“The Sony Walkman, introduced in 1979, hit Generation X at just the right moment, as its oldest members were starting high school. This explosively popular device foreshadowed an entire digital future. Suddenly, you could tune out parents, teachers, bystanders — the rest of the human race, basically — while inhabiting your own highly personalized, carefully curated media reality.” (What could possibly go wrong?) The NYT with an interactive series that’s talking about my g-g-g-generation. This Gen X Mess: the tech, music, style, books, trends, rules, films and pills that made Gen X … so so-so. (More modern generations might ask, “Why don’t you all f-fade away?” The answer: We can’t. We were the first generation to back up our work…)

+ “People—smart, kind, thoughtful people—thought that comment boards and open discussion would heal us, would make sexism and racism negligible and tear down walls of class. We were certain that more communication would make everything better. Arrogantly, we ignored history and learned a lesson that has been in the curriculum since the Tower of Babel, or rather, we made everyone else learn it. We thought we were amplifying individuals in all their wonder and forgot about the cruelty, or at least assumed that good product design could wash that away.” The excellent Paul Ford in Wired: Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense Of A Difficult Industry. (Yeah, tech may be ruining our lives and the world. But, seriously, how great is it to be able to stream movies on demand?)