The reaction the last Rangelife, about San Francisco’s purported “doom loop,” really surprised me. I assumed that people who didn’t live here would just skip it as a local story, but it was far-and-away the most read and forwarded issue yet. Anyway, here’s a CBS report from 1987 about how SF is doomed because of all the downtown office vacancies (and AIDS).
Things are a little wistful over here on the Southside this week. Our teen daughter recently departed for two weeks in South America on a program for urban high school kids.
A key part of this travel program she’s on is that they take your phone away. Can you imagine? A teenager without her phone! Crazy, right? That’s like a… um… who am I kidding? This is all of us now. How would you do for two weeks without your phone? Your brain would desperately seek dopamine from any flat object you found. You’d be tapping your oven door, pinching to zoom the pattern on your toilet paper. Soon you’d return to your most feral, primitive state. Within 48 hours, you’d be eating bugs off trees.
It’s gone better than expected. I talked to her via Whatsapp the other day, and she said she was doing great after four phoneless days. “I’m actually connecting more meaningfully with the other kids in the program,” she told me. Welcome to dorm life, pre-2010! Y’all solve all the world’s problems yet?
Her major concern wasn’t losing TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram, even though her excessive use of those violates Einstein’s theories of space-time. No, she was most concerned about losing music.
It was only in the final days leading up to her departure that she mainfested this specific anxiety. She asked us if we still had any old iPods she could borrow. (Yes, but the chargers don’t exist anymore.) Failing that, maybe a compact CD player? A Walkman? All this feels even more primitive than eating bugs off trees.
We told her to suck it up. Maybe go without the personal soundtrack when you’re walking around a foreign country. Listen to life, man.
When I was almost exactly my daughter’s age, my family took a trip to the USSR as part of a Cold War-era peace exchange. We spent July 4th in Red Square, which my mom joked would render me unelectable to higher office. (Little did any of us know how popular Russia would eventually become among Reagan’s party, for the most terrible and stupid reasons!)
My weeks in Russia and Georgia made it painfully obvious that Soviet communism was a social, economic, and moral catastrophe, especially for the people living in and under it.
Because basic consumer goods were so scarce in Russia, men were constantly trying to buy my stuff, right on the street. Imagine being 16 years old, and a guy offers you 100 rubles for your pants! I had to brush off at least three dudes wanting to buy my ratty jeans off my ass. (I wasn’t exactly sure how I was supposed to continue my day in tighty whiteys.)
But the item that attracted the most attention was my Walkman-style portable tape player. In Leningrad, my cheap foam headphones attracted constant attention to me and my cassettes. After a day or two, I left all my gear in the hotel room, having learned a lesson about abundance, privilege, and deprivation.
I don’t think my kid would get similarly harassed for her earbuds in the Andes in 2023. But I’m curious to see how a two-week enforced digital detox changes her. And then maybe I’ll try one myself.
(No I won’t.)
Your phone sees dead people
The other day I signed into Facebook for the first time in a while, and it was three friends’ birthdays. The thing is: I didn’t immediately know who these people were.
After a few minutes, I determined their identities and my relationships to them:
a mom of a kid from our ‘00s preschool. We talked at a school picnic once
an IT contractor with whom I worked briefly in 2009 who since returned to India
a friend’s cousin I met once, who died years ago, but a lot of her Facebook friends don’t seem to know she’s dead
This inspired me to look at my Contacts on my phone. I have 1,279 of them. You might have a similar number in yours. Just in the first 100, I saw:
A very nice co-worker I knew casually in the 1990s and haven’t heard from during this century. (Alfredo, where are you?)
An appliance repair company I would never use again
A friend who committed suicide a decade ago
What exactly are we looking at when we look at Contacts or Facebook friends? Are they relationships? Are they people? Are they mere data?
Let’s start with Facebook friends. If you’re like most people, you acquired a ton of Facebook friends when you first got on board, probably in the mid- to late-‘00s depending on how old you were then. You probably mostly stopped adding friends by the late ‘10s.
If you fit this pattern, your Friends list is overweighted toward people you knew or met 10-15 years ago. You’re probably more likely to be connected with people you barely knew in 2010 than anyone you met in the 2020s.
You have also likely been in parasocial relationships of liking-and-commenting with people you barely know outside the contexts of Meta’s various networks, maybe now including Threads. This can be kind of cool. You’ve become part of each other’s audience.
Other relationships of yours may have actively disintegrated in the real world, and yet you remain “friends” on Facebook. And still we don’t unfriend them most of the time. (I’ve only unfriended two people, and one was from a work relationship that went very badly, and the other tried to scam me. I also muted a relative who was posting nonsense 10-30 times a day.)
