Talk:The future of office work: Difference between revisions

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 === Kyla Scanlon’s argument ===
-Kyla Scanlon is a whip-smart 25 year old content creator who, with unusual haste, has built a large following posting short form videos about investing and finance. Her content is funny, ironic, learned, saturated with leading-edge memery and it's ''fast'': delivered at a gallop, with frenetic jump cuts that speak to the multi-channel, hyperlinked , always-on dot-dash attention spans that we are told are the thing for the next generation. Her delivery is so quick and she pivots so fast it’s hard to keep up, let alone mull over or subject to sober reflection that you wonder whether you're having your pocket picked or just being  bamboozled into admiring acquiescence at the energy and brio of the delivery.
+[https://kylascanlon.com/ Kyla Scanlon] is a whip-smart twenty-something “content creator” who has built an impressive cross-platform following posting short-form videos about finance. Scanlon’s style is well-informed — she is plainly  someone who paid attention in college — but also funny, off-beat, wry and a lot wearier with the world than a twenty-five year-old influencer really has any call to be.
-So reading her blog — still infused with the same knowing wit and eclectic references — no doubt Scanlon was an excellent student — is an interesting contrast. It is in the nature of written communication that the author cedes control of the page and depth of engagement to the reader, and the reader has to do the work. The tiktok short is a symbolic of the received criticisms of the the young generation.
+Her video shorts are never earnest: she saturates them with state-of-the-art memery and ''velocity'': everything gallops between with frenetic jump cuts, Burroughs like cut-ups and frame shifts that speak to the easily-distracted multi-channel, hyperlinked, always-on dot-dot-dash attention spans of the digital native but don’t necessarily make sense. Well, not to me, at any rate: they are often far too quick for this old codger to make out, let alone follow, and they’re gone before you get a chance to mull over or analyse for content.
-Scanlon is unrepresentative of her generation in another way too. That same lazy categorisation of millennials as dilettante attention-depleted digital natives who conduct their self-absorbed lives through social media isn't even generally true of the cohort who live in north London or the Menlo park, let alone the rest of the world's twenty -two year olds, of whom the stereotype is starkly atypical. Ambitious kids work like tyros, wherever they are. And are the progeny of the professionally qualified upper middle classes of London, new York and California necessarily as driven and (figuratively) hungry as poor kind lin Nairobi, Damascus or Kyiv? The JC has no data, but he doubts it. Who is more likely to complain about burnout after a nine to five?
+You come away impressed but never quite sure if you’ve watched some next-level, tenth-Dan free-form improvisational genius, or something totally hip that just looks like it. Have a look at [https://x.com/kylascan/status/1704626243402895435? her most recent one] — “Federal Reserve Recap with Jerome Powell” — and judge for yourself. It is well-executed for sure. I’m just not quite sure what “it” is.
+In any case you can’t help but admire, and maybe be sucked in by, the energy and brio of the delivery. You wonder what it would be like if you got to slow it down and treat it like an old-fashioned, boomer thought piece.
+Well, Scanlon lets you do that, too. Her Substack is almost as popular as her TikTok, and definitely a lot more popular than this one!
+So Scanlon is unrepresentative of her generation. She is unrepresentative in another way too. That same lazy, boomer categorisation of millennials as “attention-depleted dilettantes who conduct their self-absorbed lives through social media” isn't generally true even of the metropolitian liberal cohort we have in mind, let alone the rest of the world's twenty-two year olds, of whom the “digital native” stereotype is starkly atypical.
+Ambitious kids work like tyros, wherever they are. And are the progeny of the professionally qualified upper middle classes of London, New York and California necessarily as driven and (figuratively) hungry as poor kind in Nairobi, Damascus or Kyiv? The JC has no data, but he doubts it. Who is more likely to complain about burnout after a nine to five?
 Being of Generation Zer — just — it is not surprising scanlon sides with her cohort , particularly seeing as her own career today is more or less the millennial experience. Scanlon earns a good crust making fun videos and doing podcasts. She is no better placed to speak for her generation then the boomers — less, in fact, because boomers and generation Xers are their parents.