TotW: Don't Trust Anyone Under 30!

The other day, at an anarchist gathering, I was talking to some people, and one of them, going through this age transition, was reflection on the phrase and what it meant as an anarchist. We didn't have time to go too deep in the conversation but I thought it was an interesting topic, since some anarchists do reach, and go beyond, the age of 30.

The phrase is credited to Jack Weinberg, known for his environmental activism and the Free speech movement in the 60s in the United States. But because the 1960s and 1970s were a particular international moment in terms of youth revolt, this phrase was very well known in different places all over the globe.

The world was changing rapidly, and that was an expression of a generation clash (as we still see in anarchist environments today).

As people age, sometimes they feel the need to find more stability in life. Once they realized they might reach an old age, they start to think how they are going to make it, especially in a country like the US where older people don't have much support. And to be honest, anarchists in general, also didn't figure out a way of embracing their elders.

For some other people, having kids make they think they have to build a more "normal" life around them (not everyone, of course). Or they don't think that consciously, but bills, school, etc, start to pile up, and they get into a more normie life without even realizing.

Some people just lose hope.

And some other people still, just get tired of all the fuss.

Does it mean then, there is some truth to the phrase? Or that there's some truth to it still? As anarchists, do we also get more conservative? Or do we just understand some things better or differently as we age? Are we more sure of ourselves? Or maybe too sure and not open to learn from inexperienced people?

Listen to the conversation here!

What does it mean to trust someone?
As anarchists we want to believe we're still trustworthy. But for whom? Can we trust someone under 30?
It would be great to hear from different age people.

Disclosure: Yes, the aging subject has been at the totw before, and this probably won't be the last time. One: because some anarchists (thankfully) are still aging; Two: because our memories are getting bad and we keep repeating ourselves. So if it bothers you, just get over it and go read something else.

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For a minute there were quite a few babies being born in the broader @ scene and some friends stenciled onesies with the slogan "Don't Trust Anyone Over 30 lbs" to give away at bookfairs. cute. but also, this gets to the issue of how long is too long to be in the system, so to speak. if 30 years is too long, then maybe 2 years IS optimal.

I didn't find other irl anarchists until i was past 30 so i have a different perspective on the age question. definitely, many things change as we age, like not being able to throw down with cops or whatever. but there is some compensation- being able to see the traps before they close in and being less inclined to fall for marxist/ alphabet soup group rhetoric. (one hopes!)

the saying meant something particular to the 60s though. today, all the "generations" prattle makes me cringe. there are people of all ages a on all sides of whatever we're talking about, it seems to me, no age cohort has a lock on what's correct.

and Trust. yeah, this takes time to build and sadly our world seems to be running out of time.

In a cantankerous mood, I would just invert the slogan, say "don't trust anyone under 30." More as a way of saying that I'm sick of youth culture, and as expressing an awareness that a lot of the kids that are here today will be gone tomorrow. Also a little jaded with my experience of people who are closer to my age (In their 20s) being incapable of making a commitment. So many behave like students, even if they aren't students. In other words, they're just tourists passing through.

Ultimately I know these things are generalizations and, when it comes to individuals, are completely meaningless. Statistics and individuals are basically completely unrelated. But to speak in general terms, I've often found older people to, GENERALLY, be more open to engagement than younger people, who often seem content with their cliques (cliques which, 99% of the time, will not last). Of course, the reverse is often true as well, especially in more normie social situations, where the young ones can actually talk to you, while dumbfuck grandpa just says work sets you free. Yeah yeah, I know, many people are not like this at all, and people can be a lot more interesting than the picture I'm painting with too broad a brush. But I've also experienced these things too. Idk, put me on blast.

Anyway, people are people. Ultimately I'd like to see a greater degree of openness to others regardless of age group. I think you can often tell when someone is posturing, or lacks commitment, or is in it for dubious reasons, and it's smart to make a note of that when you see it. When it comes to trust, that inevitably takes time, and the age of the relationship is a lot more important than the age of the people involved.

I think talking about age is often a poor proxy for talking about other things which are the issue.
In this case, the issue of trust, and of coming across many people who may call themselves anarchist which we don't trust, nor agree with, nor like. There's also the lack of meaningful relationships and supportive circles, which come in handy when sick or down on your luck, regardless of age, but certainly age comes with worsening chronic illnesses for many, although many are getting them younger and younger because of lifestyles and environmental factors. And speaking of lifestyles, often they are coded as young or old, as if age automatically implied a way of life.

I know we don't like discussing "generations" but to say this doesn't obviously fit for almost anyone heading to college paying attention in 1970 would just be purposefully ignorant.

Reasons are just blatant, only reason you wouldn't come to them is if your pet ideology depended on it.

