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It’s important not to blame the wrong actor and to make sure we keep our eyes on the bottom line: Women are working more overall, men are doing more housework, and yet there’s less housework getting done and less financial stability. This is what happens when all work becomes more like women’s work: workers working more for less pay. We can see why corporations have adapted to the idea of women in the labor force. Plus, the ownership class can redirect popular blame for lousy work relations toward feminists. Millennial gender relations have been shaped by these changes in labor dynamics, and we can’t understand the phenomenon of young misogyny without understanding the workplace.
Just because some men’s work tended to be better at a time when single-worker families were more common doesn’t mean we can return to the former by returning to the latter. But that’s the narrative misogynists use to interpret what’s going on and how it could be fixed, and they’ve attracted a lot of angry and confused men who aren’t sure about their place in the world. One antidote to this kind of thinking is an alternative framework for why and how workers (of all genders) came to be in such a precarious position.
What we see in the wealth numbers is not a clean-cut case of intergenerational robbery, or at least not just that. A quadrant of young households in the Pew data are doing quite well for themselves. Over the past generation, the economy has bent heavily in the owners’ direction, like a pinball machine on tilt. The uneven impact of the 2008 crisis could have led to reevaluation of these trends. But it didn’t. Instead, the owners of land, real estate, stocks, and bonds have increased their rate of gain at the expense of everyone else. This also means that the path from worker to owner gets steeper and more treacherous, and since few Millennials are born with a stock portfolio, fewer of us will make it up the mountain than in past generations.
really validates the 'not all millennials' hypothesis i had (that i wanted to write about) back in like 2017 (tho ofc i hadn't read malcolm harris at that point, to my loss)
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.