The Future is Live

When I say the future is live, I mean live— as in live music, live sporting events, moments that are experienced as they occur and you have to be there or it isn’t the same.

Chuck Klosterman makes a case in his book Football about how and why American football (not soccer) is likely to change in the decades the come. He’s probably right. Klosterman notes that in the more immediate future football is probably going to become even more popular. I think so, too, but my reasoning is a little different. I think it’s going to become more popular the same way all live sports are going to become more popular—even among those who previous didn’t see themselves as the kind of people into sports; the kind of people who like to joke about “sports ball”.

The reason I think live sports, along with live music, will become even more valued is because they are truly human, meaning anything can happen, and many will increasingly flock towards activities that feel more human as AI creeps deeper into our daily virtually-enhanced lives.

You don’t have to be a techno-optimist to acknowledge that not everything about AI will be bad. There will be impressive medical advances, math problems solved, quantum computing challenges rapidly overcome— probably, a wealth of achievements in the STEM areas. But these are not the areas that drive Culture.

Culture has been in trouble since the 90s. Chuck Klosterman addressed this in his book The Nineties, calling it akin to the last authentic decade. Kyla Chayka talks about the flattening of culture due to algorithms in his book Filterworld.

The aesthetics of the 2010s and 2020s are… well, what are they exactly? They have aspects of what usually happens— echoes and callbacks to previous decades that the youth of now did not experience. Millennial parents are passing down “Culture” (already pretty watered down) to Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids. This Culture is already heavily recycled.

Millennials, remember, are the generation that experienced both sides of the analog and digital life. Millennials did not grow up with the existence of smartphones. The first iPod was released in 2001 and kids were still using portable cd players because iPods were expensive. We, as a society, had not yet adapted to the expectation of paying hundreds of dollars for new tech every 2-3 years as normative. There were knockoff mp3 players but these were not popular until a few years after iPods came on the scene. We had the Nokia brick phone— a product that was “too well made” to the point of being a problem for Nokia’s business (this warrants a longer aside about planned obsolescence being ingrained into consumer capitalism run amok). Elder Millennials were badly impacted by being sold a version of The American Dream that no longer functioned— a version that Gen Xers still want to believe in but even many Xers in the “Professional Class” earned certifications that they were unable to make use of in the workforce due to changes in the economy and general corporate downsizing. (This relates to the controversial concept of “elite overproduction” which I personally find compelling in many respects.) Millennials were badly impacted by The Great Recession which led to a future economic crisis across the generation in the form of an inability to pay back student loans.

Gen Z are “digital natives” who grew up with iPhones as normal and 9/11 being a historical event that they did not experience firsthand in any meaningful way. Gen Z is suspicious of everything that they saw fail for Millennials, which includes several iterations of gig, hustle, and grindset culture. Gen Z hasn’t wanted to jump through traditional hoops to advance at jobs because they’ve seen that older generations are not satisfied with the outcomes of putting in years (decades) of experience… to what end? So why bother, right? Gen Z has been badly damaged by social media— acknowledged by Sam Altman as likely the first [narrow] misaligned AI (maximized for engagement). (Aside: a current theory related to what we’re calling “AI” (read: chatbots) is that instead of engagement (leading to something like a social media use disorder problem) excessive engagement with AI results in issues with attachment.) Not just Gen Z, but they have been statistically hit the hardest because social media was marketed to them as children in order to create lock-in. This is the same standard protocol used by Big Tobacco. New product, same tactics. The slot machine-esque elements baked into social media created highly addictive products that have degraded the lives of users. You’d be better off sitting around smoking weed with your friends and laughing about nonsense than sitting alone on social media feeling FOMO or experiencing more and more body dysmorphia (also see: looksmaxxing). Gen Z had important life moments disrupted by the pandemic and almost certainly continue to suffer as we have not had collective societal mourning or reconciliation. Gen Z has grown up with Donald Trump as a standard figure in American politics making him and his antics alarmingly normative; this trickles down and affects the cultural zeitgeist (aka. status quo / consensus reality).

Gen Alpha is a new breed. We don’t know exactly the direction they’ll take yet but it seems like they’re on track to push back against AI-infused society where life involves Big Brother cyberstalking your every move. This means Gen Alpha is likely to desire for more experiences off the grid. Gen Z is already doing more of this. Gen Alpha, like all generations, will want to do something different. Gen Z has been known to be somewhat doomer minded or nihilistic about the climate crisis. A hope would be that Gen Alpha are problem solvers who have a little bit of “hopium” that will assist them in discovering creative ways to facilitate a better tomorrow.

It’s hard to say how Millennials will adapt given their experience with both the analog and increasingly hyper-online and virtual world. Some will become AI fanatics, probably, and others will get fed up and flee to the woods. Many will be caught in the brutal center of being torn between two worlds, neither of which feels like a comfortable fit.

I have hope that Gen Z and Gen Alpha will fare better at adapting to digital transformations and the rapid shifts that result from AI integration into everyday life. There will always be new technologies and they will always be initially feared. Some early adopters go all in. Some late adopters decide to reluctantly get on board. Others decide it’s simply not for them and they are done keeping up with the times (if society permits… an example is it became difficult for even The Greatest Generation not to get a cell phone for emergency use).

PS – By no means do I mean to leave Boomers and The Silent Generation out of this conversation! Or that as-of-now unnamed group of 40-something Gen X folks who don’t really seem like Elder Xers. I hope you’ll share your thoughts on how all of this sounds to you in the comments!