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=== Kyla Scanlon’s argument ===
=== Kyla Scanlon’s argument ===
[https://kylascanlon.com/ Kyla Scanlon] is a whip-smart Gen-Z “content creator” who makes short-form videos, podcasts and blogs “analysing the economy with a human-focused lens”. She has hundreds of thousands of subscribers.  
[https://kylascanlon.com/ Kyla Scanlon] is a whip-smart Generation Z “content creator” who makes short-form videos, podcasts and blogs “analysing the economy with a human-focused lens”.


Scanlon’s style is well-informed but also funny, off-beat, wry and ''millennial'': she is, says the grumpy old man, a lot wearier with the world than a twenty-five year-old influencer really has any call to be.  
Scanlon’s style, which has earned her hundreds of thousands of subscribers, is well-informed but also funny, off-beat, wry and ''millennial''.  


Being of Generation Z — just — it is no surprise Scanlon sides with her cohort, seeing as her own career to date has prescribed the idealised millennial life experience. But that makes her an outlier: few attain that degree of freedom and self-determination, so whatever you make of her material, she hardly represents the [[lived experience]] of even her immediate cohort: a narrow demographic of affluent, educated, young Metropolitan professionals. She is hardly well placed to speak for her wider generation, including kids in the poorer neighbourhoods of Kinshasa, Kyiv or Karachi.  
Being of Generation Z — ''just'' — it is no surprise Scanlon sides with her cohort. And her own career to date has prescribed the idealised millennial life experience: she is 25, self-employed with a Bloomberg column and a podcast.  


In any case Scanlon starts with some potted anthropology — in agrarian societies people worked during daylight hours, giving up their circadian rhythms only when forced to by the industrial revolution, and it took Henry Ford — not ''usually'' a Gen Z pin-up, but still — to recognise he would get more out of his workers by paying them more and asking of them less.  
But that makes her an outlier, not an archetype: few attain that degree of freedom and self-determination, so regardless of the quality of her output, she barely represents the [[lived experience]] of even her immediate cohort: a narrow demographic of affluent, educated, young Metropolitan professionals, and is a million miles from her wider generation which stretches from Kansas, Kinshasa and Kyiv to Karachi.
 
Scanlon tells us not to snigger: TikTok Girl is ''right''.<ref>https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-tiktok-girl-is-right-modernity</ref>
She starts with some potted anthropology — in agrarian societies people worked during daylight hours, giving up their circadian rhythms only when forced to by the industrial revolution, and it took Henry Ford — not ''usually'' a Gen Z pin-up, but still — to recognise he would get more out of his workers by paying them more and asking of them less.  


So was born the nine-to-five, she says, and the western world has, arbitrarily, stuck with it ever since. But the nature of how we are — networked, digital, online — and what we do — we’ve pivoted from production of goods to delivery of services (“B2B SaaS”) — means [[this time it’s different|it’s different this time]].
So was born the nine-to-five, she says, and the western world has, arbitrarily, stuck with it ever since. But the nature of how we are — networked, digital, online — and what we do — we’ve pivoted from production of goods to delivery of services (“B2B SaaS”) — means [[this time it’s different|it’s different this time]].
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