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STATES
A M E R I C A N
M I L L E N N I A L
OF THE
OGILVY RED
THINK SERIES
OCT 2015

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NOSUCH
THING
ASA
MILLENNIAL
THERE IS

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The supposed teen-to-early-thirtysomething
generation is nothing more than a convenient
idea, a series of uninteresting generalizations
existing solely in the heads of media pundits and
marketers. There is no shortage of self-anointed
experts on the topic (including a fellow who’s
titled himself ‘Mr. Millennial’), who pen speeches
about Millennials’ purported affections for
smart watches, mobile payments, world travel,
connectivity, health and fitness, and being ‘always-
on.’ Such experts are, unfortunately, missing the
point. And what a pity, because the realities of
this American cohort’s experiences run the gamut
of scintillating to stagnating, awe-inspiring to
heartbreaking.

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America is now changing too
quickly for people with a twenty
year age difference to possess
a common history. A 33 year
old Millennial remembers what
it was like to first get dial-up in-
ternet access; a 13 year old has
never been without Facebook.
One generation, many realities:
A whole world of change occurring
between some influential headsets.

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Millennials are actually a series of subgroups,
most quickly divided by the factors of age and
socioeconomic situation. To begin remedying
past errors of communication, I refer to “old
Millennials”and“youngMillennials”inordertotease
out important differences. Additionally, income
inequality runs so rampant among this generation
that both The Economist and The New York Times
have recently questioned why riots have not yet
broken out in the streets. “Why aren’t the poor
storming the barricades?” asks The Economist.
The New York Times blames a lingering, vastly
aggrandized notion of the individual’s importance
in American society (more on that in a moment),
but the tide could soon change.

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entrepreneurial members of the older Millennial
subset are altogether reinventing the planet.
Earlier this year, the UN speculated that world
hunger could be completely eradicated by 2025;
MIT’s City Farm initiative is developing 12 inch by
12 inch vertical garden bases that could feed an
urban family for months. Elon Musk’s new solar
battery could eventually take homes off the grid.
The sharing economy is teaching us to live—and
thrive—on much less. Social media networks,
though still in their infancy, are teaching us to
extend our circle of caring. When someone gets
married, we emerge from life’s woodwork to post
a quick note of congratulations. The ‘Like’ button—
an older Millennial’s invention—might be a bit silly,
but the sentiment behind it is not.
Vertical Farming: In the future, we
won’t waste so much space.
ONAHOPEFULNOTE

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We find the states of the American
Millennial in between these sets of
extremes—the prosperous might
of Silicon Valley, the resource-
barren inner cities and emptying
suburbs; those of us who witnessed
Steve Jobs delivering his liminal
iPhone keynote speech in 2007
while gathered around laptops like
campfires, and those of us who
unearthed the YouTube of it years
later, watching it as a historical text.
We will attempt to imagine their
near future without making
generalizations about the few (the
‘wearable tech-loving’ rich people
most often contorted by the media
to represent ‘all Millennials’) at the
expense of ignoring the many (the
90% of Americans who collectively
only control 25% of this nation’s
wealth; the 90% of Americans who
do not currently see a clear place
for themselves in our economic
future as jobs automate or move
overseas).
It is here that we find the
American Millennials.

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INCOME
EQUALITY:
IT’S JUST
AMERICAN DREAMIN’

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IWOULDN’TMIND
IWOULDN’TMIND
PAYINGMOREINTAXESIFITWENTTOTHE
THINGSTHATREALLYMATTERED.IFITWENT
TOEDUCATION,TOPEOPLEINPOVERTY,
- Jay-Z

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AMERICAN FAMILY
INCOME DISTRIBUTION
Source: Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). Unit of analysis is the family.
The initial year is 1959 because the income variables in a decennial census or March
Current Population Surey (CPS) interview refer to the preceding calendar year.

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and have never lived outside the upper-middle-
class bubble, the danger increases that the people
who have so much influence on the course of the
nation have little direct experience with the lives of
ordinary Americans, and make their judgements
about what’s good for other people based on their
own highly atypical lives.”
AS THE NEW UPPER CLASS INCREASINGLY
CONSISTS OF PEOPLE WHO WERE BORN
INTO UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILIES
- Charles A. Murray, “Coming Apart”
“

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In a nation facing ever-increasing financial inequality,
MILLENNIALS INHERITED AN AMERICAN DREAM
SO FANTASTICALLY UNREALISTIC, THEY HAD NO
CHOICE BUT TO REWRITE IT.
After all, who can afford
a mortgage when they’re
burdened with a trillion
collective dollars in student
debt? Who wants to have
multiple kids amid record
levels of underemployment
and a workforce largely
turning to overseas workers
and robots? Who will ever
retire if Social Security is
slated to run dry in 2033?
If, in the words of Da Vinci,
art lives from constraints and
dies from freedom, then it’s
no wonder that a subset of
older Millennials have become
gloriously inventive. Given the
dire circumstances (and the
historic lack of substantial
government intervention), the
generation’s brightest business
leadersarereinventing100year
legacy business models—from
advertising to automotives—
so quickly it’s as if it’s for sport.

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PRESIDENT
BARACK
OBAMA
has called our nation’s rising income inequality “The defining
challenge of our time.” If income, for most people, is not
rising, then the only viable solution is to learn to live on less.
Thankfully, this sentiment is the very bedrock of the older
Millennial-created sharing economy.
In a display of considerable vision and might, Airbnb has just launched an ad
campaign for its “Belong Anywhere” tagline. The campaign opens with some
of the most formidable questions that humanity has asked since the dawn of
civilization: “Is man kind? Are we good?” Quickly, the viewer can see Airbnb’s
answer: a resounding, absolute yes. After all, if we can share strangers’ homes,
then there is no such thing as strangers anymore, right? This proposed virtue is
not to be considered lightly, as Airbnb is now one of the most valuable companies
in the world. Look to Airbnb’s model: they are aiding the American middle class
when the government is not (more on that later). While companies their size
routinely deplete the earth of resources, Airbnb uses existing resources.
In a world of increasing inequality, Airbnb is increasing equality.

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OMG,
MILLENNIALS
L I K E ,
A R E S O
ENTITLED

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MILLENNIALS
MISUNDERSTOOD.
OF BEING
EXPERIENCE
SHARE THE
Trend reports love to assume the
lackadaisical tropes of young adulthood,
making blanket statements like “Millennials
aren’t into politics.” These reports cite stats
describing low voter turnout and a general
distrust in government. Edward Mendelson
embodies this sentiment well in a recent
interview with The Baffler’s John Summers
wherein he says, of today’s youth, “People
who are staring at their cell phones never
rampage. They merely bump into things.”

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MILLENNIALS
OF BEING
EXPERIENCE
SHARE THE
What Mendelson misses is that even though
thebodypoliticof(especiallyolder)Millennials
may not look the same as that of Boomers
in the 1960s, it exists. In 2012, Reddit co-
founder Aaron Swartz, then 26 years old, led
a national effort to prevent the passage of the
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) by generating
an online petition and an accompanying
Twitter protest, all without needing to leave
his apartment. As part of this digital protest,
millions of Twitter users changed their profile
pictures to feature an anti-SOPA logo. These
protesters fought against significant odds—
after all, what congressperson understands
anything about the internet, let alone SOPA?—
but the modernist, mobile-era tactics worked:
SOPA was stopped.

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More recently, New York asked the private tech
sector to help them build a social media platform –
– as a way to adapt government services to the
behavior patterns of younger citizens, rather than
expecting those citizens to change.
SOMETHING MORE LIKE FACEBOOK 311

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Lastly, in June of 2015, after the Supreme
Court’s monumental marriage ruling served
as a rallying cry for much of the nation, social
media proved a fertile ground for unexpected
amounts of pro-LGBTQ self-expression, with
26MM users altering their personal profile
picture so that it featured a Pride flag. This
idea originated at Facebook, and it had even
bigger intentions than supporting 2015
advances in human rights. As The Atlantic
chronicled, “Facebook is looking at what
factors contributed to a person changing his
or her profile photo, but the implication of
their research is much larger: At stake is our
understanding of whether groups of citizens
can organize online—and how that collective
activity affects larger social movements.”
Old, young, rich and poor Millennials all
support (and consistently have supported)
LGBTQ rights in far greater numbers than
their elder generations, and were an elemental
part of America’s recent sociopolitical
transformation. Millennials’ participation
was essential to the movement, even if their
boldest public act was to add a rainbow filter
to a Facebook profile photo; for a teen in rural
Alabama, that one act might have required
tremendous bravery.
The success of rainbow profiles and
SOPA hashtags demonstrates the sort of
latent generational political potential of
Millennials that academics like Edward
Mendelson consistently miss; however, if a
simple online act yields federal change, then
it is still a protest, and it is absolutely still
revolutionary.

