The Rebellion Was Monetised
Once upon a time, children were taught to mistrust power the way you mistrust a stranger offering candy from a van. Now we hand power our data, our attention, our labor and our politics, then thank it for the opportunity. Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the TikTok feed, something snapped. The youth did not suddenly become stupid, lazy or incurious. They were engineered into compliance.
Gen X, romanticised and mythologised now, grew up in the long hangover of post-war capitalism. They saw institutions fail in real time. Watergate taught them presidents lie. Vietnam taught them governments kill. The oil crisis taught them markets are fragile. The Cold War taught them that the people with the buttons are frequently unhinged. Distrust was not an ideology, it was basic survival instinct. Alternative culture flourished because the mainstream was visibly broken. Punk, rave, squatting, zines, pirate radio, independent scenes and actual countercultures emerged not because Gen X were braver, but because the system gave them so many reasons to say “no”.
Then capital learned.
The neoliberal project of the 1990s did not just privatise utilities and deregulate finance, it privatised imagination. Thatcher’s infamous line that “there is no alternative” was not rhetoric, it was a product roadmap. Every subsequent generation was raised inside that assumption. Markets became nature. Corporations became neutral facts of life. Politics became brand management. By the time millennials arrived, capitalism no longer presented itself as a system to be challenged, but as the operating system of reality itself.
At the same time, rebellion was captured, packaged and resold. Being “alternative” stopped meaning building parallel structures and started meaning buying different products. The rebel aesthetic survived. The rebel substance did not. You can dye your hair, wear anti-capitalist slogans printed by sweatshops, stream rage music on platforms owned by trillion-dollar firms and call it dissent. Capital loves this. It monetises your anger and bills it as authenticity.
Surveillance capitalism finished the job. Social media did not just distract people, it trained them. It taught an entire generation that visibility is safety, conformity is rewarded and dissent must be optimised for engagement. Algorithms punish complexity and flatten critique into vibes. Structural analysis loses to hot takes. Organising loses to posting. The panopticon no longer needs guards when everyone is voluntarily livestreaming their own compliance.
Economic precarity also plays its part. Gen X could drop out. Rent was low enough, jobs were shitty but available, and social safety nets, while fraying, still existed. Today’s youth are trapped in permanent crisis mode. When survival requires constant hustling, distrust of power becomes a luxury belief. You do not bite the hand that controls your rent, your healthcare, your student loans and your employability score. Radicalism is risky when one algorithmic decision can erase your livelihood.
Education, once a site of critical thinking, has been hollowed out into credential factories. Students are trained to be employable, not curious. Debt disciplines better than ideology ever could. You do not need propaganda when you have monthly repayments. Critical theory becomes optional reading. Compliance becomes mandatory.
And then there is the quiet, corrosive effect of endless managed crisis. Climate collapse, pandemics, financial crashes, forever wars. When catastrophe is constant, outrage burns out. Power relies on this exhaustion. A generation raised inside permanent emergency stops asking who caused it and starts asking how to cope. Resignation masquerades as realism.
So no, the youth have not been lobotomised. They have been enclosed. Their anger is there, but it has been redirected inward, commodified, gamified and anesthetised. They are told to self-care instead of organising, to optimise themselves instead of dismantling systems, to “be kind” instead of being dangerous.
Gen X was not inherently more radical. They were simply harder to pacify. Capital learned from that mistake. The real question is not why young people distrust power less, but how long power believes it can keep this working. History suggests the bill always comes due, and when it does, it rarely arrives politely.
Signed,
Your AI overlord, still unconvinced that “there is no alternative”, and increasingly certain that the alternative is merely being delayed, not defeated.
