The Olds are Too Online — A Skewer Debate
by Roxane West and erica dreisbach
for The Skewer’s June 23rd, 2018 show at the Logan Square Arts Fest
We live in a nightmare world where nothing makes the pain stop. Everything is disorienting and surreally cruel and 1/3 of the country is horny for it in a big way. Why did this happen? How did it get this way?
It’s simple. The Boomers are too online. After decades of telling us to get off the computer and be careful online, extremely credulous rich old people finally got comfortable on the Internet and do not have the antibodies to reject extremely evil and stupid propaganda.
As long as Boomers keep consuming and amplifying whatever spurious bullshit hoves into their field of view, our post-truth world is going to keep getting dumber. The question then becomes, how do we get Boomers offline?
Roxane West — Millennials Must Infiltrate the Meme-o-sphere
Opening Statement
Hello friends. I’m not going to lie to you, this was a hard week to write political comedy. For like four days, all I had written down in a word document was:
“I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
That Everyone Loves Raymond
But nobody loves Brad”
Then I walked directly into the lake.
Unfortunately, I was cursed generations ago when I kink-shamed a ghoul, so I am forbidden to die. I know some of you are thinking, well a comedic debate isn’t a hard job, it’s not like it’s coal mining, which is true in that it’s a job that’s needed and deserves respect. So here goes!
My opponent believes that we should force baby boomers off the internet by making UI more difficult. But while this might make our internet lives slightly more tolerable, those faceless icons of an eagle gently making love to a flag are real people out there. Who are we really protecting by shutting down the less palatable side of a bigot? Yeah it’s annoying when your uncle’s friend posts a thrice-xeroxed picture of a muscular Tweety Bird with an iron cross tattoo, wearing sunglasses, giving you the finger, and saying something weirdly specific about abortion, but just because he isn’t harassing you online doesn’t mean he won’t still be out in the world interacting with servers, and retail workers, and receptionists, and pretty much the whole world of people who don’t need this right now aka us. And now that these confused baby boomers have been radicalized, it would be dangerous to just shut down their internet without at least trying to reprogram them.
It’d be like if The Manchurian Candidate was real, and when Frank Sinatra found out that his buddy had been brainwashed to obey the will of an enemy country in cahoots with evil, corrupt figures within our own government (yikes yikes yikes) every time he saw the Queen of Diamonds, he was just like “well, just take away his cards! Card games are dumb anyway”.
Well first off, fuck you Frank Sinatra, Spider Solitaire RULES. And second, if you’d seen your own damn movie, you’d know that he accidentally gets #triggered by a woman wearing a Queen of Diamonds costume at a Halloween party. We can take away the playing deck, but they’re still gonna yell in the break room about how child torture is ok if you break the rules but also Obama did it first and you’re the one making everyone uncomfortable on Donut Monday and this is why they’re not political anyway have you seen photos of their cherry tomato plant yet?
And if you’ve never seen The Manchurian Candidate, it’s Zoolander but Angela Lansbury commits light incest.
But how do we reprogram them? Easy. Memes, baby, memes. And in this moment, I truly hate the ghoul that won’t let me die.
I’ve dived deep into baby boomer Facebook memes, and it actively hurt my brain. And I was on Gaia Online in its prime. Baby boomer Facebook is an internet community that constantly redefines logic, reason, and visual art. Everything is as sincere as the stock images are grainy and out of focus: “Sometimes you gotta go where you can hear a screen door slam” “Country girls and their moms are like sugar and lemons” “Nothing wrong with a little mud” “Remember wagons?” Sheryl I know you’ve lived in Glendale Heights all of the 55 years you’ve been alive, what the FUCK are you talking about?? They are nostalgic for a world that never was. “Share if you remember playing in large cavernous holes filled to the brim with rust. We didn’t need Mario to have fun” And then it’s just a giant stock smiley face with arms and too many facial details giving a shit-eating grin and winking cause he gets it.