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GOOD CALL, MARK

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HOPE

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Yes, Millennials are protesting, though
it does not look like other protesting.
Yes, Millennials are paying attention
to the world around them, even though
their response is different; sometimes
it comes not in the form of a political
dispute, but in the form of a startup that
offers people a better way. Millennials
also remain a young generation, even
in its ‘older’ cohorts. After all, who’s to
underestimate a group of people that,
according to The New York Times’
Clive Thompson, reads and writes more
prolifically than any culture since the
ancient Greeks?
Millennials bring the country not
only hope, but great hope. And this is
certainly not the first time that America’s
aspirations have drastically altered
within the confines of a reality.
YES
MILLENNIALS
PROTESTING
ARE

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1
MILLENNIALS
HOMEAND

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1THE NEW SELF
SMALL SELFis the
No More Endless Aspiring
to “Strike It Rich;”

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1THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT
trend common to all the
Millennial generational cohorts
is a sharp decrease in interest in
homeownership. This trend will be
thesolebasisofthedeconstruction
andreconstructionoftheAmerican
Dream. Its importance cannot be
overstated.

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wherein hard work renders economic
ascension possible from any rung in
society. In an era of ever-increasing income
inequality, shrinking natural resources and
continual job outsourcing, this dream has
become especially farcical.
Millennials, unlike the Xers before them, are
notparticularlyinterestedinbuyinghomes,
which to date has been America’s primary
method of wealth accumulation. Weary
of home-as-investment, many Millennials
are decoupling the emotion around the
word ‘home’ from the functional notion of
‘ownership.’ To most Millennials, a rented
home can still be a home if it contains the
people (and pets) that you love.
CENTURIES
AGO
AMERICAWASBUILT
ONTHEBACKOFA
HORATIOALGER-STYLE
RAGS-TO-RICHES
FANTASY,

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In the recent words of The Washington
Post: “The homeownership rate in
the U.S. has been tumbling since the
height of the housing boom. Fewer and
fewer of us own our homes — because
foreclosures claimed them from us, or
because the housing bust taught us to be
wary, or because the economy ensured
that families who might have bought in
the past can’t afford a home today.”
This shift has occurred for a host of
very powerful reasons. An American
economy predicated, since 1942, on
selling Americans home mortgages
they can’t afford, therefore tethering
them to organization life and stabilizing
the GDP—went dreadfully awry in 2008.
How dreadfully awry?
From the end of World War II to the
beginning of the housing bubble in 1997,
American housing prices actually stayed
quite stable. However, between 1997 and
2006, the price of the typical American
home increased by 124%.
A N D T H E N
I T A L L
C O L L A P S E D .
Millennials watched parents, aunts and
uncles, and other adults be ravaged by
the financial crisis of 2008.

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1
DOOMS
DAYJUMBO
MCMANSION
MORTGAGE
for the

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Consider the ignominious vastness of the classic,
Midwest American 1990s Toll Brothers great room:
itsvaultedceilingsdesignedalmostpurposefullyto
bleed heat in the winter and air conditioning in the
summer. Since this unaffordable room’s heyday,
Americans’ tastes may have collectively changed
for the better. It’s a bit of a stretch, but one of Steve
Jobs’ greatest legacies was in teaching the world
that the design of something really matters, that its
ingenuity is the aggregate of choices made about
its features, materials, longevity, environmental
impact, and overall aesthetic appeal. Perhaps, in
the wake of such teachings, it’s become too hard
to go from admiring the thoughtful curves and
proportions of a smartphone (or a well-done IKEA
item, or a Shake Shack burger, or a Toms Shoe-
-the thoughtfully-designed-ordinary-object list is
too long to continue) to then facing the usual Toll
Brothers chicanery.
Dreams Deferred: The Bluth family
home in “Arrested Development”

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1LESS
SMALLER,
SMARTER HOMES
Natural Resources

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Another important move is the potential
departure of the ideal home being a large
home. According to CNN, as of 2014, “The
average size of homes built last year hit 2,600
square feet, an all-time high that surpassed
even the housing bubble years, when homes
averaged around 2,400 square feet.”
Now that many Americans have been priced
out of owning such homes, the simplicity
of tiny homes is beginning to hold broader
appeal. Like the best trends, tiny homes
will increase in popularity partially due to
necessity (most Millennials will not have
another option) and partially from cultural
ingenuity. After all, if you have less home, you
have considerably fewer expenses, which can
be a great thing.
“A tiny house costs anywhere between $10,000
and $40,000 to build, with the average being
just $23,000. At such low prices, it’s no wonder
that 68 percent of tiny house owners don’t have
a mortgage. It’s been estimated that Millennials
are the newest and largest group of potential
homebuyers. However, more than 50 percent
rent because they can’t afford the initial down
payment. Tiny housing, as a result, can be an
appealing alternative, particularly since many
Millennials live alone or don’t have children.”
As recently noted by real estate
investor Marco Rubel:

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Tiny home terms are wonderfully practical
Concurrently, Tesla’s home battery will only make the small
home and the eco home more possible (and more affordable).

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The Verge, in an article titled “Why Tesla’s
Battery For Your Home Should Terrify
Utilities,” suggested what follows:
“The prospect of cheap solar panels
combined with powerful batteries has
been a source of significant anxiety in
the utility sector. Suddenly regulated
monopolies are finding themselves in
competition with their own customers.” An
Edison Electric Institute report suggested
that the transition could be as abrupt as
the shift from landlines to cell phones.
FORECAST STORAGE MARKET
from GTM Research
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
2011 2012 2013 2013E 2015E 2016E 2017E 2018E
$57
$140
$56 $42
$144
$380
$563
$1,001
Residential (Million $)
Non-Residential (Million $)

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Cumulatively, the aspiration to ‘live
onless’couldbethesinglegreatest
thing to happen to America’s
middle class since FDR’s New
Deal. Ending a cycle of endless,
mindless consumption could
enable Americans to live lives
they can afford and find meaning
through nature and community.

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1
BEST-
FRIENDS
The
new American Dream
-AS-FAMILY

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Recently, trending topics on social media show an
American populace intrigued by a killer new idea
about home, community and meaning: instead of a
McMansion, why not aspire to live in a “bestie row”
of eco-houses, alongside your nearest and dearest?
DOESN’T
THAT
SOUND
LIKE A
LOT MORE
FUN?

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“I’m happy to see the little-house movement
taking off. If anything ‘good’ came out of the
recession, it was people hitting reset and
realizing they don’t need so much space and
stuff to be happy. I feel proud to be working
with clients who have had that realization, that
less is more.”
The ‘Bestie Row’ architect
on the viral phenomena of the article:

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This new notion of
HITTING IT BIG
BY KEEPING IT SMALL
is about so much more than the size of one’s
house. Journalists (in places like Medium
Matter, The New York Times and The New
Yorker) are beginning to question Americans’
ceaseless quest for grandiosity on a spiritual
as well as material level, almost as if the latter
made room for the former. David Brooks has
become especially curious about the topic
lately, with his article on life’s purpose gaining
such groundswell momentum that he’s now
launched a full series of articles on the topic,
as well as a portion of the NYT’s website where
readers can submit their own essays on the matter.
A prefabricated
home

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2

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2
MILLENNIALS
COMMUNITY
AND

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2TRUST
The Sudden, Wild,
Unexpected
Evolution of

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As previously noted, Airbnb
has become one of the most
valuable companies in the
world in just a handful of years.
Older Millennials have warmed
to the idea, getting over the
‘creepy’ part of staying in
someone else’s house to now
fully embrace it, and younger
Millennials have never known
an adult world without it.

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AIRBNBAIRBNB: NOT SOME RICH PEOPLE THING
In very heartening news,
Airbnb’s June 2015 study
of its American user base
revealed that the company
has not created some rich
kid’s global playground. The
report, titled “The Impact
of Airbnb on Middle Class
Income Stagnation”, cites
that the company is no less
than “an economic lifeline,
making it possible to pay the
bills and make ends meet.”
Aside from being the powerful
driver of positive change for
whathadbecomeanincredibly
corrupthousingmarket,Airbnb
has created something else
that will continue to reshape
the American socioeconomic
system: more trust. Again,
note the lack of government
intervention and the reliance
of Millennial startup invention.
In order to share someone’s home, you first have
to trust them. This idea sounds simpler and less
pervasive that it really is: soon our credit scores
will be 90% based on our ‘social’ scores, a very
logical step in a world of sharing economies
that depend on us being highly trustworthy
and generally well-intended toward each other.
Mistreat an Airbnb home, leave the place a
mess? Maybe American Express won’t want you
as a Gold cardmember. This is karma’s (slightly
creepy, yet slightly inevitable) shining moment.
Sharing America: Building A Bedrock of Trust

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BFROM A SCHOLAR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK COMES THIS MODEL:
More positively, trust actually begets the
creation of more trust. It could easily be
argued that the public nature of the sharing
economy actually makes us better people.
From a psychological standpoint, knowing
that others are watching increases our
desire to impress.

