Three decades after his debut novel made him the unwilling voice of a generation, the author wonders whether – after Y, Z and now C, for Covid – individuality will become obsolete
I’m 59 and a half years old – and these days I no longer feel that I identify as a human being. I’ve turned into an app. I’m a filter for words. I filter the ways I experience the world.
How you identify has always been a big deal. In the late 1980s, I disliked being classified as a baby boomer so much that I had to invent my way out of it; my debut novel, published 30 years ago, was called Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Why accelerated? By the tail end of the 80s and the start of the 90s it felt as if history was finally emerging from locked-in syndrome. The Soviet Union was over. Liberal capitalism was triumphing. Music changed completely. It became a cliche that every other advertising montage showed someone sledge-hammering the Berlin Wall – and there was this new group of younger people who obviously didn’t fit into any pre-existing category, so who were they? Marshall McLuhan wrote that the oversimplification of anything is always exciting, which is I think what happened with Gen X. The term became a meme back when society only had five or six of them a year.
