In one of the most iconic movies of the 1990s, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, the lead character, Renton, riles against the prospect of life narrowly defined by the lifestyle choices of 1990s Britain. As if speaking for our generation, he rejected the empty promises of consumerism. Although we weren’t sure exactly what was wrong, what we wanted, or how to change it, many of us felt trapped like ghosts by the dead end corporate sponsored identity shopping futures we all faced.
In the original 1996 film, Renton the anti-hero, played by Ewan McGregor, was a Thatcher’s child, driven crazy by the times. Socialised by the trauma of the late 20th century culture war between the pro- social politics of the baby Boomer generation and their seduction by capitalism to financialise everything, turning the hippy aesthetic into MTV ready cosmetics, fast-food and flatpack furniture. By extracting the rebellious optimism of post-World War 2 mass movements, consumables became an idealism that could only be imagined in your head. Peace, love and happiness became big brand identity, trademarked through logos, personal value statements written on our threads.
“Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance.”
Renton, like us, was not happy. Shouted out in bold italics, our agency to make a difference, crossed out from history with an auditor X. Beautifully vulgar and painfully true, Renton articulates our futile attempt to resist, everything that has now become. You?
“Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage.”
Renton expressed our refusal to blindly accept that our young lives should become a mindless cycle of work, eat, sleep, consumerism. In this pivotal monologue, the junkie anti-hero, lists the ideals and objects of consumer culture, spitting out everyone like the mad last breaths phlegm of human consciousness, sick of everything, before adult life has even begun.
We were the generation who came of age at the beginning of this challenging time of western history. For those of us who were paying attention, there was nothing that we could do owing to our age and relatively small demographic, except exclaim through our various subcultural styles, “bollocks”!
“Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning.”
Culturally stripped of the ability to imagine a more organic, joined up and inclusive society, Renton took us on a self-absorbed trip down the toilet of personal annihilation. This was, given the absence of alternatives, our only ‘choice’; nihilistic free will par-excellence. It was in this situation we turned to the power of art and music, like the post world war generation of socially progressive thinkers before us, before capitalism consumed their bold ambitions and turned them into the slogans of transnational value extraction. We sought to embolden our resolve to make sense of a world imposed upon us by the growingly out of control cancer of neoliberal economics.
“Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth.”
The 1999 Matrix movie is a cinematographic masterpiece of Generation X. Although the film has more recently been maddeningly misappropriated by marginalised masculinity, these souls mustn’t be left to linger here. Its true significance is rooted at the turn of the millennium, when the Wachowskis briefly mainstreamed this critique of neoliberal capitalism.
Through protagonist Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, we awaken to our world as computer simulation, designed by machines to harvest human energy. Through our uncritical internalisation of consumerist reality, we are controlled by a fantasy of mind. Our illusion makes the everyday toil of life seem real, work, eat, sleep, repeat. Once critically awoken by electric shock death, Neo enters his subconscious mind.
Summoning up the nonsense of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland; ‘drink me’, we shift perspective to see through the self-delusion, and into the desert of the real, free from capitalist hegemony. A dead planet run by machines, restricting human development as incubated babies, wired into the economic system, milked for energy.
Through unravelling layers of fake-believe Neo awakens to consumerist truth, exploited, infantilised, innocence weaponized by the powerful, life’s force turned into commodity, death of self-autonomy. The commodification of all human activity, chemical energy turned into electricity, fuelling the corporate machinery, physical, mental and emotional enslavement.
A faceless post-human world where artificial intelligence is in control via death grip ignorance, human tragedy, the potential of love lost to the science of imaginary. This is what Mark Fisher defines as capitalist realism, post conscious minds, battery farmed computer simulation, life lived through fear, subordinated by the absence of future, kept hard at work by anxiety and societal decay.
“Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves.
As the last generation to become young adults before collective societal crisis was individually pacified with prescription drugs, we felt the danger posed by neoliberalism. Music Television was beginning to extract the last few drops of vitality and transformative power from the post World War Two counterculture, sucked out as vampire shareholder profit. Mindless acid nightmare graphics, pop-tart celebrities chatting endlessly in between thong-titty music videos, massaging the egos of manufactured celebrity and lipstick-gloss fakes. From the margins of fame US singer songwriter Beck poured scorn on such banality, in his first single released in 1993.
“MTV makes me want to smoke crack,
Fall out of the window and I’m never comin’ back
MTV makes me want to get high,
Can’t get a ride no matter how I try,
And everything’s perfect and everything’s bright,
And everyone’s perky and everyone’s uptight”
Renton’s rage against the machine of neoliberal capitalism is mirrored in the tongue filled cheek of Beck. Piecing together fragments from the whisper of a collective memory we find a waymark point in between the gaps of then and now. A generational spilt personality, which on the one hand craved authenticity, but on the other, unable to express an alternative reality that wasn’t merely a drug fuelled escape.
Choose your future. Choose life . . . But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?”