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2SHARING
THE SAD
The bright
future of
reality of
privacy

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“Technology develops
cumulatively, rather than
in isolated heroic acts.”
Jared Diamond,
Guns, Germs and Steel

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“[In the future] there will be chips all over
the high street relaying information and you
will be bombarded with digital information
everywhere you go. You will need a digital
bubble force field — a shield that lets
through what you want and blocks
everything else.”
Ian Pearson,
futurist, 2005

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itsuseswillquicklyproliferate.Thenew
social score will be used everywhere.
Unfortunately there is, so far, a lack of
privacy around such data (though in
the future it’s not a stretch to imagine
a second type of sharing economy
proliferating, based off a more Bitcoin-
like notion of private, encrypted, but
still-validated trust).
Millennials,youngandold,richandpoor,
are yet to see any real repercussion
from so much of their data and identity
now being fully accessible. As a result,
they largely don’t care about internet
security when polled on the matter.
ONCE THE
TRUST GRID EXISTS,
A screenshot from my location history in Google Maps, one of Google’s lesser-known
features. Google has an archive of my every single location for the past 5+ years. This
morning, you’ll see, I commuted from my home in DUMBO to the New York office of
Ogilvy & Mather. With the bottom slider you can see that I left home at 8:30, got out
of the subway at 9:10 and arrived at Ogilvy at 9:20.
This is the kind of tracking that currently does
not concern American Millennials.

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IT WILL ULTIMATELY BE THE
MILLENNIALS’ RESPONSIBILITY
to continue Ed Snowden’s planet-
altering work in protecting human
privacy, and given the generation’s
collective lack of concern for the
matter, privacy might be something
Generation Z has to fix.
Additionally, the generation’s sense
of humor and current ‘who cares’
attitude toward public surveillance
have had an interesting effect on
the broader culture. Case in point:
in a desperate grasp at relevance,
the CIA emerged on Twitter in
mid-2014 as if the agency was
entering a bar at happy hour,
greeting a bunch of pals from
work. Interesting tonality choice,
given the agency’s foreign
and domestic roles in society;
seemingly one only the ¯_(:/)_/¯
Millennial era could yield.

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Everyone’s a Comedian: The CIA makes an appeal to Millennial youth with its first tweet.

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3

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3MILLENNIALS
TRANSPORTATION
AND

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3
An overhaul of life expectations
and living situations will
inevitably produce an influential
overhaul of the transportation
system. Though the sharing
economy is set to transform
too many lines of business to
detail here, transportation is
important for 3 reasons:
IT REFLECTS
IT ALTERS
IT AFFECTS
ANOTHER RAPID
TRANSFORMATION IN
MILLENNIALS’ CORE VALUES
OUR RELATIONSHIP
TO COMMUNITY
AND GOVERNMENT
THE EVERYDAY.
O3
O2
O1

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3CARIN AMERICA
The meaning of a

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Cars have meant different things to
older and younger Millennials. Older
Millennials counted the days until they
could get their permits and licenses
as teens, and the freedom a car
provided was the definitive adolescent
milestone.
Their first cell phone was the freedom.
Who wants to fight with parents about
going to visit a girl, when you could
not fight with them and text her from
the safety of your room instead? Less
than 50% of younger Millennials have
even bothered to get a license when
they legally could. That percentage
continues to drop every year.
YOUNGER MILLENNIALS?
Couldn’t care less.
Freedom, Old Millennials-Style
Freedom, Young Millennials-Style: The popular messaging app Kik

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Younger Millennials might really be onto
something: from a safety standpoint, it’s
probably a good thing that cars are becoming
a commodity. Younger Millennials have
largely already dismissed the idea of owning
a car. Again, the pattern of this generation’s
ability to completely dismiss century-old
ritual and expectation is apparent.
THEYARETOTALLY
COOLWITHWILD
AMOUNTSOF
CHANGE.

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3
TRANSPORTATION’S
EQUALITY
ISSUE

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HELICOPTERS
BUSES
AIRPLANES
LONG CAR RIDES
BOATS
Blade
Bridj, RidePal
NetJets
Split
Coastalyfe, GetMyBoat
THOUGH
EVERY
TYPE OF
TRANSPORT
NOW HAS
ITS “UBER,”
CURRENTLY THERE’S
A DOWNSIDE FOR MANY
MILLENNIALS.
These new transport methods are
currently accompanied by extreme
income inequality, and will be so
for at least the foreseeable future.
There is a ripple effect to this sort
of en masse privatization that has
a serious effect on broader society.
As The New York Times notes,
“Santa Clara County Valley
TransportationAuthorityexecutives
note that 20 percent of the workers
who ride the private tech fleets
between San Francisco and Silicon
Valley would have otherwise used
public transit. The dark outlook
presented by the explosion of
private transit systems is that an
elite class of tech workers will be
moved in style, while the overall
quality of transit will decline.”
In the long haul, there is still
reason for optimism. For example,
Helsinki’s goal is to go car-free. In
the meantime, transport is another
form of inequality that less affluent
Millennials will have to contend
with in order to succeed.

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MILLENNIALS
CAREERAND

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“Weshoulddoawaywiththeabsolutelyspeciousnotion
that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that
one in ten thousand of us can make a technological
breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The
youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this
nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs
because of this false idea that everybody has to be
employed at some kind of drudgery because, according
to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his
right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and
people making instruments for inspectors to inspect
inspectors. The true business of people should be to
go back to school and think about whatever it was they
were thinking about before somebody came along and
told them they had to earn a living.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, 1960

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WITH
LESS HOUSE,
LESS (OWNED) STUFF,
LESS MORTAGE,
YOU NEED LESS JOB
LESS FAMILY,
LESS CAR,
(the birthrate is at a historic low,
and continues to drop every year)
Consider what that insight
could mean for the Millennial
era of the American economy
in that one aforementioned
question:
What happens to the future
of employment when it’s no
longer an economic necessity
to be employed?

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RIP, Boomer and Xer-style employment.
We’ll miss your excellent office accessories.

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IS
THETHE
TRUTHIS
America
already isn’t
fully employed.
That’s been the economic
reality for the entire Obama
administration—and it’s time for
our culture to start improving and
reflecting the new status quo,
rather than trying to ‘hope’ it into
becoming something it’s not.

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A recent piece in The Atlantic titled
examines the stark truth that
many former American hubs of
manufacturing are now ghost
towns, and many of America’s
most popular careers will
soon be automated. The top 4
professionsintheUSalone—retail
salesperson, cashier, food and
beverage server, and office clerk—
are professions that employ a full
15.4 million Americans, or 10%
of our workforce. All of these
professions (and many more)
are at substantial risk of being
outsourced to software in the
very, very near future.
“ “
And the article goes on to note:
“In 1964, the nation’s most valuable company, AT&T,
was worth $267 billion in today’s dollars and employed
758,611 people. Today’s telecommunications giant,
Google, is worth $370 billion but has only about 55,000
employees—less than a tenth the size of AT&T’s
workforce in its heyday.
...The share of prime-age Americans (25 to 54 years
old) who are working has been trending down since
2000. Among men, the decline began even earlier: the
share of prime-age men who are neither working nor
looking for work has doubled since the late 1970s, and
has increased as much throughout the recovery as it
did during the Great Recession itself.”
THE END OF WORK

73.
75
in the country’s
economics that more Millennials, old and young, rich
and poor, will learn to live without holding down full-
time jobs.
There will be numerous, obvious upsides. New cultures
will emerge around ‘working without work.’ Needing
more structured ways to busy themselves, communal
efforts born from a sharing economy-style ethos will
emerge,inwhichpeoplecanderivethesenseofpersonal
satisfaction and purpose that comes from working
efforts that don’t necessarily pay in money. Think back
to the WPA from FDR’s New Deal, and you can start to
imagine how diverse skillsets could be put to use en
masse (even though likely, with the Republican Party’s
current interest in small government, it will be startups
that offer Millennials these services, or at least broker
them through the appropriate government agencies,
not the government agents directly themselves).
IT IS WITH THIS CHANGE
1930s Economic Revival & The WPA: As
much about art as it was about industry

74.
76
Canoe House, University of Iowa:
One of the WPA’s loveliest legacies

75.
77
Working for satisfaction and not money is actually
quite realistic. After all, we do ‘make’ things in our
spare time: we created Wikipedia and we upload
400,000 hours of YouTube video every day. We make
so much stuff online that the IDC projects that the
digital universe will reach 40 zettabytes (ZB) by 2020.

76.
78
The Columbus Idea Foundry: The world’s largest makerspace is in Ohio.
It helps those displaced by a changing global economy find a way to ‘do’ things
again, and is credited with representing the future of communal space.