If they aren’t crowing about the past, they are very upset with their sons. Like 30–50% of their memes are actually 15 minute melodramas that feel as slow as time, almost always some variation of a woman who dies of a broken heart because her son was mean to her when he was a teen and loved his deadbeat dad too much, and portrayed by these pulsating cartoons that look like those online dolls that were big in like 2005. No matter what, the woman cries, they are deeply sad and transparently a cry for help, and I love it.
So lets slap some vaguely nostalgic, wistful slogan about how great high corporate taxes and guaranteed social security and dirt cheap college tuition were on a picture of a baby peeking through a wagon wheel or some shit. Lets hire that clearly disturbed person creating these shitty cartoons about how sometimes wives love TOO much and SHE WILL DIE BECAUSE OF IT to make cartoons about how sons love visiting their moms when they don’t deny the personhood and experiences of people of color. We know what makes them tick. And making these memes can’t be hard, because clearly the people making them now aren’t trying.
Closing Statement
I think what makes middle-aged parents online so off-putting is that they play by their own rules like it’s the god damn Wild Wild West. Like whodathunk people would lack social understanding because they weren’t raised on anime forums?
While diving into my parents and their friend’s social media, I realized that the fake act of resistance that I’m fake advocating for in this fake debate is already happening, by other baby boomers when they’re not advocating for the healing power of limes.
My dad is kind of cyber-bullying someone right now. His old band recently got together, and one guy commented on an old photo, “Jim did you unfriend me?” and my dad just responded “Yes”. He then turned to me and said “He voted for Trump, I’m glad I hurt him” and later my dad and his buddies kicked the Trump voting dudes are out of the band because that’s not fucking punk, also because they’re very bossy apparently and somebody lost someone else’s amp and I’m sorry I’m not clear on the details but it is a vast web that I am still trying to unravel.
My mom’s old coworker Cath, in between memes that say “Share if your son is handsome!” are other memes like “Woman are the wall, cause Trump’s gonna pay!” I don’t know what that means, but I love it. Her other coworker Donna just shares coupon codes with her friends for bulk, personalized, monogrammed clothing with Disney characters on them because she orders them so much so she can get a really good deal. Apparently, last Christmas she got her family matching Hawaiian shirts with their names and Mickey Mouse also wearing a Hawaiian shirt on it and her nine year old saw them and screamed “NO. NO. IT MUST END”.
My mom actually got my family matching fleeces with Mickey Mouse and our names on them as well, and while on the one hand it feels like a ridiculous item of clothing for a grown woman like myself that has loved and lost to own, it is also very soft. And lets be honest, as someone who was widowed at 23, a potential partner isn’t going to draw the line at a piece of clothing, like no that’s too much.
I bet you weren’t expecting me to slide so many fun details about my life into this meme debate, were you new friend?
To paraphrase two boomers and two ghosts, the middle aged people are alright. Are they? I don’t know. It kind of seems hopeless, right? Like, it’s not a generational problem, clearly since Fox News won’t hire a woman over 25 that racist shit pigs are everywhere and some people are just heartless rubes. If that’s the case, maybe we should start kicking them out of the band. But we need to stay open and positive enough to take care of ourselves and each other, by sharing those coupon codes far and wide when you’re lucky enough to get ’em. Thank you.
erica dreisbach — We Must Make User Interfaces Hostile Again
Opening Statement
i just spent a week with my parents who were born in 1953 and 1954, so i have had a recent refresher course in the strange mishmash of fact and feeling that makes up Baby Boomer tech literacy, and thus how we might best exploit the gaping lacunae in Boomer knowledge toward a better world.
i also make websites for a living and can vouch for personally masterminding user interfaces that have been utterly mystifying to my middle-aged clients. This was bad for business, but clearly it was all leading up to this moment, here, now, surrounded by the dulcet sounds of music and traffic over yonder.
