The Comatose Millenial LinkedIn Class
Why is the generation that grew up with Rage Against the Machine dead silent?
It has been almost two months since my last post. That’s not because nothing has happened. On the contrary, more has happened in those two months than can possibly be commented on or analyzed in a single entry.
The problem is, there hasn’t been anything particularly *NEW* to write about. It’s the same escalatory spiral of hate, ignorance and project 2025 propaganda that has driven every regime action. And it’s the same meek, hapless democratic “response” that has thus far been profoundly ineffective at combating it.
One persistent theme that I haven’t yet covered on Substack and continues to profoundly bother me is the dead silence of my own generation, particularly those that are cogs in the American corporate machine. This was quite evident this past weekend at our local No Kings protest, where I would conservatively estimate the median age being 65, and the demo at most other similar events has been the same.
In some respects, the overrepresentation of senior citizens makes sense. These are the people that came of age in the Vietnam war era. They know what protest movements are and they know that real change can be effectuated by them. They also, on the whole, have more time than your average 30-40 something with a demanding job and kids that require being shuttled to and from their 50 weekly activities.
In many other much more important respects, it makes no fucking sense whatsoever. People that still have more than half of their lives ahead of them should be paying attention to the ongoing destruction of their country. They should be paying even more attention to it when they think about their young children’s futures. And yet, in virtually every sphere, these people are almost completely absent.
The reason I call this the Linkedin class is simple. The vast majority of them are well-educated white collar professionals. They have polished Linkedin profiles, tidy resumes and fancy titles. I know because I was one of them for many years. It has been drilled into them over and over again by their organizations that POLITICS IS OFF-LIMITS and they continue to abide by that credo like good little boys and girls. In a normal political climate, this is annoying but fine because the consequences are well-defined and minimal. In today’s political climate, it is absolute insanity.
Just take a step back and think about it. The public education system that produced most of these high-earning professionals is being targeted for destruction. (No, this is not an exaggeration, the former CEO of The World Wrestling Federation (!!!) has literally been told to eliminate the department of education). The colleges and universities that launched their careers (and would theoretically launch the careers of their children) are also being systematically targeted, scapegoated and demonized through politically motivated witch-hunts. Many of the cultural institutions they and their spouses enjoy and frequent are also at abject risk of being defunded, marginalized and minimized. The ability of their OWN DAUGHTERS to maintain sovereignty over their bodies is being taken away in front of their eyes.
And what is the response? The same old bullshit Linkedin conference attendance announcements, empty job promotion congratulations posts and corporate buzzword-laden blabbering that no one cares about, and not much else. In other words, this highly influential class of people is explicitly choosing to pretend that it is business as usual and stay silent.
The pushback to this criticism is obvious, and goes a little something like this:
1) Linkedin is a business platform, it’s not social media.
2) There are potential negative consequences for voicing political opinions in the workplace.
3) Posting about politics on LinkedIn doesn’t accomplish anything.
Fine. Let’s accept the validity of the above and absolve the Linkedin Class from any blame as it relates to not making their voices heard on that specific platform. What is the excuse for everything else? Why aren’t they posting anything on non-corporate social media? Why don’t you ever see them at protests or rallies? Why have my fellow millennial compatriots so willingly and completely surrendered themselves to the corporate mandate of “staying out of politics” in every facet of their lives?
There are a few potential explanations. The first is the same as #2 above – the concept that somehow, if they get involved, they risk some sort of retribution from their employers or their social groups or country clubs or whatever it may be. I find this explanation, frankly, to be absurd, but I’ve heard it as a justification.
The second, in my view, is far more likely to be the real reason – and is far more disappointing – and that is, that it’s easier not to do anything. It’s easier to rationalize that you’re too busy to find the time. It’s easier to reason that since nothing bad has happened to you or your family directly (yet), that there’s no need to do or say anything. It’s easier to let someone else hopefully catalyze change on your behalf rather than finding the time to do so yourself.
These are not stupid people. Many (most?) are charitable, regularly support good causes and find the things going on in America today to be troubling. They value higher education, they value science, they value women’s reproductive rights and they don’t want to see the country backslide into the 1900’s on the social issues they care about.
And yet, they are dead silent. Admittedly, my generation has never once had to really sack up and get involved in the preservation of democracy. Sure, there have been plenty of bad things that have happened in this country in the last 30-40 years but for the most part, they worked themselves out. There was never an existential crisis comparable to what we are seeing today that literally threatened the fabric of our society. And I believe that fact has led to a profoundly complacent mass of PC corporatist robots who are unwilling to do something unless and until they absolutely have no choice (by then, of course, it will almost certainly be too late).
I’ll close my little diatribe with a quick comment about one more refrain that I have personally heard from my compatriots on multiple occasions. It goes a little something like this:
“What would I really accomplish by going to protests or posting on social media or doing similar things? It’s not really doing anything anyway.”
In isolation, this is largely true. For example, I’d love to pretend that my family’s attendance at No Kings this past weekend directly led to some discernible change, but that is a fantasy. And I’m not a fantasy type of guy. But concluding that a single action of dissent, if it doesn’t immediately result in change, is pointless or not worth the time, or won’t contribute to eventual victory over tyranny, is the height of absurdity.
I assure you that when the LinkedIn class trains for a corporate 10k, they don’t conclude on day one that if they can only run a mile before having to walk that the entire race isn’t worth running. They don’t do that because it’s complete bullshit, and because you need to train your body to enable eventual success. Every day of training gets you closer to the goal, gets you closer to being able to succeed. In isolation, that first day of running a mile doesn’t result in anything either.
So why is this concept seemingly so hard to understand in the context of something that matters a hell of a lot more than some random corporate 10k race? It’s obvious that the type of resistance that will stop Trump from achieving Project 2025’s dystopian blueprint is not going to be fomented overnight. It’s obvious that it will need to involve well-educated professionals in the prime of their lives. So when will it become obvious to the comatose LinkedIn class that this is the reality?