77.
79
Academics are studying the many
ways to make a life without a high
annual income. As one expert says
in The End of Work,
“A lot of people in the [under-
employed] cities make post-wage
arrangements, working for tenancy
under the table, or trading services.”
Full time corporate employment
is, after all, a relatively new notion
in American history, an evolution
of post-agrarian industry. Perhaps
as technology improves, we’ll
migrate back to a more agrarian
model, albeit with the aid of a
thousand wonderful adventures
that our grandparents could never
have dreamed of.
(And more on that in a minute.)

78.
80
3
WHITE
COLLAR
AMERICA ‘Startup’ will lose a
lot of its reverie

79.
81
3
Much in the way that top
universities are responding
to the presence of startups
by becoming more like
startups (online learning,
venture-funded programs,
etc.) big corporate jobs will
soon modernize by acting
more like the startups
that compete with them.
For those lucky enough to
remain in America’s white
collar workforce in ten
years, this transformation
will be quite beneficial.

80.
82
Startup life, however, will start to lose
its luster once venture capital funding
normalizes and the market corrects;
the VC industry is currently enjoying
its current all-time investment high
(over $52B in total last year). The fires
of this enthusiasm remained fanned
by IPOs like Twitter, which is some-
how still a publicly traded company
despite being unable to retain users,
grow users, turn a profit or innovate.
The primary reason that startup
jobs will become less revered by
highly educated, experienced, aging
Millennials? The industry’s base
expectation that all employees take
salaries at significantly less value
than they’re worth, on the (very) off-
chancethatstockoptionswillvestand
the company will IPO. Estimates vary,
but approximately 97% of startups
see no such wealth-creating exit.
These talented minds are therefore
currently accepting less money to
make less money, and often for years
of their careers—with no upside
attached other than a branded hoodie
and some free lunch. Such economic
dalliances are unconcerning to the
young only: no parent thinks lightly of
taking a 60% pay cut.
College/Startup Mashup:
Stanford’s Venture Studio

81.
83
, Fortune 500 companies will lure talent by starting to borrow
the best aspects of startup culture (project-based work, clearer upsides
for successes, agile teams) as Millennials take over the C-suite roles and
implement the ideas of their startup brethren. White collar careers will
soon look more like a pastiche of activities, a mosaic, rather than a linear
ascension. Having a side hustle will not only be standard, but encouraged,
because it means your employees possess a richer myriad of skills. The
company man can now have a company on the side.
INSTEAD
Man-children at work and
play in the offices of Hooli,
the thinly veiled parody of
Google from the hit HBO
show “Silicon Valley”

82.
84
4
GLOBAL,
MALLEABLE
HYBRID
COMPANIES
“Another shakedown
on shakedown street.”
- The Grateful Dead

83.
85
MESSAGES SENT PER DAY (BILLIONS)
Sources: Portio Research, a16z; The Economist, 2015
“WhatsApp and other over-the-top
services are projected to drain global
telecommunications companies
of $386 billion in revenue between
2012 and 2018 from the use of OTT
mobile voice calling alone. Could
most telecommunications service
providers survive a decline like this in
a core business?”
- The Global Center for Digital
Business Transformation
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
1996 2000 2005 2010 2015
(forecasted)
SMS WhatsApp

84.
86
In other words, Samsung Electronics’ competition is
no longer LG and Sony, it’s any company that feels like
dabbling in screens. Both Facebook and Google have
successfully proven to be capable of truly unanticipated,
agile crossover: Facebook is deep in mobile payments,
Google is working on curing cancer, and Amazon owns
small business cloud. Not bad for a digital Rolodex, a
search engine, and a bookseller.
The term sometimes used here is “combinatorial
innovation,” an idea credited to Hal Varian, the Chief
Economist at Google and a Professor Emeritus at
the University of California, Berkeley. Combinatorial
innovation is steeped in the history of mechanization,
and it predicts that businesses in various industries
will rapidly and unexpectedly “combine” to form new
products. This is the theory that could have predicted
Facebook becoming Western Union and Google a
medical research lab.
IT’S NOT JUST
THAT INDUSTRIES
WILL BE
REINVENTED, BUT
THAT THEY WILL
ALSO CROSS-
POLLINATE.
IN THE FUTURE ECONOMY,

85.
87
The implications for such innovation are daunting: it’s one
thing for companies to track their top competitors, and
another for every company to be a potential competitor.
Whereas now most market disruption comes from
startups, corporate intra-preneurs will gain prominence
in the future, as they help prepare long-established
companies for wild crossover.
It is interesting here to note that talent nurturing and
identification will be one of the primary challenges
during the next wave of Millennial work: Facebook itself
famously turned down hiring Whatsapp founder Brian
Acton in 2009 (as did Twitter), instead opting to pay
out $19B for his company just a handful of years later.
(Even Millennials sometimes struggle to identify fellow
talented Millennials!) Given that the global industry’s
new norm will be incessant disruption, figuring out who
has the special gift for ‘knowing what’s next’ will prove
an exceptionally important challenge.

86.
88
Hearteningly, companies are
emerging to help established,
important companies hire
more diversely, since diversity
of experience and thought
will be absolutely crucial to
future innovation. Entelo has
built an algorithm that helps
HR departments find perfect
candidates outside their
“normal” (predominantly affluent,
predominantly white) hunting
grounds. It has been statistically
proven that companies with
women on their boards
outperform those without. It is
hopeful that Millennials, who
ushered in the era of LGBTQ
rights, will be more open to this
critical change than the Xers and
Boomers who preceded them.
The $19B hiring whoopsies.

87.
89
The Entelo Team: An HR startup that
helps companies hire more diversely

88.
90
4THE MICRO STARTUP
THE NEW
STARTUP

89.
91
4
Startup culture won’t go away—
not in the slightest—but it will
evolve and improve. The tools of
mass production democratized
by the internet all but insist on
the continuation of industry
disruption by small companies.
However the norms around
what a startup is and is not will
change.
THE MICRO STARTUP

90.
92
A crop of different startups will soon emerge with different
goals—comfortably supporting 3-5 employees and their
families and realistic, long-term growth—rather than
vaulting their debt into the stratosphere on the back of
phony ‘valuation’ calculations, hoping for a huge exit or an
IPO. These new, smaller ventures will sometimes be funded,
sure, and sometimes the funding will come from traditional
VC investors, for more reasonable terms. Sometimes
funding will also come from larger corporations, as a way
for those corporations to retain top talent and have access
to fresh IP in a style of employment the talent finds less
constraining. Most white collar Millennials see less need for
a 9-to-5 office culture than their older counterparts.

91.
93
will hopefully widen the entrepreneur
aperture, allowing non-white, non-
affluent, non-male, non-Ivy League
citizens to start a startup. After
all, the fortunes left to be made in
Silicon Valley involve innovating for
the 99%, not the 1%. Bill Gates’ vision
was a computer in every home, not
a computer in the richest homes.
The ideas that better life for the 99%
won’t occur to Silicon Valley without
significant culture change.
THIS LEVELING OUT
OF THE ECONOMIC
PLAYING FIELD
Coldhubs: A brilliant startup for the 99%. In developing countries, almost half of
the produced food rots in the sun; Coldhubs provides solar-powered refrigeration
for an affordable fee. These are the billionaires of the future.

92.
94
4
R E T I R
E M E N T
R E T I R
E M E N T
OF

93.
95
4

94.
96
Millennials are considerably under-financed,
which is why they have no choice but to
start living on significantly less. As they age,
additional factors will continue to bear down
on their financial future:
1.
2.
3.
4.
SOCIALSECURITYISUNDER-FUNDED
MILLENNIALS’LIFEEXPECTANCYWILLINCREASE
COLLEGEDEBTWON’TDISAPPEAR
ROBOTIZATIONOFTHEWORKFORCEISEXPECTED
TOCUTBLUE(ANDWHITE)COLLARJOBS

95.
97
Millennials will work through their lives, potentially
changing professions, but nonetheless working.
As Slate points out, “The notion of retirement is
a relatively new invention. A century ago, 7 in 10
over-65s in the United Kingdom were working.
Today, about 2 in 10 are. (Similar changes
have happened in the United States.)”
Additionally, when Otto von Bismark created
the notion of a state-funded retirement
pension in the 1880s, life expectancy upon
hitting age 65 was a mere 18 more months.
Now, it’s 23 years.
NO LONGER WILL THEY RETIRE

96.
98
Luckily, the purpose of technology is to make
life better and cheaper. New business models
are already emerging, creating entirely new
layers of work. The European-based startup
La Ruche Qui Dit Oui is attempting to usurp
the grocery store for a market of local sellers,
each covering off the production of a different
bit of produce or good.
Imagine a world in which you spend two days
a week harvesting tomatoes, and then trade
your tomatoes for the other things you need
in the market.
La Ruche Qui Dit Oui doesn’t just represent an
accurate depiction of how artisans functioned
in past economies; it represents many hard-
driving venture capitalists’ vision of the future.
Union Square Ventures recently led a $9MM
round of funding for the startup (and, of
course, all of the accompanying proprietary
technology that makes scaling and running
such markets so much easier than it was in
the 1600s!).
Imagine a life in Millennials’ older years wherein
theirprimaryfinancialobligationistocontribute
their week’s harvest, or their handmade chairs
and tables to the communally-operated
farmer’s market. Life and career can become
a continual exploration, not a beginning
followed by an end.