For Karl Manheim, the sociologist of knowledge, a generation is a distinct from cohorts as they spark into existence in response to societal trauma or catastrophe. Even though it is commonplace to refer to each new cohort as a generation, not all waves of youth emerge into adulthood with a distinct sense of collective existence. Its not that everyone who grows in such times are the same as each other, as always the exceptions prove the rule, especially if the exception is from the aristocracy. It is argued that generation X, people born between 1965 and 1980 are one such generation as we experienced the shift between analogue society and digital, and the battle assertion of free-market capitalism over socially accountable democracy. According to Manheim, from their situation of unease, a generation comes to perceive itself as distinct from the dominant culture, and from a shared vantage point, collectively challenges existing social norms and values. Our collective catastrophe was neoliberalism.
In the UK generation X spent their formative years in the theatres of violence between Thatcher’s government and her antagonists both here and abroad. Her electoral popularity taking a calculated boost defending the Falkland Islands from an Argentinian invasion. As school children our understanding of this conflict, was given a human face on state mandated BBC children’s TV. Between recycled yogurt pot and loo rolls made into space rockets, garden time weeding with Percy Thrower and happy times with Goldie the dog, we were introduced to horrors of war by veteran Simon Weston’s 46% burnt body and face.
In these days Thatcher did ideological battle with the working class. Striking miners versus the cops on News round, John Craven, breaking it down for us before baked beans, pizza, ketchup and chips. Later, re-enacting the riots and the Battle of Orgreave, we made sense of the world from behind a childish barricade of branches, throwing sticks and stones at rival friends, a stack of get well soon cards, a broken nose, a few nights and a get well soon card from Horrible Histories’ Simon Farnaby. We were the last generation to grow up without the total dominance of the Internet, when finding things out still involved going to the library and reading borrowed books. Television was viewing limited by a limited choice of channels, and pornography was topless, cut out and pinned on the back of your mate’s dad’s garden shed.
In the film Last Days (2005 HBO Studios) we follows the slow unravelling of a fictionalised Kurt Cobain, who due to his failure to find authenticity in this world loses his mind. Last Days is cut through with fragments of almost incoherent interactions, between people that mean nothing to neither us nor Blake. The need for coherence is replaced by the feeling that meaning is superfluous to these end days. A pre-Internet, business pages salesman calls around to see Blake, offering to promote his brand of punk rock in the phone directory, the idea of punk rock in business pages is absurd! Brakes interaction with the salesman is surreal, wearing a glittery dress he flops around never bothering to engage, he’s out of his mind. This film reflects the time before rock music become the background music of supermarkets and DIY stores. Blake has no future in the coming corporate reality. Blake’s world falls apart, MTV plays on the television in the background, a window into the ascendant inauthentic world that is looming.
The commercialisation of society was growing, and we could see from both sides of the mirror. On the one hand we could see a world of collectivism and the struggle for social and economic equality, trade unions, feminism, gay pride, anti-racism, Green Peace environmentalism, Amnesty International human rights. On the other a duty to keep alive the fight for further equality that befell both generations as capital sought to capitalise, control and expunge and political damage that critical minds pose to this form of wealth creation and social control.
In the song NatWest-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds written by Nicky Wire of Manic Street Preachers expressed our rejection of neoliberal capitalism, as it attempting to seduce us into becoming nihilistic consumers. Like Neo in the Matrix, our generational consciousness was emerging from childhood naivety into a world that expected us to believe that all we could ever wish was expressing self as stuff.
“Economic forecast soothe our dereliction,
Words of euthanasia, apathy of sick routine.
Carried away with useless advertising dreams,
Blinding children, life as autonotomes.
Natwest, NatWest-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds,
Blackhorse apocalypse,
Death sanitised through credit.
Natwest, NatWest-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds,
Blackhorse apocalypse,
Death sanitised through credit.”
The 1992 Manic Street Preachers song Slash ‘n’ Burn spat out shards of anger at the growing financialisaton of society. An x marked the spot where the clear felling of our collective will for a more equitable world, was replaced with the false needs of consumerism. Clear felled from the historical narrative by a wilful destruction of the connection between people, meaningful employment and the landscape of place. Market forces reasserted ruling class authority through consumer brands and financially segmented market choices. Delusions of happiness were now to be found in brand loyalty, creativity and self-expression, only accessible as units of consumption. We emerged from our adolescent into a society characterised by a famine of meaning, or as the Manic Street Preachers put it.
“Worms in the garden more real than a McDonalds,
Drain your blood and let the Exxon spill in,
Look around here and you see nothing is very real,
Chained to economy now famine has been.
Slash and burn,
Kill to live,
Kill for kicks,
3rd world to the 1st,
Kill to live.”
The views and ideas expressed above, by bands like Manic Street Preachers, Levellers, Rage Against the Machine, Sensor and Nirvana, resonated with a sense of righteous political anger. They gave voice to our feeling that life could be better for everyone if we banded together and fight. Many of us shared a sense of collective identity that was conflicted. On the one hand, we each held an individualised sense of self that was in part created by consumerism, yet on the other, wider sense of who we were that rejected the dominant culture, that we felt was fucked. The words of the of the 1998 Levellers song seemed to sum up our situation, retreat into a collective imagination whilst it could still remember a more authentic past.