Don't trust most folks under 30 personally, or most folks over 60 politically. I think the lack of healthcare in the US combined with the call-out culture that makes particularly elders very disposable to young people, create a situation where one would be very foolish to invest in a social network to the detriment of actual $ resources. One zoomer decides they don't like you, uses some abuse language and you're just some middle aged dipshit who gave 20 years to projects where you're no longer welcome. On the other end, almost all the folks left over from the 60s/70s (notable exceptions) are the pacifists who the government didn't think were worth imprisoning or killing, bunch of fucking hippies.

The fuck is this thinly veiled ageist bullshit?

How does becoming complacent and more “normal” mean you’re more trustworthy? Why does anarchist aging imply becoming more complacent? How does being older correlate to having been an anarchist longer? How can you correlate inexperience, cliquishness, and trustworthiness to age without gross generalizations and outright ageism?

The question of how to relate to inexperienced or untrustworthy anarchists is an interesting one and ultimately very dependent on personal circumstances and the context your in. But by making it about age your driving a wedge between older and younger anarchists, making the olds distance from the youth and the youth resent the olds. This kills any chance for intergenerational knowledge to spread, which is CRITICAL for the spread of ANARCHY!

Can you trust anarchists under 30? If your so quick to generalize thousands of people you sure as hell can’t trust me.

trying to spread anarchy? thought it was common knowledge that that doesn't happen. what would you do if you decided proselytizing was a dead end? how would you spend your time if you could only ever be too much fun for most people?

age hasn't had anything to do with whether a person is trustworthy or not in my experience, but i keep a pretty high bar on that anyway. not sure i could offer any kind of generalization there except that i look first for people who are sort of spiritually active or animated, and not just as a salesman act--but even then that only means an open door. no telling what's through it in advance.

for my part, one of the main things i've noticed about getting older is that i keep getting more and more social while my immediate circle tends to shrink due to attrition of one kind or another. i think i just get less out of doing things on my own and prefer conversation, especially when it comes to any kind of media.

and while it might be kind of cliche having a kid has made me significantly more intentional and aware of the way that power interacts with my personal life. even with a ton of theory going in, i was still surprised by the level of biopolitical interference and noise that comes with being a parent. the "noise" aspect has been particularly interesting and challenging for me, the way that this sort of power becomes diffuse as people enforce and reinforce control norms out a kind of perpetual need to justify to themselves that what they've been doing--what they've been told to do or pushed into doing--is not "right" so much as "healthy" i.e. good for their kid who they of course would never do anything to harm. it has been a jarring demonstration of just how easily and absurdly people can sublimate contradictions between their intuitions and social norms and life-ways into a sort of self-made social psychosis.

in any case, there is pretty much a daily invitation to abandon my perspective and accept the path of integration into that regime and i actively combat and evade those temptations. hopefully that makes me a little more trustworthy at least to my family.

Younger folk have less irrelevant layers of hysterical dogma stacked upon the intrinsic inner- ontological logic interface every naked human possesses. Their conversation is light and spontaneous if compared to the pretentious formality of ideologically fuelled boastings!

In my critique of social media and the generalized technological landscape, I have been especially critical of younger people’s almost complete dependence on it. In this, I am less accusatory and more sorrowful over their situation. I understand that they were born into this particularly shallow context, raised with a screen in front of them almost from the moment of birth. Most of their social interactions, from friends to dating to entertainment to commerce to work, are almost exclusively filtered through these mediations. I do hold them accountable in the realm of personal responsibility and agency, but as a so-called “Generation X’er”, I did not come to age with such overwhelming pressure to conform in this particular way — television, pop music, and video games were relatively easy for me to escape, especially with youth, cynicism, and drugs at my disposal. But capitalistic post-modernity has metastasized, and there is no doubt in my mind that this type of socialization has produced an overwhelmingly troubling generalized reality. Sadly, this leaves me with some severe overarching critiques of not only the so-called “Millennial” and “Z” generations, but everyone who idealizes this virtual new world and the supposed possibilities it opens up.

Related to this, I have been misunderstood at times in my general critique of so-called “youth culture”, usually by those who seem to find value in the novelty of the new, the popular, and often, the urban. Mistaken as just a grumpy old-timer, I am the co-parent of, and coconspirator with, two extremely thoughtful, off the grid, home/self-schooled, amazingly creative teen-aged free-spirited women who have a more thorough critique of this world than most adults I know. I never discount youth, just popularized cultural norms, especially when they penetrate the anarchist realm. I do believe that various radical youth sub-cultures have, at many pivotal moments throughout history, flung the world, or at least certain social relations, into extreme change, some at least partially for the better, some not. There is an inherent freshness of youth, a desire to strive for a world beyond the perceived trappings of their parents, and usually a bolder outlook in general. If this occurs in a somewhat functional face-to-face situation, it could provide a needed balance to the often too rigid practicality of the middle-aged and the experiential wisdom of the long-visioned elders, but within a hyper-capitalized, superficial, trend-heavy, narcissistic, alienated techno-culture, the desire for constant novelty and newness makes me suspicious. Sure, there are rare exceptions with unique insight to add, but these become more exceptional in a world where less depth in understanding is applied to so much more. In other words, now, because of this techno-culture, people tend to know a lot less about more things....just google that if you don’t believe me. The trajectory here is glaring and seems fairly obvious to anyone not seduced by the gaze of screens, the need to belong, or false attachment to concepts like hope. Add to this the never-ending insecurities and politics of victimization and identity, or really any politics at all, and I don’t think anti-civilization anarchists and those truly seeking freedom have much to glean from these cesspools. Like always, most people are too far gone into the oblivion of domestication to come out of its spell, regardless of their demographic.