97.
99
A La Ruche Qui Dit Oui market in Europe

98.
100
5

99.
101
5MILLENNIALS
COMMUNICATIONS
AND

100.
102
5FACEBOOK’S
COMING SECOND ERA
OF SUCCESS

101.
103
5“Facebook is building an
incredible moat around
the future of social with
Messenger and WhatsApp.”
– Dan Frommer, qz

102.
104
IMAGINE A NEAR FUTURE WHERE
INSTEAD OF HAVING 50 APPS ON YOUR
PHONE, YOU HAVE ONE APP.
That app that can easily cue
up 50 different APIs in a couple
of commands to keystrokes,
engaging companies like Uber,
Foursquare, Facebook, Airbnb,
Kayak and beyond. This is how
we’ll all use the mobile internet
in 2-3 years. This style of
communication, of course,
will be brought to the world by
a subset of entrepreneurial,
mostly older Millennials.
What makes Messenger, What’s App, Line and WeChat so special?

103.
105
5
GO
EAST,YOUNG MAN,
GO EAST

104.
106
“Here in Western markets, if you
want to interact with a service
from your phone, you either visit
its mobile website or, more likely,
you download the app. In China’s
WeChat and other services across
Asia, the services you may want
to interact with are right there in
your messenger. There’s no need
to download an app: It’s as if you
could just tap on an app in the App
Store and start using it within the
App Store app. This model will be
at least somewhat disruptive to
Google (because it could cut away
from Search) and Apple (because it
could cut away from the App Store).”
Union Square Ventures’ Brian
Libov recently wrote about the future
of messages, explaining Eastern
innovations like WeChat accordingly:

105.
107
One of the most promising facets of the
WeChat economy is the company’s broad
user base: everyone is using WeChat’s
services, shopping interfaces, payment
tools, and entertainment vehicles—not just
privileged few, the rich people, like in America.
Here, apps are largely a trend of the affluent.
60% of people making under $40,000/year
don’t download apps onto their smartphones.
Over 90% of those lower income users do use
texting, though, which is why introducing new
services to the familiar medium of texting will
drastically increase penetration among less
affluent older and younger Millennials.

106.
108
SERVICES LIKE FACEBOOK
MESSENGER WILL REPLACE EVERY
COMPANY’S 1-800 NUMBERS.
In the very, very near future,
Image: Brian Libov
All of this chat functionality will yield
far greater fluidity between strangers
looking to communicate with each
other from an enterprise standpoint,
as well. The ‘walls’ of companies will
become porous. The monolith, relatively
immutable notion of ‘brand’ becomes
somewhat disempowered in this
environment, where more human-to-
human interaction is added into the mix.

107.
109
HotelTonight (which sells last minute hotel
rooms at heavily discounted rates) has just
releasedanewconciergefeaturecalledAces.
HotelTonight staffers replace, via text, the
concierge staffers presumably sitting in the
lobby downstairs. (This is perfect example
of many Millennials preferring one mode of
communication, text—and preferring it for
years—with traditional businesses refusing
to change their practices.) In HotelTonight’s
words, the new feature is “perfect for the
always-on-the-go business traveler, those
checking out a city they’ve never visited
before, or anyone who just wants to plan
less, live more, and let someone else handle
the details.”
CASEINPOINT
HotelTonight’s Ace app. Note the casual
language and the sincerity of the
intrapersonal interaction.

108.
110
Investor Chris Messina is cultivating a list of
these “conversational commerce” startups
on Product Hunt, all almost entirely founded
by affluent Millennials. The list is already 100
companies long. Ideas include things like “Text
a Stanford Nerd,” wherein anyone can asked a
question or seek longer term assistance from
an appropriate ‘nerd’ at Stanford University.
That could be helpful not just for students, but
anyadult.Imaginehowhelpfulsuchcompanies
will be to the world once they are able to expand
past the early-adopting 1%?

109.
111
5
¡NO
MA
NCH
ES!

110.
112
Another compelling facet of WeChat is that
it is semantically sophisticated, capable
of deciphering slang in a dozen different
languages (including Latin!). Soon there will be
far less significant barriers between any two
people in the world communicating with each
other. Not internet access, not language, not
platform. Line, Japan’s WeChat, has inspired
the creation of streams of incredibly detailed
“sticker sets,” which convey nuanced emotions
and situations via picture.
In America, amid Millennials old and young,
Emoji and Bitmoji communicate not only
concepts (hamburger!) but entire worlds
of emotion (‘hamburger’ can equal ennui,
generalist American indulgence culture,
plainness/expectedness, etc etc). Like Line
stickers, Bitmoji can be especially expressive,
linking popular phrases (“I can’t even!”) to a
corresponding image, allowing someone who
might not get the words to learn them by the
picture. Bitmojis effectively can translate a
slang phrase while teaching it. This ability will
prove especially helpful with languages like
Spanish, where much of the popular slang
uses words in ways that aren’t even close to
their official meaning.
For example:
A Line sticker from Japan.

111.
113
5
NEVER
UNDERESTIMATE
GIF
the

112.
114
MOST INTERESTING
OF ALL IS THE GIF,
or the short, animated clip most usually
plucked from a popular film or TV show.
GIFs are extra interesting because
they can have two meanings: the literal
happening in the clip (Tina Fey as Liz
Lemon from 30 Rock, sarcastically
rolling her eyes at Jack Donaghy, her
male boss), which pretty much anyone
can understand and be amused by,
regardless of their familiarity with the
show; and, a secondary, more furtive-
yet-fun meaning to those fully in on
the context of the clip, or those who
are familiar enough with the referenced
television show to get additional ins and
outs of the joke.

113.
115
GIFscanalsoassumenewmeaningsovertime,asblog
commentators, writers, and regular friends on social
media re-appropriate them for specific instances, thus
adding to a video or image’s set of implied references.
For example, a GIF or an image of a cross-eyed cat
can start out as a substitute for saying “I’m out of it.”
Later, a popular internet personality can look at the
GIF and assume a more nuanced explanation of its
circumstance: “When you’re drunk af [as fuck] but you
need to act all serious for a sec.” ‘Tired, out of it’ kitten
is now ‘drunk-but-feigning-interest’ kitten. When the
image is referenced in a blog comment after, say, a
post on a presidential candidate, it assumes both
meanings. Those in on the more furtive one can have
a good snicker.

114.
116
Note the purposefully maligned grammar: this style of lingual
play, which probably first appeared in “I Can Has Cheezburger?”
in the early 2000s, was initially relegated to translating and
anthropomorphizing the supposed internal monologues of pets.
After all, animals can’t speak English, so if a cat somehow found its
way to the keyboard and typed up its thoughts, its grammar should
come off slightly mauled.

115.
117
5ZERODEGREES
SEPARATION
of

116.
118
5
As messaging, new language
forms, and global “inside jokes”
allow for a true communal
conversation, some startups are
having fun with the notion that
there is no longer such thing as
STRANGERS

117.
119
is a startup that’s seen
phenomenal popularity come from a very simple
idea—set an alarm, and a random stranger will call
to wake you up. Wakie calls itself a “social alarm
clock.” People have been reveling in this delight (as
well as the positive psychological effects—you can
scream at an automated alarm, but when a person
calls up, they elicit a very different reaction!).
Wakie’s fans swear by the the moment of pure
serendipity as a fresh way to start their day. Wakie
simply, brilliantly cuts to the most important of
human truths: that we’re all in this together, and
we need every reminder of our unity that we can
get. The less automated, more human, the better.
WAKIE

118.
120
5
ACTUAL
HUMAN
EDITORS
Recode, June 2015
There’s a Shiny New
Trend in Social Media:
“
“

119.
121
5
The next round of technological
innovation will get more
predictive—Google’s Now can
already help you avoid missing
your flight due to a forming
traffic jam on I-78—but it will
also get more emotive, and
human, too.

