because they’re not adults, but because they can’t afford to. The average age a kid left the nest in 1975, during the recession, was 25. We’re none too different now.

In times of recession, it’s almost impossible to start a career, because none are to be found. That’s why the average 20-something today has seven jobs in ten years. Nobody can truly expect to hold a job that long. Who the hell has job security nowadays?

And if you don’t have money, how the hell are you supposed to start a home? It’s not a state of mind indicative of a creche culture in the modern society, it’s cold hard facts of money.

The subject of the economy got a scant three sentences in a ten page article. Robin Henig should spend less time noting the details of our day to day lifestyles and more time acknowledging the 400lb gorilla in the room.

Not terribly long ago, Judith Warner and Lisa Belkin whined on the New York Times that Generation Y, the Millenials, born from 1982 onwards, have an inflated opinion of themselves and are spoiled brats who are incapable of putting their noses to the grindstone and work in today’s economy.

Ironic position: A couple of boomers who work for a dying industry giving reactionary vitriol. It’s like physically watching someone lose relevance.

But because it strikes home, what with me being an under-employed 20-something with a massive ego and all, I’m inclined to fire right back, so here goes: Women, you’re dead wrong not only about my generation but about the economy my generation is so “haughtily” rejecting.

• We do not job-hop. We are forced to move jobs constantly because promotion within the office is practically unheard of and job security is non-existent. With 35 years of de-unionization and the most severely depressed job market since the Great Depression, there is no guarantee that, five years down the line, the office will be loyal to you, so there is no incentive (and indeed very much a risk) for you to be loyal to the office. Every recession since boomers became politically prominent has resulted in a drop in employment. Every recovery has not seen a corresponding rise in employment. When those offices found they could still work with a smaller workforce, they learned not to hire. When they realized that massive unemployment means anybody will jump at temp work, they stopped offering full-time jobs with benefits. We’re a generation of freelancers not out of choice, but out of necessity.
• We do not reject good work. There is no good work. Skilled blue-collar jobs have almost entirely dried up and most white-collar offices hire legions of unpaid interns, depressing the job market in just the sorts of entry-level positions the young and newly-educated require, thus forcing those of us who are independently wealthy into a form of modern indentured servitude while forcing those of us who are not independently wealthy into other professions (mostly of the severely underpaid pink collar variety). We cannot afford to work for less than a living wage, so it should come to no surprise that if we’re to work for work’s sake, we would expect there to be intrinsic benefits involved – that the work pleases us politically, for instance, or that it interests us intellectually.
• We do not oversell ourselves. Our generation has paid more for education than anybody in the history of mankind and received less training than every previous American generation. The boomers could expect to have government-subsidized tertiary education which they could use to study liberal arts with the assumption that the future jobs they held would train them (and pay them!) on the spot. Our generation has saddled themselves with more debt than any other and then applied for those same jobs, except now those employers expect all training to be done on the applicant’s dime prior to employment. If we seem inexperienced to the travails of the market according to boomers, perhaps it’s because there’s no means to gain it and pay for our education.

Now, neither Warner nor Belkin have specifically mentioned this in their topics of complaint, but it’s on the same line of reasoning:

• We are not politically apathetic. We’re just prematurely cynical towards a political climate that’s stuck on boomer issues, filled with aging boomers that have been in the beltway since before we were born and known most of all for having given themselves tax breaks while raiding the budget put in place by the generation before them (thanks, Reaganomics!), on the expectation that our generation is to be comparatively “austere.” (That term’s getting popular. Who wants to bet some marketing company was commissioned to replace “budget cuts” with “austerity” in order to soften the lexiconic blow?)
• We are not socially apathetic. We just express our outrage at the current culture differently than that other ignored generation (Remember Generation X? Specifically, remember why it was called Generation X?).  They tuned out. We’re more sneaky. There’s a reason social satire is more common now than sincere speech.

Simply put, we’re not haughty. We just refuse to supplicate ourselves to the rules of a generation that has given us the corporate consumer culture that so threatens to eat us alive on the argument that they meant well some 40-odd years ago. You made this bed, ladies. You can’t complain when we sleep on it.

I’ve always pretty much worked under the assumption that Republican party was the party of the rich, maintained largely through the manipulation of the heartstrings of the non-rich in order for them to vote against their economic interests.

As it turns out, this describes the Tea Party “movement” perfectly: People who don’t have a clue what they’re talking about being cynically manipulated by people who wish to hold on to their vast wealth. In fact, I think this is the closest I’ve ever seen the New York Times get to running a Daily Show skit.

It’s too bad that under their collective shrill tantrums – people collecting unemployment insurance, Social Security and Medicaid complaining about government size and spending, during a time when taxes went down for practically everybody – meticulously directed and publicized for ulterior motives (on Fox! And now: CNN!) drown out the voice of reason.

The Times put out a “report” that “rates” the iPad (which still sounds like an Apple Tampon) that distinguishes between “techs” and “normal people.”

I think by “normal people” you meant “luddites,” Mr. Pogue.

There was a time in the 90s when I was sure that computers and the internet would drive people to be more active and engaged in the flow of information – that TVs would become more like computers. Instead, it would appear more that computers have become more like TVs – no longer tools but mere consumer toys.

“But it’s not the same market!”

At $700 a pop, they sure as hell ARE the same market as laptops.

Of course, far more crazy is the fact that the apocalyptic christian militia caught last week planning to kill a cop and subsequently bomb his funeral plead Not Guilty in their hearing; their lawyer cited as saying, “This is going to be a free-speech case.”

Uh, no. “I hope he dies” is barely covered as free speech (and arguably not if you’re, say, propagating such speech as a public figure in retaliation for a congressman voting one way). “We’re going to kill him next Friday at 7″ is most certainly not protected. But what gets me is that another Michigan militia helped turn them in. That’s right: Even crazy has standards.

Newsflash, David Brooks: It ain’t a goddamn counter-culture.

In fact, while we’re talking about the moral “equivalence” of Democrats and Republicans, lemme just chirp up and say shut the fuck up: Jim Bunning’s Senate antics meant an estimated one hundred thousand Americans‘ unemployment insurance payments – including eight thousand New Yorkers – were cut. Charles Rangel’s Caribbean antics meant the treasury had to sell ten more bonds, and then they got the money anyway. Rick Perry cost the state with one of the lowest educational records in the country hundreds of millions in federal aid. Eliot Spitzer fucked a prostitute – and paid for her with his own money.

Seriously, now.

Marty Peretz of The New Republic and David Brooks (again) of the New York Times get to say openly racist and hateful statements but Obama is hammered for pointing out that the racial profiling of a Harvard professor was stupid.

Yeah, you know what? Fuck you, Brooks. Fuck the media that helps propagate that kind of bullshit.