About a month ago, it was my beloved grandmother’s 94th birthday. Well, it would have been, except she passed away last winter after a truly rich and wonderful life. But Facebook asked me to wish her happy birthday. Google asked if I wanted to plan something nice for her!
Of course, that’s not really grandma. Those are data profiles owned by extremely profitable advertising companies. She had put content on their servers, and in return she expected that company to show her ads. It was a perfectly fine deal, and it’s basically how media has worked for hundreds of years.
Next, let’s look at your phone contacts. Do you prune them? Every now and then I open them up, and it’s like looking in a box from hastily packing up an old apartment. Customer service line for the defunct cable company? College dormmate I ran into in NYC in 2003? Wait, why are there six versions of myself? This is how a David Fincher movie starts.
My Contacts are such a cluttered mess, that if it were a corner of my house, I’d spend a weekend purging it. (It would also take me five years to get around to it. Do not look in the southwest corner of the room where I’m typing this. Please.)
But here’s the difference: the digital clutter doesn’t matter. This isn’t physical space. Everything is indexed, so unlike real-world objects or documents, you can find what you need instantly no matter how much garbage surrounds it. You won’t take longer finding the phone number for your regular pizza place just because all your old landlords are in there.
With Facebook or Instagram, you can even go back and see the photos you shared with each other. Those relationships might feel as real as any. So why “clean up” anything?
I’m genuinely curious what others do. Do you delete old phone numbers? Do you unfriend deceased relatives? Or do you hoard them?
Please leave a comment! This isn’t an engagement play — I don’t get any Substack algorithm tokens for this. I just really want to know what you do to maintain order among your digital contacts and friends.
Now, let’s open that Photos app and look at July 2013. Why did you take seven pictures of that cat in the window?
Kids these days! (They want to burn it all down)
So, the Supreme Court has given us a hell of a ride over the past year, eh?
Before we get into grrr, Alito, it always helps to step back for a moment and consider how this country is ultimately directed and ruled. When you think about the system for a moment, you realize just how America became so exceptionally fucked.
Our entire American foundation of what laws may exist, how they’re created, and how they’re enforced is commanded by nine wise-people, each of whom rules the nation until they die or retire.
Their job, which they defined for themselves, is to scrutinize an ancient text and try to figure out what a small group of powerful men were intending when they wrote it hundreds of years ago, and how we might apply those principles to a comparatively alien society that bears no resemblance to the one they wrote these rules for.
These anointed wise-people get the final word on what the text means and how society may operate in accordance with the wishes of the Founders. Nobody may question or overrule them, except for themselves.
Now if this sounds more like how a religion operates than a government, you’re right. This is exactly how a religious hierarcy works. But wait!
These nine wise-people are themselves not subject to the laws they interpret and enforce. Removing them from their high positions is nearly impossible. As a result, at least three of them (that we know of) are currently taking bribes and yet still establishing legal precedents in which they have personal financial stakes.
How do these people get anointed? They’re selected by a President, who is himself selected by an undemocratic process of state-based electors, and then confirmed by a US Senate whose absurd mis-apportionment of power was laid out to get the smallest colonies on board in the 1780s. As a result, a current majority of the nine were selected by Presidents who lost the popular vote, and approved by Senators who together represent a minority of Americans.
So, in summary: America’s laws and policies are commanded with total finality by a group of nine high priests, most of whom were enshrined by men who most Americans voted not to lead them, and these nine people are ruling based on their interpretation of an ancient text written for a country and society that no longer exist in any recognizable form.
Also they’re taking bribes.
Freedom! Happy July 4th week!
OK, but now it gets bad.
One year after stripping women of their bodily autonomy, a majority of the Nine decided, in course of two days:
People can choose to serve or discriminate against their fellow citizens based on the others’ sexual or gender identities, if their beliefs derive from one of the most popular ancient religious texts, which were also written to command societies that no longer exist.
Colleges and universities are no longer free to consider someone’s race in their admissions, but can continue to consider whether they play football or their parents are Supreme Court justices.
If the President wants to relieve young people of their student loan burdens, he can’t do that.
(Just to be clear, I think student debt forgiveness is a terrible policy and also that an illegitimate court should have no say in it.)
Meanwhile, we have a planet hurtling toward climate catastrophe, alongside concentrations of wealth that are unprecedented in modern society, mass shootings that are so frequent and normal that they’ve become local stories at best, and economic pathways that are blocked by the debris of past decisions. If you were trying to make the future look as grim as possible for young people, you couldn’t do much better.
The United States is dominated by two politicial parties. The Republicans represent a brutally narrow view of what America was and should be, and their primary use of power is to make the country inhospitable for people who they’d rather not meet or know about. The party is also essentially owned and controlled by a career criminal currently under multiple indictments, and yet he still maintains Jesus-tier popularity in rural counties, where relatively few young adults live.