120.
122
Apple’s latest maneuvers around reinventing
music were all about hiring the humans
behind Beats. Less API, more IQ. Apple
isn’t unique. “In the past months, Twitter,
Instagram and YouTube all announced new
curation features that rely on humans to sift
through and select the best content from
their massive collections of user posts.”
YouTube has announced a partnership with
Storyful to build a new kind of newswire,
one that lets eyewitnesses immediately
contribute video and commentary to
breaking stories. In a matter of minutes
or even seconds, Storyful’s editors verify
the veracity of the source, and the breaking
story is told with previously unimaginable
context. This is the new, true future of
crowdsourced journalism.
Under the aegis of human editors,
young Millennials will partner with news
organizations to contribute stories,
interviews, videos, and other components
of journalism more earnestly. Imagine, in a
year or two, receiving some sort of title and
official badge from The New York Times, for
getting a gripping first-responder video of a
forming protest? Imagine going out of your
way to interview several of the organizers,
and the Times not only verifying but using
your piece? Imagine how great that would
look to a potential employer? This is the
future of crowd publishing. Older Millennials
and their rambling Tumblrs will quickly
become a digital vestige.
A NEW KIND
OF NEWSWIRE

121.
123
5MILLENNIALS
& THE NEWS
QUIT YOUR JOB AND MAKE $10K
A DAY AFTER YOU READ THIS!
A subset of older white-collar Millennials
will potentially be remembered for their
attempt to destroy the news industry. By
either starting or supporting (by means
of their eyeballs) a toxic marshland of
purposefully obfuscated ‘journalismism’
sites like Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post,
Fusion, Thought Catalog, Elite Daily, and
dozens more, Millennials have often
stopped caring where the hell their
information comes from, and whether or
not it’s right.

122.
124
is perhaps the best (as in truly the worst)
example of this type of sensationalist business
model in action; the company has tossed
journalism and advertisements into a blender
and hit the ‘Pulverize’ button.
“[Marissa] Mayer is now banking on an
overtly corrupt model of digital journalism
to help stanch Yahoo’s steady hemorrhage
of ad revenue. What Mayer is pleased to
call the site’s stable of ‘digital magazines’
is, in reality, the barest of fig leaves
for an orgy of sponsored content—i.e.,
copy commissioned, inspected, and
(increasingly) edited by advertisers,
and misleadingly packaged as reliable,
independent journalism in order to win
eyeballs and reader trust.”
Y A H O O
Its failings are perhaps best summarized by noted
writer and former Yahoo editor Chris Lehmann:

123.
125
Like the response to the ‘pink
meat’ of McDonald’s by the
food industry, a Shake Shack
will eventually emerge to
triumphantly to assume a more
well-intended, noble place in the
journalism world. The purposeful
obfuscation of advertisements
will end. It just might take some
subset of Generation Z to do it.
Accurate diagram of an era that we
hopefully leave behind (The Baffler)

124.
126
5
SILICON VALLEY’S
NEW ERA OF ADVERTISING:
FROM PUBLIC RELATIONS TO
PUBLIC RELATIONSHIPS

125.
127
5
“Americans
wouldn’t care if
90% of brands
disappeared
tomorrow.”
- Havas Media to The Guardian -

126.
128
IT’S REALLY HARD TO GET PEOPLE TO CARE
ABOUT BIG COMPANIES. IT’S MUCH EASIER TO
GET PEOPLE TO CARE ABOUT PEOPLE.
One important trend from the
Millennial era (and a definite
carryover from Steve Jobs) is the
CEO public address. Google doesn’t
have to buy 30 second spots during
the World Cup to land themselves
on the front page of every influential
paper and blog; instead, like the
world’s other innovative, powerful
startups and companies, they
routinely hold public conferences to
explain three very important things:
O3
O2
O1
WHAT THEY’RE MAKING
WHY THEY’RE MAKING IT
HOW IT WILL MAKE BOTH INDIVIDUALS’
(AND THE WORLD’S) EXISTENCES BETTER

127.
129
ElonMuskannouncingTESLAEnergy
Xiaomi, Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber,
Spotify, Alibaba, Tesla, and Starbucks: these
are just a few of the companies whose
executives frequently take to the stage to
explain their new plans in plain English. As
a result, traditional marketing products and
practices can look positively Byzantine to
Millennials. If it’s great, if it’s noble, why
not just step outside, take some questions,
show some pictures and explain it? Apple
takes this process so seriously they’ve just
built themselves a new amphitheatre.

128.
130

129.
131
MILLENNIALS
COMMERCE
AND

130.
132
6SILICON
VALLEY
THE LOVE MACHINE

131.
133
6“You want to know how to
paint a perfect painting?
It’s easy. Make yourself
perfect and then just paint
naturally.”
- Robert M. Pirsig,
Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance

132.
134
SILICON VALLEYis obsessed with making your shopping experience
perfect.The minute each transaction is complete,
startups love to ask the user, “Did you love it?”
Here’s the de facto Uber-style 1-5 star rating system
that many mobile commerce companies prefer:
See how easy it is to give love, from 1-5? How
easy it is to complain? Offer a suggestion? Ask for
more information? Comparatively, can corporate
America say that it cares about how each and
every one of its transactions is received?

133.
135
of Millennials in America
now have smartphones. Regardless of how
innovative a category is, to a smartphone-
bearing Millennial, its competition is the
latest set of shopping standards and
experiences created by Silicon Valley.
Here are three trends that will shape
commerce, as more thoughtful living
(tiny homes, communal cars, rented
goods, kaleidoscope careers, sharing and
community) begets more thoughtful buying.
90%

134.
136
PRODUCT
O1
DISTRIBUTION
O2
CRITICAL
O3
RECEPTION
Fixthe
Fixthe
Fixthe

135.
137
PRODUCT
EYEWEAR INDUSTRY
MATTRESS INDUSTRY
CAR INDUSTRY
MOVIE INDUSTRY
OIL INDUSTRY
LIQUOR INDUSTRY
O1
Fixthe
If something about your business model is unethical
(overly harmful to the world, or harmful to consumers by
way of marked-up legacy pricing schemes), then beware,
because Silicon Valley wants you gone. No amount
of feel-good commercials, branding or purposefully
obfuscated content plays can save you.
Glasses were marked up 500% Warby Parker
Forced individual ownership even though cars spend 90% of their lives idle Uber, Zipcar
Didn’t ever have sales Caskers, Lot18
The environment had to die for fuel Tesla battery
Marked them up 200 - 300% Casper
Placed pointless constraints around content availability Netflix

136.
138
Silicon Valley has trained its entrepreneurs to hunt
these industries down, make replacement products
that are earnest and efficient, and then put the
dinosaurs out of business.
Here’s venture capitalist Paul Graham on hunting down the most
lucrative of the Fortune 500 dinosaurs:
“Find a cure for the disease of which things like
the RIAA is a symptom. Something is broken when
Sony and Universal sue children [over pirated
music]. Actually, at least two things are broken: the
software that file sharers use, and the record labels’
business model. When the dust settles in 20 years,
what will this world look like? What components of
it could you start building now?”
O1

137.
139
Millennials are waiting for Silicon Valley to systematically reinvent every category
of business; in fact, they’ve come to expect nothing less. In mere months, old and
young Millennials have subverted decades and centuries-old businesses.

138.
140
DISTRIBUTIONO2
Fixthe
The coming era of ‘Brand Tribes’: Affluent and less affluent Millennials alike won’t have to shop
in the future if they don’t want to because the machines will do it for them. Machines can even
take an individual’s ethics into account while they do it.
TODAY
Amazon Dash
TOMORROW
Jet.com
Just push a button you stick on your washing
machine and you’ve instantly ordered more Tide.
The purchase experience has been reduced to its
simplest act. An advertiser’s ability to influence it is
all but gone.
An Amazon competitor that will make bulk discount
deals on one specific product in a category. Imagine
an Amazon that only sells one kind of dishwashing
soap… But that dishwashing soap is half the price of
competitive soaps anywhere else.

139.
141
And now, the Brand Tribe explains itself: Imagine
group-buying deals based on preferences. Never
think about what brand of soap, garbage bag or
spongemostrepresentsyou. Jetwillnotonlyfigure
it out, but broker a discount based on the ‘tribe’
you’re in. The cheap-o tribe? The environmental
tribe? The luxury tribe? Some blending of the
aforementioned?
You’ll be a member. Household purchases will
be entirely automated through sensors and then
filtered through your own preset preferences.
Uninteresting shopping experiences are relegated
to the background of life.

140.
142
CRITICAL RECEPTIONO3
Fixthe
The way people find products they’ll like is
about to be completely overhauled. As one
harbinger of the future, look to The Wirecutter,
which combines the objectivity of Consumer
Reports’ reviews with the potency of big data.
The Wirecutter examined 15,000 data points
to make near-perfect recommendations on
things like ‘The best TV under $500’ and ‘The
best TV over $500.’
Early adopter Millennials already swear by the
service. Its best-reviewed products sell out
almost immediately on Best Buy and Amazon’s
websites.
The Coming Era of the ‘Perfect Product Review’
There are other related
players to watch:

141.
143
PRODUCT HUNT
A new startup that allows people to
vote up or down on the hottest new
products, creating a crowdsourced
‘what’s hot’ list of things you can
shop for. Its vetting system can
make or break a startup overnight.
Product Hunt reduces the Gursky-
esque sea of goods that Americans
face and produces one simple,
short hotlist of what’s good.
This is what’s to come. Product Hunt lists the best
startups of the day

142.
144
ENJOY
The flip side of the algorithmic
perfect review. Created by
the father of The Apple Store,
Enjoy only sells electronics
that its staff “uses and loves.”
The research phase of a big
electronics purchase, against
which the companies in play
spend millions, disappears.
Enjoy website
O3

143.
145
GOOGLE NOW
As of June 2015, Google has
announced that its Now software
will instantly be able to assess
what product is right for you, based
off of what it knows about the rest
of your life (for example, I should
buy a small $19.95 composter
from Oxxo for my garden, because
it’s well-reviewed for use on
brightly lit, urban rooftop gardens,
whereas my mother needs an
entirely different model for her
backyard garden; plus she’s a
bargain-hunter and I’m not).
This type of Google research
will soon simplify: the next
Google Now could be capable
of figuring out that you’re in the
TV aisle at Best Buy, considering
a choice. Using all of your
personal data, plus Wirecutter’s
data, plus financial information
from your bank account, it will
automatically recommend which
of the 10,000 products would
really be right for you.

