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Comment by zerostar07 | Hacker News Reader

Calling our generation "sellers" has negative connotations, as if we 're super-conformists or sth. If you follow his descriptions, we are the most mature and responsible generation ever: we don't overtly express a futile belief in utopias, we lived the end of communism, we don't reject business, but instead try to infiltrate it with less greed, we don't manipulate people with emotional bullshit (love did not feed the world), we understand that you can change society by not being confrontational (hence we are "selling" ideas rather than screaming them). We don't have a dominant mass culture, which means we are open to micro-cultures, frowning upon the childishness of current-day blockbusters. I don't think Steve Jobs is an idol for us, we don't really have idols and myths, except maybe google.org or wikipedia. It's a good generation.

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I'm much older than the generation he's talking about, and I think you're entirely right. I shouldn't expect too much understanding of grubby commerce from a former English professor, but I think the affect of a salesman and of an entrepreneur are worlds apart.

An entrepreneur is up to a whole thing, and deals with mainly closed feedback loops. A salesman is at best a fragment of a real enterprise, but is often, as in the case of a snake-oil salesmen, backed up by little or nothing. The feedback loops for a salesman are frequently open, allowing all manner of bullshit.

Further, even if he were right about entrepreneurship being more common, it still wouldn't be the dominant experience, so using it to explain a generation's affect is suspicious.

Instead, I think it's much more reasonable to look at the rise of electronic communication (cheap phone calls, texts, email, chat, Twitter, Facebook). It means, in effect, that each of us lives in our own virtual small town. People end up being pleasant to each other because when they aren't, the consequences are more likely to be felt and harder to dodge.

...we are the most mature and responsible generation ever

Just because the hipster ideal is more "mature and responsible" than related social movements which preceded it, does not make our generation more mature and responsible than those which preceded it.

Calling our generation "sellers" has negative connotations, as if we 're super-conformists or sth.

Are those negative connotations necessarily unwarranted? For example, is everyone starting their own business and doing their own PR really the most effective way for us to organize ourselves?

We understand that you can change society by not being confrontational

Really? I count OWS, WikiLeaks, Anonymous, etc. among the biggest contributions of our generation. Certainly these are confrontational?

We don't have a dominant mass culture, which means we are open to micro-cultures

Agreed. This is what I admire most about our generation.

- Our generation is not all about hipsters. It happens to be much more fragmented than previous generations, u hear about hipsters because it's the most pervasive (and loud) pattern. I meant that as a generation we haven't created a fake utopia just for ourselves, we yearn for what is possible not just what is ideal (or i believe so, i dont know my generation that good)

- I think it will be, it is possible now to overthrow corporatism for a more ethical model where corporations will be socially responsible. Things like "PR" are slowly fading.

- Compared to May '68, or the Red Army Faction, it is.

> Really? I count OWS, WikiLeaks, Anonymous, etc. among the biggest contributions of our generation. Certainly these are confrontational?

I think he covers this point here: "Yes, we’re vicious, anonymously, on the comment threads of public Web sites, but when we speak in our own names, on Facebook and so forth, we’re strenuously cheerful, conciliatory, well-groomed. (In fact, one of the reasons we’re so vicious, I’m convinced, is to relieve the psychic pressure of all that affability.) "

This is one of the silliest claims in his piece. It supports the thrust of his argument that our generation's friendliness is affected and skin-deep, and therefore we need anonymous outlets for our underlying negativity. But in reality vicious anonymous comments are outlets of the insecure and jaded. It's not like the friendliest and nicest people we know spend the most time making nasty anonymous comments on the Internet.

How do you know this? The comments are anonymous.

> It's not like the friendliest and nicest people we know spend the most time making nasty anonymous comments on the Internet.

I assume this is true, but can we be sure? What if the people who make nasty anonymous comments on the internet are actually nice in person? I know that I have hated people who hang on the same irc-channels than me, only to meet them in person later, and be surprised that they're not at all like they are online.

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