This shallow critique of pitting generations against generations is a tactic of disinformation called polarization. I know boomers who are just as addicted to tiktok and netflix as well. The who social landscape has changed, it's not just a youth thing. Everyone is expected to have an email, a cellphone, and do things online. Narcissistic traits are not any more prevalent in any cohort, but of course, you'll see more of those who are media savvy online, you won't be seeing the offline narcissists in your feed.

I think a way to bring people of all ages into the topic without pitting it as a battle between generations is to ask young people: How would you like to be and live when you're older? And ask older people: When you were younger, how did you want to live when you were older, and how do you want to live now? Then ask each other: How can we help each other live the life we want to live now?

as people (me very much included) get older, it's hard to see the new ways that people resist and rebel. we are attuned to and familiar with old ways, that may still work for some things, but not work for other things, and may have never worked very well or very broadly...

that is to say, it's not wrong to see how things are worse now than they were 30 years ago (or 20, or 10 ffs), but that there is a smugness to a lot of the "stop doing that" messages that isn't in touch with reality.

none of us know how to stop the juggernaut. we can only hope that upcoming people figure new things out, how to use the tools and understandings they have in creative ways that will probably be counter-intuitive to people from previous contexts.

There used to be a true socio-economic intergenerational conflict, like from the late '70s to the late '90s, thst demanded a generational analysis. If you're a Millenial or Zoomer you got no idea how hard that was to get a decent, stable job, and don't think about starting a business, lol.

But the narrative has overlapped way beyond its former base, and not sure it's still relevant at all to talk of generational conflicts, as there ain't any major demographic weight difference between the more recent gens... and what are gens anyways? Boomers used to mean something tremendous as they were a disproportionally big population that grew up in the very convenient post-war context.

A flattening is what we're seeing these days.

"If you're a Millenial or Zoomer you got no idea how hard that was to get a decent, stable job, and don't think about starting a business, lol. "

That's an inflammatory statement if there could be any. I take it you are 8:18. There's no generation that hasn't found it hard to have a decent stable job or found it difficult to start a business. Those things are inherently hard and precarious in our capitalist economic systems of exploitation.

Wtf are you onto... Boomers notoriously had it super-easy, as there were countless opportunities for good jobs and you could study at Berkeley for peanuts, among other things. Music and other arts industry wasn't nearly as competitive and any good writer could hope selling a lot of books without being fucking Dan Brown.

Quit whining: life is hard. What is it you want? A paternalistic/maternalistic nanny-State that provides for all your needs? Toughen up, already!

Ah I see... it's all 'bout myself and my seething of ressentiment about Boomers who got given away high education and then high profile jobs back in the '70s. Easy guess! No need to think too much.

Do you really want what passes for "education" in the University Indoctrination Mill? or a "high-profile job"? That all sounds pretty mainstream...

it's just that those are the factors that turned class strata into generation strata

Technology (and disembodied techno-infantalization) probably had a lot more to do with it....

do you think that those resumé people would turn down those mortgages and cush jobs if they hasn't had mtv, tv, and then youtube, tictok? all the factors come together to make a symphony :) euhhgg

we're stuck in a rushing river of blood, currency, and oil mixed in with clean clean water

You should've saved all these little quips in a notebook and then typed them down in a single comment after you made sure it was coherent enough, instead of making a thread you replying to yourself. I see some elements floating in all of that, but it's hard for me to piece them together beyond some general generational malaise? Juvenoia? Old man yells at clouds?

WRONG, that was not me (8:18), but you know everything....that's what the internet tells you.

Another critic here, I'm more concerned about the > fattening < that we're seeing these days. Screens and social media are just electronic books with instant telecommunication attached, The problem is the time spent sitting down without exercising, and the junkfood hegemony.
I exercise, use my phone, read interesting essays on @news, flick through social media for about an hour every day and have the physique of an athletic.
existentialist renaissance man and the heart of a teenager in a mature boomer consciousness.

if you read what is above, it is more complicated than how you describe it. you seem to be the one oversimplifying, no, beyond oversimplifying, dumbing things way down...

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