144.
146
O3 The wonders of Google Now

145.
147
It’s Not Remotely Egalitarian, Though:
The affluent will pay more for the
same goods and services than
the less affluent (which already
happens on sites like Amazon).
With more data, notions of “fairness”
in pricing models will change. As
mentioned,Amazonalreadycharges
its affluent customers extra money
for the very same good. (Their logic?
If they know you’ll pay $2 more
because you’re too lazy to price
check the good on a competitive
site, why not charge it?)
Airline companies also do the same
thing (boosting the price based on
how many times you’ve searched
the flight, aka quantifying how
much you desire to travel). Apple
has just patented technology that
allows them to know what amount
of credit is left on your credit lines,
so they can know what you could
afford to buy. Shopping will get even
more seamless and delightful, sure,
but with the current lack of privacy
regulation, there will be a dark side
to it, as well.

146.
148

147.
149
MILLENNIALS
CELEBRITY
AND

148.
150
7NEW
FAMOUS
(ANONYMOUS)
IS THE

149.
151
The ‘Normcore’ fashion trend
originates with urban, younger
Millennials, popularizing the wearing
of Walmart clothes as a sort of
reverse fashion statement. “For when
you realize you’re one in 7 billion”
was one of the movement’s better
taglines. These younger Millennials
have realized that feeling ‘special’ is
an artifice, created by marketing, and
a direct legacy of Edward Bernays.
Normcore: A fashion trend in which one wears
only commonplace items from stores like LL
Bean, Walmart, GAP and Old Navy. Also
sometimes referred to as ‘anti-fashion.’

150.
152
Simultaneously, a new kind of ‘fame’ is evolving—
wherein well-known artists and personas
subvert their real identities, preferring the freedom
of true anonymity.
In our post-Warhol social media era, and in the
wordsofScottishartistMomus“Everyoneisfamous
to 15 people,” many subsets of Millennials are
interested in toying with the notions of invisibility,
identity and even infamy all at the same time.
We’ve already seen anonymity become a major
political tool (Arab Spring), but it’s now going
cultural, too. After all, Banksy—arguably the
world’s most sought-after living artist—has never
made his identity known to the public.

151.
153
Amid the Millennial set, cult
personalities like @Seinfeld2000
use multiple medias to not only tell
jokes as an anonymous person,
but also to act as a meta-parody
of fictional characters like Jerry
Seinfeld.
An example of
@Seinfeld2000 in action:

152.
154
@Seinfeld2000 also wrote a hugely popular novella about
President Barack Obama (which Warner Brothers attempted
unsuccessfully to ban, citing copyright infringement), of
which the opening lines, in their own invented, postmodern
language, are as follows:
“U.S. Presedent Barack
Sadam Husene Obame
sit in the darkened Oval
Ofice at 2 a.m. wearing hes
traditienel Kenyan robe.
He take one last bite of
the Chicago style deep
dish pizza that he has
flown to him every day on
the Amerecan tax payer’s
dime and wipe the grease
off his mouth with the U.S.
consititutien.
“Eeny, meeny, miney, mo —
which basic U.S. freedoms
are next to go?” he say
aloud to no one and every
one at the same time.
Then he flash that trade
mark Bary Obame million
doller grin as a crack of
lightning sound in the
distance.”

153.
155
@SEINFELD2000 STAYS ANONYMOUS BECAUSE HE’S
NOT FINANCIALLY WELL-OFF ENOUGH TO REVEAL HIS
IDENTITY AND LOSE HIS JOB TO BECOME FAMOUS.
Despitemultiplepleasfromjournalists,theCanadianrefusestorevealanything
more about his identity other than the facts that he is male and Canadian, in
order to preserve the corporate life that makes him money.
Anonymity also has broad sweeping economic implications, as well. The
collective-turned-company HackerOne gained fame by hacking into 100 of the
biggest global companies’ mainframes, and emailing those companies with
the discovered security vulnerabilities. Originally seen as an out-of-control
vigilante effort, it didn’t take long for Hacker One to go legit, given how clever
the business idea was (we hack you for free, and then show you how we did it
for a fee). The company just raised a $25MM round of financing.

154.
156
Modern economy flat-out encourages the bifurcation of identity. It’s
smart to maintain one job, try out a second job on the fly, and keep
a third in mind as a hobby. As previously discussed, this is a world
that heaps reward on fast-adapters, and Millennials’ future financial
survival will likely at some point be predicated on how quickly they
can assume a new personal and/or professional identity.

155.
157
7
BLACK LIVES
MATTER

156.
158
ACLARIONCALLFORACTION
Hip hop has continually introduced
artists who ignore the current
aesthetics of traditional celebrity, and
therefore notoriety. Kendrick Lamar,
D’Angelo, Kanye West, Common
and many others are engaged in
a dialogue about the state of race
relations in America that’s so eloquent
and important, their era of works
will inarguably go down in history
as one of music’s seminal periods.
Of Kendrick Lamar’s landmark new
album, To Pimp a Butterfly, The
Fader’s Rawiya Kameir said, “God
knows how long it will be before any of
us fully grasp the stacked meanings,
extended metaphors and shrouded
complexities of Kendrick Lamar’s To
Pimp A Butterfly. Definitely weeks,
probably months.”
“Ain’t nothin’ new but a flow of new Democrips
and Rebloodlicans Red state vs. a blue state
Which one are ya governin’?”

157.
159
Seats on
an Airbus
A380
49 81 628 853
African-American Millennials face a
political system that has never produced
equal rights for all American citizens. To
paraphrase a recent speech by President
Obama, addressing matters of race is
about so much more than policing the
language we use, it’s about ensuring the
presence of equal opportunity.
NUMBER OF BLACK EMPLOYEES
AT LEADING TECH COMPANIES

158.
160
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ luminous new book,
Between the World and Me, is a letter to
his Millennial-aged son. In it he discusses
America’s ceaseless history of violence on
African Americans, leaving them vulnerable
to arrest without cause, poverty, false
imprisonment and worse. He reminds us
that America is a nation built on stolen land,
through the tool of subjugation.
Toni Morrison calls the text “required
reading,” but her endorsement feels like an
understatement once one launches into the
first page, and then is sent reeling through
Mr. Coates’ depictions of his Baltimore
childhood, his education at Howard
University, his “mecca,” and the fear for his
body that consumes “30% of his brain” at
any given time during his adolescence.
“I have seen that dream all my life. It
is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is
Memorial Day cookouts, block associations,
and driveways. The Dream is treehouses
and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells
like peppermint but tastes like strawberry
shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to
escape into the Dream, to fold my country
over my head like a blanket. But this has
never been an option because the Dream
rests on our backs, the bedding made from
our bodies.”
He speaks of The American Dream
as just that: a dream.

159.
161

160.
162
IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO CREATE A
SHARING ECONOMY TO SUSTAIN
OURSELVES IN THE FUTURE;
MILLENNIALS MUST TURN
THEIR ATTENTION TOWARD THE
POLICIES AND POLICING THAT
HAVE LEAD TO SUCH A REALITY.

161.
163

162.
164
7GENDER &
SEXUALITY
CHANGING IDEAS of
FOUCAULTFIELDDAY

163.
165
To think, a mere five years ago, it was expected that at
some point every homosexual person was to “come out”
to the rest of society, because apparently society was
owed that explanation.
Now, younger Millennials have gloriously taken the identity
and sexuality privileges that Boomers and Gen Xers lost
their lives to fight for and are now happily running wild.
Without any grand, pained “coming out” explanations,
heroes like Miley Cyrus, J.Crew’s Jenna Lyons, Angelina
Jolie, Lady Gaga, Amber Heard, supermodel Cara
Delevingne freely, (sometimes occasionally, sometimes
steadily) date women. Matt Bomer, Billie Joe Armstrong,
Michael Chabon, date or marry men. It’s hard to name a star
who is an A-list force at the box office who’s not publicly
somewhere on the sexuality spectrum. Caitlyn Jenner
took the cover of Vanity Fair by storm. Perhaps no one
said it simpler or better than late night host Seth Meyers,
who put his jokes aside for a moment and commented
that he was so grateful to be “living in a time where we are
all so happy about Bruce going public as Caitlyn.”
Fashion doesn’t get any more
beautiful than 2015

164.
166
IN THEIR FUTURE, THE
FLUIDITY WILL ONLY FURTHER
NORMALIZE AND INCREASE.
In the instances of gender and sexuality, the
older Millennials are truly learning from the
younger ones, many of whom have shed
their pretense. Perhaps the first subset of a
generation to grow up with ‘out’ pop stars and
movie stars of all varieties, younger Millennials
have no reflexive memory of unflinching
culture fear and disdain for being not-straight.
Ever since Lady Gaga roared that she was “Born
This Way” and Google placed her atop the
Brooklyn Bridge, younger Millennials have not
looked back And how lucky we all are, for that.