The Democrats are more aligned with the needs of future generations, but reticent to tackle the crippling financial obligations of an aging nation, thus assuring that young people will be holding the bag for decades of debts and unfunded liabilities. They’ve also blown opportunities for structural reforms on health care, immigration, guns, and government funding.
But looming largest is a shortage of housing young people can afford, even just to rent. A McKinsey study last year showed just how bleak the outlook is for young adults. Among Gen Z, only 37% believe “most people in this country have economic opportunities” and only 41% think they’ll ever own a home.
Gen Z is also simply not well. That same McKinsey survey also showed 55% of 18-24 year-olds have been diagnosed with some form of mental illness. Maybe we’re just seeing more active diagnoses, or the gradual end of stigma associated with treating mental health. Or maybe the world just has them fucked up. Dissociation is the hottest trend in music.
I wrote a few weeks ago about how Gen Z and Gen X have similar senses of humor, because we both grew up in the shadow of apocalypse — ours was nuclear war, and theirs is climate… and also nuclear war (still), pandemics, mass violence, AI, and any number of horrors that technology has accelerated.
Youthful anger at older generations is normal and persistent across decades. But Gen Z is watching older people mortgage the country and planet as if the future didn’t matter. Gen X was once afraid that a demented world leader would push a button and nuke all life into permanent oblivion. But Gen Z is watching the world literally burn, with accelerating consequences, and little visible action.
This anger is manifesting politically now. Gen Z turnout, embryonic in 2020, has become meaningful in every midterm and statewide election since. And while you will not find a human under 35 who’s enthusiastic about Joe Biden being president until 2028, you will find overwhelming majorities of young people who are disgusted by the modern Republican party, which is now hardline against gun safety, environmental action, reproductive autonomy, and progessive taxation. These are all issues with consistent support by massive majorities of Americans, acutely so among younger people.
Political conservatives are fully aware of this desperation among young people, and they know they need to address it before their voters and financial supporters die off. But they mostly blame cultural influences for this. The favorite word of the American mainstream right of the moment is “indoctrination,” and when they say that, they exclusively mean “schools teaching that LGBTQ people exist, as do racism, gun violence, and human-driven climate change.”
But of course, kids aren’t learning these wild ideas from school; they’re learning them from existing in 2023. The primary evidence for this is that older Millennials are also highly aligned with Gen Z on most issues, even though they’re long out of school. In fact, most of the Millennial generation graduated high school before George W Bush left office. (For example, every student killed at Columbine, now 24 years ago, was a millennial.)
Nonetheless, the woke kids must be the result of the woke teachers! Red States have engaged in public campaigns to punish classroom instructors for acknowledging modern reality instead of historical fantasies. A teacher in suburban Georgia is about to be fired for reading a book to her 5th graders that encourages them to embrace non-conforming elements of their identities. In Florida, what started with censorship of discussion of sexual orientation in elementary school (a.k.a, “Don’t Say Gay”) very quickly escalated and extended to censor the education of adults. Ron DeSantis (the oracle of San Francisco) has gone so far as to dismantle the state’s most elite academic institution and reform it as an anti-woke school for the incurious.
But young people aren’t just learning from school. They’re also spreading ideas amongst themselves on social media. I wrote a couple months ago about how conservatives’ desire to ban TikTok was less about the “influence of China” and more about general dissatisfaction with Gen Z itself. (You don’t hear much from the Right about how much of Elon Musk’s wealth — and therefore Twitter’s solvency — is dependent on the uninterrupted flow of rare earth minerals from China. Did you know Tesla signed an agreement to “promote core socialist values” this week?)
The fact of the matter is that young people are profoundly upset at a system that’s making their futures bleaker and less free.
A country that cared about its younger generation would:
have already mobilized a rapid transition from fossil fuels
have taken at least 300 million of the 400 million guns out of circulation
focus more on accessing general health care and less on restricting sexual health care
have taken strong action to make higher education more affordable (and not just with bigger loans and grants)
be building massive amounts of dense housing for young adults and families
Until someone in power commits themselves to securing a future of a habitable planet and abundant housing, young people will feel abused. If we want them to feel like they have a stake in the USA, it’s not enough to push a bicentennial-era idea of “patriotic education” on them. We need them to believe the country is going to secure their futures, not lock them out. We need to throw them a bone or two, or else “voting” is going to seem like a pathetically unproductive act compared with tumbrils and guillotines.
Who’s even doing that?
I write this comment having spent an embarrassing amount of time scrolling through my phone contacts, becoming increasingly aware that my system of filing some individuals by their first name and the dating app on which I met them -- as if that would help me remember over a decade later -- probably wasn't my best idea. It's gonna take a while to clean this house...
I have four Eric Meyersons in my contacts. I also do not cull them, because, well, why?
Btw did your keyboard catch fire after this post??