Of Millennial Minds
Hello fellow “kids”
I remember the address of my best friend’s childhood home, and I cannot make it to the grocery store without GPS.
It is a mile from my house. I have driven there hundreds of times. If you asked me to describe the route I could do it, slowly, with effort, the way you describe a dream the morning after. Left at the light. Right at the place where the bagel store used to be. Something something. The address of my friend’s house I could give you in my sleep. 4847. Several syllables and a street name I haven’t used in twenty years. The number is just there, the way my own name is just there, lodged in some part of the mind that the rest of the mind no longer calls.
The faculty that knew the address has not been destroyed. It has been retired. There was a job it used to do and the job is now done by something else, and the faculty has gone to wherever faculties go when they are no longer needed. Emeritus faculties. Probably, it’s doing something else now. Storing other things. I don’t know what.
What it was like to be a mind under the old conditions is a thing my cohort can still describe and not many cohorts after us will be able to. We learned to think one way and were asked, over a couple of decades, to think another way, and the asking happened so gradually but persistently that none of us noticed when the first way stopped being available.
Millennials, that’s us, although the word has been so abused that I am reluctant to use it. The marketing version of the millennial is a person who killed an industry and bought avocado toast. The actual cohort is something stranger. We learned to write in cursive and never used it. We memorized phone numbers and watched the phone become the thing that remembered them. We looked things up in encyclopedias and then in Encarta and then in Yahoo and then in Google and now in something that talks back. We did not choose any of these transitions. The transitions chose us.
Our predecessors remember the before but did not have to adapt the same way. They could opt out. Many of them did. They are the people who still write checks and call to confirm appointments. Their relationship to the new is voluntary and their relationship to the old is sentimental rather than functional. Younger generations do not remember the before times. The conditions they were born into are simply the conditions. They are not adapting; they are inhabiting. We are the only ones for whom adapting itself is the condition. We did it once, then we did it again, then we did it a third time, and now we are being asked to do it again, and we are tired, but we know how. We have the muscle memory.
Adapting was not a series of moments where we put down one tool and picked up another. The adapting was a continuous, low-grade cognitive labor of holding two systems at once. You learned the phone number and then the phone remembered it but you still had to know what to do if the phone died. You learned the map and then the map became GPS but you still had to know roughly where north was because the GPS failed sometimes. You learned to write a footnote with a physical book and then you learned to write one from a database and the two procedures lived in your head side by side, not because you needed both but because the old one was load-bearing for the new one in ways you could not articulate. Every adaptation came with the requirement that you not lose the previous faculty entirely, the previous faculty was the thing the new one was built on, and also you could not let the previous faculty offend the sensibilities of the new world, because the new world had no patience for someone who insisted on doing it the old way.
The pressure came from both directions. Those older watched us and judged us for forgetting. Those younger watched us and judged us for being slow. We were supposed to migrate without leaving anything behind and without dragging anything along. The migration itself was the skill, and the skill was invisible because it was the medium we moved through. You cannot describe the water if the water is what you are made of. It would be like describing the Dao.
Some of what we left behind was a way of having a mind. The autodidact, for instance, was a person whose authority came from having read the book others had not read. Their power was a function of information being scarce and unevenly distributed. You met someone at a party and they had read a strange book and the book had changed their thinking and they could tell you about it, and the telling was a kind of gift, because you could not have gotten the book yourself without effort. The gift had texture. A photocopied essay, stapled at the corner, with someone else’s pencil marks in the margin where they had argued with the author years before you read it. The autodidact was a node in the distribution network of ideas. The form depended on the network being slow and uneven. Now the network is fast and even. Everyone has access to everything, which is to say no one has access to anything in particular, and the autodidact’s leverage is gone. The form is not extinct. It is just no longer being grown. The conditions that produced it, a small canon, deep reading, idiosyncratic synthesis, the social premium on having read carefully, are conditions the new world does not generate by accident. They have to be cultivated deliberately, which means they will become a hobby, like wood carving, rather than a way of being.
There was also a kind of thinking that happened in the gap between sending a letter and receiving a reply. The two-week pause was not empty. It was a brain temperature at which certain kinds of thoughts could form. You wrote the letter, you sent it, you went about your week, and the question you had asked baked in your mind the way bread sits in an oven. By the time the reply arrived you had usually answered the question yourself, in a half-formed way, and the reply was a refinement rather than a revelation. The whole exchange was a slow cooperative cognition between two people who could not be in the same room. The form survived into email for a while, in a thinner form. Long emails between people who took two days to reply. Then the form withered. The conditions are not available now. A question sent at 9:14 expects an answer by 9:31. The thinking that happened in the gap no longer has the gap to happen in.
And then there was the bullshitter (oh how I miss the bullshitter), who could hold a room by talking confidently about something they had half-read in a magazine. The bullshitter was not a liar exactly. The bullshitter was a synthesizer who lived at the edge of their own knowledge and trusted the room to fill in the rest. The form was honest in a way that is hard to defend now: it admitted that all conversation is partly performance, and it gave the room something to do, which was to push back, refine, correct, embellish. A social technology for producing collective thought in real time. The form depended on the impossibility of fact-checking in the moment. Now everyone can verify everything in three seconds and the bullshitter has nowhere to go. The room used to lean in. Now the room reaches for its phone. The good bullshitters made the world a more lively place. The dinner table is quieter without them.
AI is the completion of the sequence. The conditions the autodidact required were already mostly gone. The conditions the slow correspondent required were already mostly gone. The bullshitter was already in retreat and now we are chased out of the room by “facts”. AI is the technology under which the change becomes total. The world had been moving toward a state in which all information is immediately available and all questions have an immediate answer, and AI is what makes that state final. The forms that depended on slowness, on scarcity, on the gap, on the room’s inability to verify, are not being killed by AI. They were already dying. AI is what closes the door behind them.
The new faculty, the one that knows how to work with a machine that talks back, is being grown in real time in my fellow millenial “kids”, and we are growing it the way we grew the others. We are learning without losing the old faculties entirely, because the old faculties are still load-bearing for the new one. The machine does not know what to do unless you know what to ask it, and knowing what to ask it is a function of having once had to know things yourself. The young, the actual kids, will not inherit this scaffolding by accident. Some will build it deliberately, but that is a different thing from having it built by the conditions themselves. The position will produce a different kind of mind, and that mind will not be worse, exactly. It will be a mind shaped by conditions I cannot fully imagine. Which is, I suppose, what every generation says about the one that follows.
The old conditions were not better. Some of them were and some of them were not. The autodidact was sometimes a bore. The slow correspondent was sometimes pretentious. The bullshitter was sometimes just wrong. The old conditions had their pathologies, and the new conditions have their own, and the question of which set is preferable is not actually answerable, because the people who can answer it are split by the very change they are being asked to assess.
The conditions existed. People lived in them. The living had a texture, and the texture is going to be forgotten if no one writes it down. The people who can write it down are a narrow cohort, and even for us the memory is already beginning its slow conversion into story.
I know the address of my best friend’s childhood home because there was once a kind of mind that knew addresses, and I happened to be one of them, and the mind is still there, mostly, and on a good day I can show you what it was like to be inside it. The mind cannot make it to the grocery store without GPS. The two things have been true at once for a while now. The trick of my cohort, the thing nobody gave us a name for, is that we have been living inside both of them the whole time. We learned to do it without breaking. That learning is the part that will be hardest to describe to anyone who did not have to do it themselves.