165.
167
7
MILLENNIALS, AGING,
QUESTION
TIME
of
and the

166.
168
“These joys were so trifling as to be as
imperceptible as grains of gold among the
sand, and in moments of depression she
saw nothing but the sand; yet there were
brighter moments when she felt nothing
but joy, saw nothing but the gold.”
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
“Our ancestors learned how to remember,
and we will learn how to forget.”
- Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think, 2013
“Time is an illusion.”
- Albert Einstein

167.
169
With special, heightened
consideration given to the
younger Millennials, cohorts
of this generation will have
relationships with time that
are different to any humans
who’ve come before them.

168.
170
With videography and photography made casual
and archivable by the smartphone, we have now
becomeanationofarchivists.YoungerMillennials
will have the very best records of their online lives,
given the number of life-chronicling tools that have
emerged in the last five years, and will continue
to emerge in the next. We will now bequeath our
descendants ever-improving digital time capsules
of our lives. Last year, T.C. Boyle wrote a story for
The New Yorker called “The Relive Box,” in which
a widowed man and his young girl slowly become
addicted to using their Halcom X1520 Relive Box
to relive their favorite memories of life with their
now-deceased mom. “[My daughter] was going
to bed, and I was going back to a rainy February
night in 1982, a sold-out show at the Roxy,” the
father says. The bittersweet story could not be a
more accurate prediction of the near future.
For the time being, we have our primitive time-
traveling tools: our Stone Age-era Timehop apps
(search your Facebook and Instagram photos
from this date, last year, 2 years and 3 years+ ago);
our data-gathering, preference-learning devices
(Google Now knowing that you love gourmet ice
cream and making a recommendation on a trip);
the letter-writing site future.me, on which one can
write an email to their future selves or a loved one.

169.
171
Some of the most trivial-seeming mobile apps
built by Millennials are actually reimagining the
way we think about the self over time. Snapchat
figured something out that had previously
eclipsed the greatest minds in social media:
people don’t always want to see themselves in the
future. Sometimes people actually like to forget.
Maybe we’ll someday come to regret letting all of
Snapchat’s disappearing images disappear, but
for the time being, the app is serving a vital need
Millennials (especially younger Millennials, the
more determined life-loggers) have: to live certain
moments without the onus of memory.

170.
172
This agita over our own image is nothing new;
the act of staring at ourselves has been altering
human consciousness for thousands of years. In
the 1400s, the invention of the Murano glass mirror
was actually a crucial enabler of the Renaissance.
As Steven Johnson wrote in his wonderful book
How We Got To Now:
“[Glass mirrors] set in motion a reorientation of
society. […] Social conventions as well as property
rights and other legal customs began to revolve
around the individual rather than the older, more
collective units: the family, the tribe, the city, the
kingdom. People began writing about their interior
lives with far more scrutiny. Hamlet ruminated
onstage, the novel emerged as a dominant form
of storytelling, probing the inner mental lives of its
characters with an unrivaled depth.
Entering a novel, particularly a first-person
narrative, was a kind of collective parlor trick:
it let you swim through consciousness. […] The
psychological novel, in a sense, is the kind of story
you start wanting to hear once you begin spending
meaningful hours of your life staring at yourself in
a mirror.”
Snapchat is a meaningful invention because it’s
tethering identity to the opposite of a mirror. It’s
the first picture or video-based mass social media
tool that’s not so overtly, gratuitously about the
self—it’s about other people. We send Snapchats
to share a sincere happening, to react, to make
someone else feel loved, to make someone else
laugh. We think primarily about the other, not
about the self, precisely because the medium
doesn’t lend itself well to self-congratulation.

171.
173
As Millennials young and old, rich and
poor imbue their lives with a greater
awareness of community’s importance,
of living on less, of detaching their self
worth from the constraints of a job at
a major corporation, it’s only natural
that they will completely reconsider not
only what the individual is, but how the
individual behaves and is remembered.

172.
174
7AUGMENTING
REALITYOUR

173.
175
Oculus Rift, perhaps a predecessor to T.C.
Boyle’s invented “Halcom X1520 Relive Box,”
is about to unleash its powers on the world
sometime next year. Interestingly, Facebook
competitor Google has begun thinking more
democratically about what AR technology
could do for the planet by way of its highly
affordable AR-riff, Google Cardboard. By
using nothing more than cardboard to give
any smartphone transformative, reality-
augmenting powers, Google has now created
a series of educational ‘tours’ called Google
Field Trips, intended to allow students to
explore the sites and sights they’re studying
in history.

174.
176
In James Gleick’s seminal 2011 book, The Information, he
investigates the work of Dr. Elizabeth Eisenstein, one of the
most futuristic thinkers about time and reality in the 1960s
(she was an avid follow of Marshall McLuhan, of course).
Dr. Eisenstein concluded that “The past is becoming more
accessible, more visible” than it had ever been. As we
prepare for augmented reality to begin its trickle-down
journey into every home in America, her words could not
have been more accurate. Imagine the best, most high
definition TV or movie screen you’ve come across, pair it with
the best surround sound, and imagine that setup enabling
the Millennials of the future to relive the day they adopted
their son—with him, now an adolescent, in the room. This
is their future. Now amplify that future with smell. Dead
Man’s Eyes, a prototype developed by Dr. Stuart Eve, allows
archaeologists to add smell to their augmented reality film
of the past.

175.
177
“During the Bronze Age the site on Bodmin
Moor was a tin-mining village. When Dr Eve
held the camera up to the hill (left) a series
of huts appeared to make it look like he was
exploring the ancient village (right). These
reconstructions move and change in real-
time as the user moves around the terrain.”

176.
178
THINK
MILLENNNIALS’
CHILDREN &
GRANDCHILDREN
WILL COMPLAIN
ABOUT HISTORY
HOMEWORK?

177.
179
The individual, the very story America was predicated on, is
shrinking in importance in the eyes of many Millennials. The
sharing economy predicates telling a story that’s much more
interesting about a collective of people, not an individual person.
Television has gone longform, often to explore a myriad of
characters who, like Tolstoy’s characters from his masterpiece
Anna Karenina, are each a different person in the eyes of every
person they meet.
Think then of The Sopranos, or of True Detective’s Detective
Rustin “Rust” Cohle viewed through the eyes of his partner,
Detective Martin Hart, versus how Hart’s wife Maggie viewed
him. The stories older and younger Millennials are gravitating
toward are lusciously complicated mosaics, not linear stories
of individual triumph. Oftentimes the three act structure is
completely abandoned; after two thousand years of success,
it no longer seems suited to our time.

178.
180
ONCLUCONCLUSION

179.
181
USION
And so we will emerge to find ourselves living in an era of
digital hippies. Millennials will live, work and thrive in tight-knit
communities, untethered from the draconian constraints of a
9-to-5, learning to live on less. The prices of things, Millennials
have discovered, are entirely arbitrary. A mortgage doesn’t
have to cost $200,000 because Toll Brothers said it should. A
home can be built for a quarter of that, and without a long term
mortgage. Land can be shared, and isolation avoided. Services
can be traded and summer homes can be small communes,
with 500 square foot treehouses sequestered around a
small pond. Work can be freelance, and span a multitude of
industries that ebb and flow, given the year. Craftsmanship
can be valued, even deified. School can be of the trade variety,
a random and lifelong experience, and not something we heap
upon the ungrateful like a 4-year-long quinceanera. Nature
can be embraced, not ignored. Love can be love: gay, straight
or whatever. Labels can be left to history’s annals. Black lives
can be examined and re-imagined, until we no longer have to
gather in the streets and cry out that they matter.

180.
182

181.
183
A farcical equality for some or a noble equality
for all—that is our generation’s choice. We
should not allow the world to come to rest in
its current socioeconomic state, wherein, in
the words of the Nobel laureate economist
Joseph Stiglitz, “A rising tide lifts all yachts.”
That is not acceptable.
The old American Dream, too often deferred
to deserve the privilege of reference, may
be dead in its current states, but it will
leave behind something better. Something
achievable. Something magical. Something
worthy of the word Millennial.

182.
184

183.
185