You're (even more) on your own from here

December 2023

Part 1 of a series on self-identity and technology.

Generational differences are actually real. Dr Jean Twenge's research shows measurable, consistent differences in attitudes, behaviour, and psychological wellbeing across birth cohorts that persist even after controlling for age and life stage. These differences are real enough to predict outcomes.

But the conventional explanation — that generations are defined by major historical events — doesn't quite hold up. The events vary enormously between countries; the generational patterns don't. Something more universal is doing the work.

The more compelling account is that generations are primarily defined by their formative relationship to a major technology. Boomers with television. Gen X with personal computers. Millennials with the internet's expansion. Gen Z as the internet's natives — smartphones at 11, social media at 13, the entire infrastructure of the attention economy as the ambient environment of adolescence. And Gen Alpha with AI, which will be something else entirely.

Technology reduces interdependence. The more capable your tools, the less you need other people. You need fewer skills from others, you need less local knowledge, you need less community membership to navigate daily life. Each technological generation is slightly more capable of managing alone and slightly less embedded in structures that required reliance on others.

This shows up in the data on loneliness, declining group membership, falling religious participation, reduced civic engagement. It shows up in the way people narrate their own lives — more individually, less collectively. The shared reference points that used to bind people of the same place and time are fragmenting as media environments personalise.

Erik Hoel made an argument about education that captures something of this. Mass schooling democratised knowledge but eliminated the personalised intensity of private tutoring — the kind that produced Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill, the historically exceptional thinkers. You could scale access to education, or you could preserve the quality of the individual educational relationship. You couldn't do both.

AI tutoring systems might resolve this. If you can have a personal tutor of essentially unlimited patience and knowledge at essentially zero marginal cost, the democratisation/quality tradeoff might dissolve. Every student gets the Mill treatment.

But the implication for shared culture is the opposite. If everyone's education becomes intensely personalised — optimised for their specific learning style, interests, gaps — then the common experience that education used to provide disappears. You learn more, and you learn it better, and you share less of it with anyone around you.

Friends who watch the same show will increasingly watch different shows. Friends who watch the same show will have different things served to them as that show's context and companion content. Eventually the show itself might be personalised — different edits, different emphasis, different pacing for different viewers.

The shared cultural experience that creates common ground has always been fragile and constructed. It's getting more fragile. The question is what replaces it, and whether anything does.

The answer to that question is mostly up to you, individually, which is part of the point.