None of this is to say anyone should feel sorry for financiers—even junior ones—but it’s worth understanding what is really at the end of the road for Millennials who do everything right. The best the job market has to offer is a slice of the profits from driving down labor costs. One of Roose’s subjects found himself working on a deal he believed to be about rehabbing a firm, only to discover that his bosses were more interested in firing workers and auctioning equipment before selling the now “more efficient” company for a quick $50 million profit. Although they’re the natural outcomes of the wage relation, work intensification and downsizing don’t just happen by themselves. The profits have to be made, and the best of the best Millennials end up doing the analytical drudge work that makes superefficient production possible, then crying to reporters over their beers. It hardly seems worth it.

For every Chief Keef or Luger, there are a hundred, a thousand kids doing similar work without hitting it big. The breakdown of what economists call “barriers to entry”—in this case, the costs of recording, editing, distributing, and promoting—means more people can make and publish more content. This is good for anyone who wants access to creative work unmediated by bigwigs in suits, but it’s a boon for those suits too. Free distribution platforms level the distinctions between professional and amateur and allow the latter to pitch themselves to fans and labels. Online platforms don’t compensate everyone who uploads their work, but that doesn’t mean the owners can’t profit. Estimates put YouTube’s value at $70 billion. Even though this new production/distribution arrangement has shrunk the recording industry and allows consumers to access nearly anything they want on demand for free, it still isn’t bad for corporations. It’s just good for different corporations.

Networking platforms are an important part of both contemporary American profit-seeking and child development; it’s like investors built water wheels on the stream of youth sociality. Through social networking interaction, kids learn the practice of what political theorist Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism”: how to navigate the “intensive and extensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance.”38 Dean writes that this education—and even attempts to resist it from the inside—ultimately serves to “enrich the few as it placates and diverts the many.”39 For all the talk about the crowd and the grassroots and the Internet age of access, for all the potentials of open source and the garage-to-mansion Internet success stories, increased inequality and exploitation have come hand in hand with these technological developments. Not only are many of young Americans’ interactions filtered through algorithms engineered to maximize profits, the younger “digital native” Millennials have never known anything different. They have always been online, and their social world has always been actively mediated by corporations.

It’s on a more fundamental level that the whole enterprise of ethics through consumerism is a waste of time. The market is not a magic desire-fulfilling machine we can reprogram to green the earth and level inequality. It is, rather, a vast system of exploitation in which workers are compelled to labor for their subsistence, and owners reap the profits. The market offers a variety of goods and experiences that seems infinite, but it’s actually very limited. There are many different flavors of Pop-Tarts, but none of them opens a portal to a world where you don’t have to trade half your waking life to get enough to eat.