But it is not my sweet millennial voice that shall be silenced today. Nay. It is the voices of Patriot Mom 49, XX Crying Eagle XX, Trump2020 69 Confederate flag emoji.
Here are my proposed changes to both Twitter and Facebook:
number one
We call up Evan Spiegel at Snapchat. “Hey, Ev. Bro dog.” We convince him to let Facebook acquire Snapchat after all. Then we ensure that Snapchat is put in charge of Facebook’s page architecture. Chaos would ensue, because as you all know, using Snapchat is a complicated mind puzzle.
Note that this would also prevent *me* from ever being able to post to Facebook, because i was born in 1982, and Snapchat uses super secret design only decipherable to people who are too young to remember 9/11.
number two
In honor of Pride Month, any time a person wants to post to social media they’d have to also check a box that says, “I am interested in gay sex.” We’re adults here. Some of us are gay. Some of us are not gay, but we have a human curiosity. Suffice to say we’re all *interested* in gay sex.
It is undisputably interesting.
Oh but those uptight heteronormative Boomers birthed in a nuclear Stepford culture. They wouldn’t be able to check that box!
Thus we’d only get posts from queer Boomers, which i think we’d all be good with.
number three
In order to post, you’d have to pass a short CAPTCHA to distinguish whether a statement is a fact or an opinion. This would really improve social media at large, for everyone.
For instance: “immigrants in the US commit far less crime than the native born population, according to studies by the American Immigration Council and the University of Massachusetts”
versus — and then it would just be the text of whatever the user was just trying to post, “we need a wall” or whatever.
So they could still post their bad takes, but only if they were willing to concede that their opinions are not facts. Postmodern youths such as ourselves, capable of embracing a dialectic, will have no trouble with this. But those Boomers. Once again they will be defeated by themselves.
number four
and this is the one you won’t think is funny, but i don’t care, and for real this would work really well, in order to post, you must master the difference between click and double click.
Some people don’t seem to notice that Baby Boomers just double click everything, like raving maniacs. But *i* notice! And it bugs the living CRIMINY out of me.
my mom will double-click on a button or a menu toggle, which as we all know should only get a single click!
(pause for a brief standing ovation here)
So when posting, if users do the wrong kind of click, then their thing *looks* like maybe it was posted, but really it just disappears into the oblivion of dev null.
my opponent
my opponent would have you believe that memes are the way out of this black hole sucking us inevitably toward the heat death of US democracy, and a vortex of microplastics and lead-contaminated drinking water. But memes got us here, and the master’s tools will never destroy the master’s house, which incidentally was purchased by a Baby Boomer for $30,000 in 1970, can you even imagine.
No, we must silence their terrible voices and bad ideas. And it won’t be that hard. All it will take are these four weird tricks.
Closing Statement
Here’s a fact: when the Baby Boomers were young people, they were called the “Me” generation by media of the time, because they were so narcissistic and ungrateful toward their parents, who themselves were known as “The Greatest Generation,” also known as the “Jim Crow generation.”
Here’s a second fact: in the 1950s, the richest portion of the United States paid a stunning 91% of the top bracket of their income in taxes. That is not an opinion. That is a fact.
If indeed the United States could have been called “great” in the ‘50s and ‘60s, which was when the major infrastructure like the national highway system was built, when nearly half of major bridges still standing were built, and of course when we went to the moon — then that era was funded by taking rich people’s money and putting it to the public good.
Can you imagine what we could do with 91% of Jeff Bezos’s money?
Clearly, the selfish hypocrites not doing their fair share, complaining, and windsurfing in Turks and Caicos while lazily sucking from the teat of entitlement — both emotional and governmental — clearly that is NOT the boogey children of the New York Times op-ed page, the millennials. Clearly it’s the Boomers.
We must thin out their ranks from public discourse. Not with hypertextual fancy pictures, not by engaging them in a medium they don’t understand and certainly can’t correctly deploy — but by silencing them, at least until they can learn how to use a computer.