“There’s only one way of life
And that’s your own.
My father when I was younger
Took me up on to the hill
That looked down on the city smog
Above the factory spill
He said this is where I come
When I want to be free
Well he never was in his lifetime
But these words stuck with me.
I grew up, learned to love and laugh
Circled A’s on the underpass
But the noise we thought would never stop
Died a death as the punks grew up
And we choked on our dreams
We wrestled with our fears
Running through the heartless concrete streets
For a few brief moments, Generation X shaped a space in time through the actions of Swampy. Collectively we willed his direct action on and prevent the construction of the A30 extension road in Devon which was set to slash n burn a landscape of deciduous woodland. Digging himself underground in a series of tunnels designed to collapse and kill him should road builders dig near them. His gallant efforts to protect the environment and challenge the dominance of the motor vehicle were presented to us as an unhinged attempt of environmental fundamentalism to block progress.
As Swampy dug down into his hand-built tunnel under the jaws of road building machinery, those of us who understood the gravity of our situation realised that the government didn’t listen to anyone except the men in suits. Despite his best subterranean efforts, the woodland lost and was exterminated by the power of financial interests and their insatiable hunger to build new roads to supply retail parks with debt laden consumption.
Our resistance- both real and imagined, were overshadowed by the corporate sponsored termination of history. It might have been inevitable that my generation would be blanked out from the final chapter of time with the strike of an X- but as stated by the musician and truth teller Moby; ‘everything was wrong’. At this time Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history and thus the ended of our opportunity to change anything. Right?
As the missing ‘others’, in Douglas Coupland’s 1991 generation defining book ‘Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture’, many of us felt marginalised by our times. We followed Andy, Dag, Claire, Tobias, Elvissa and Tyler into the desert of ambition, no future, veal fattening pens, Mc jobs. Working for the lowest wages, giving nothing but physical labour, we were able to distance ourselves from the corporate masters, by not betraying the integrity of our beautiful minds. In this land of make-believe, we made space for imaginations to stay alive, despite the encroaching desertification of neoliberalism. Although we did not believe anything to be true, except our suffering, these fertile minds were irrigated by Curt Cobain’s 1991 “territorial pissing”.
Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another
Right now
I spent the next decade or so filling time, pissing in the wind, trying to find myself in this alienating world. For a while, I found truth in the physical labour of manual graft. I repudiated my acceptance of the system by withholding my intelligence from actively promoting capitalistic gain, either for me or on behalf of the companies I worked for. In my early 20s myself defeating rebellion flipped burgers and cleaned bins in a MacDonald’s, where I experienced first-hand the detachment of my physical self from consciousness. The repetitive deskilled actions tearing away any creative aspect of being replacing, human spirit with mechanical production line, junk food and fatty liver. I picked orders in an Argos warehouse, running up and down the aisles of consumer goods.
I pushed barrows of concrete that lay the foundations for the parameter fence of Doncaster maximum security prison. With a ragtag gang of labourers, ex-convicts and school dossers, washing high walls with sulphuric acid, in between cigarette breaks. I cleaned the toilets on a building site, Monday morning toilets meet the weekend before. Guinness, greasy breakfasts, kebab meat, chips, cigarette smoke, stink, muddy boot footprints. I filed paper in an office and pulled pints for angry punks in a rock venue, and popped champagne corks for lunchtime lawyers whilst they fondled their mistresses in an underground wine bar. I rolled out lawn turf in the snow of bleak midwinter, but above all I refused to sell my integrity. Back then, as now I took time to scribble down my thoughts through prose and verse. Often after a frustrating day, keeping my mind together in a world where I felt out of place, this world I later came to perceive as Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism.
Those of us on the subcultural fringes of society, viewed Britpop’s popular take on English Britishness, that accompanied New Labour’s mid 1990s ascendancy to power, as a bit so-so. Perhaps this is because Tony Blair sought to brand himself as part of “Cool Britannia”, by the political press. This moment in popular culture reflected, the lifestyle choices of ‘Third Way’ politics, where pop songs like Oasis’ ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’, reflected the apoliticism of ‘the common man’ extracted from history, stripped of radicalism, and transplanted into the same dull suburban lifestyle choices that lead Renton trainspotting on the ceiling, cold turkey in bed. Meanwhile the rusty steel irony of Sheffield based band Pulp, Jarvis Cocker wryly articulated northern tails of artistic squalor and a rejection of hum drum conformity, quirky, cool.
Mannheim calls such cohorts ‘a generation in actuality’, that holds within it key ideas, ideals and attitudes that solidify as something greater than the sum of its parts. Although not all members of this generation might share the same sense of generational location, owing to structural factors such as, gender, ethnicity, and social class, which is especially true in the UK, which is massively stratified by social class. To what extent does this generations perspective, offer us a different way forward from the capitalist reality of the forever now?