Umair Haque at Harvard Business Blogs has written a Generation M Manifesto, which begins:

Dear Old People Who Run the World,

My generation would like to break up with you.

Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.

I understand that previous generations have made similar complaints in the past, when they were young. I’m inclined to think that the big difference between today’s radical sentiments vs, say, the 1960′s, is how much of a technical advantage we have. Not only do we know how to program DVD players and tweak security settings on Facebook, but we are also using that technical advantage to advance our theoretical knowledge.

So it isn’t like we simply have a different perspective. Some of us can make pretty serious, objective cases when we argue [as Haque goes on]:

You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.

You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.

You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.

You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today’s markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.

You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better.

You didn’t care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.

You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.

You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.

You wanted more money, credit and leverage — to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters.

You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful.

There’s a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I’m going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation “M.”

And no, this isn’t just a reactionary youth movement. We’ve already got a stacked roster of role models who have either carved a niche or dynamited their presence into the heart of the old landscape:

Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday’s way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government. Who’s Gen M? Obama, kind of. Larry and Sergey. The Threadless, Etsy, and Flickr guys. Ev, Biz and the Twitter crew. Tehran 2.0. The folks at Kiva, Talking Points Memo, and FindtheFarmer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Jeff Sachs are like the grandpas of Gen M. There are tons where these innovators came from. [...]

Anyone — young or old — can answer it. Generation M is more about what you do and who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: do you still belong to the 20th century - or the 21st?

I find myself starting to get a more radical edge.

This is not comfortable for me. In the past I’ve been fairly conservative by nature, but these points just seem increasingly obvious to me. Where does this lead?

No related posts.

David Warsh at Economic Principals has a very complementary piece this week about Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View:

Economist’s View is a lightly-edited aggregation of items from around the Web – newspaper columns and blog posts mostly, plus the occasional podcast or video, continually updated throughout the day and augmented periodically by Thoma’s own commentary, all the package distinguished by a selecting principle that is lively, informed, inclusive and nearly straight up-and-down. In this respect, Thoma’s site resembles Romenesko on the news industry, Johnson’s Russia List, or Real Clear Politics on the US scene (minus the slowly-increasing volume of Real Clear Politics-produced filler). Thoma monitors nearly 300 feeds, culls them, links thirty items or so, and himself writes as many as a dozen annotated entries a day. The easy-to-use site is an alternative to the sort of RSS feed-reader you might laboriously build yourself. Though the demarcation criteria are not quite so clear as on those other sites – the topic is vast, after all – I find Thoma pretty close to one-stop shopping for the sort of economic news and analysis that interests me qua news – a digital fire-hose, to be sure, but a manageable one. Looking at Thoma once a day is enough.

There’s more in the piece about blogging in general, specifically where Thoma and a couple of others like him (mentioned above) fit into the broader blogosphere:

The proprietors of each are essentially editors. They hue as best they understand it to the perpendicular. They seek to see whole the debate they cover, to present its raw files fairly to readers, to occupy the center ground and treat all comers fairly. They function more like referees on a stylized battlefield than (as Robert Wright distinguishes among bloggers) disc jockeys or musicians. It is no accident that in each of these cases the blogger’s ego is almost totally subordinated to the task, that the proprietors work long hours for little or nothing.

It’s in stark contrast to a column I read yesterday by Connie Schultz at The Plain Dealer (via Jeff Jarvis). She argues that tightening copyright law is the way to save newspapers. Fine for her and her organization, but it would be at the expense of everything newspapers supposedly stand for: open discussion, transparency and objectivity, public accountability, keeping the powerful in-check, shining a light on corruption, giving a voice to the weak and oppressed — all things that a more free and open web would naturally promote, but would be undermined by the atmosphere that would be created by efforts to tighten copyright laws.

I actually spent a long time working on a really negative piece, critical of Schultz’s plan, and more generally, the deeply contradictory attitude being exhibited by some journalists. I was glad when David Warsh and Mark Thoma gave me a positive alternative.

As an aside, I’ve been using Economist’s View as one of many models for my own blogging practices, but now that I think more about it, you might begin to see even more similarities here at Open Conceptual.

Related posts:

1. Re-Generative Digital Media