"It's important to keep in mind that behavior that seems irrational from a middle-class perspective is perfectly rational in the face of straitened circumstances. People who feel obsolete in today's information economy will be joined by millions more in the emerging post-information economy, in which routine professional work and even some high-end services will be more cheaply performed overseas or by machines. This doesn't mean that work will vanish. It does mean, however, that it will take a new and unfamiliar form.

Look at the projections of fiscal doom emanating from the federal government, and consider the possibility that things could prove both worse and better. Worse because the jobless recovery we all expect could be severe enough to starve the New Deal social programs on which we base our life plans. Better because the millennial generation could prove to be more resilient and creative than its predecessors, abandoning old, familiar and broken institutions in favor of new, strange and flourishing ones.

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias."

The idea being that when the Boomers finally die off, the aging Gen X power-structure won't be able to keep a whole generation of internet-age burnouts of middle-class pressures and hollow consumer culture on a leash.

So I guess ostensibly X will be oppressing those Z upstarts, while Y refuses to "grow up, work hard, and have meaningless stressful lives just so for the privilege of paying taxes" and farms in post-collapse urban kibbutzes or something.

Quality of life instead of standard of living, return to simplicity, technosurvivalism, disestablishmentarian libertarian commune stuff. Or something.

So some sort of Orwellian age-war will be going on between X, who won't nearly be as good at being the government and authority figures as the Boomers were, and Z teenagers while Y enjoys the prime of their lives as neo-barbarians.

I can see society going this way. But not for another decade or two. Our particular generation is so not so disenchanted yet we'd be prepared to leave our lives of meaningless consumerism. Nor has the mass redundancy of large sections of society due to ubiquitous use of AI or robots happened yet.

But yeah I could see us going down this route. Especially since the Boomers and Xers have no intention of spreading the wealth.

It's going to get nasty.

>>8570889

Well the stuff in quotes is from a recent Times article in a set called "10 Ideas For the Next 10 Years" that tries to predict the big things of the next decade (though some think farther than that).

The specific article in that set is "The Dropout Economy".

> Buddhist vegan militia members

Oh god it's like I'm playing Liberal Crime Squad all over again

Oh I definately think it's plausible. Wait till we're all about 30, still in shitty jobs, still renting houses, still loaded down with debts. A government weakened and useless by the Boomers greed.

Combined with the demographic time bomb, tax rises needed to pay for the older generations profligacy. A steady disillusionment with the system and entrenched interests. It could happen.

This is my next campaign setting, recommendations for a system?

>>8571024

Real life. Set up an eco-squat. Drop out and join the revolution man.

>>8571041
Real Life? What system is that?

This would make a great setting for a Dwarf-Fortress style game. Make friends with six other out-of-work bums, move into an abandoned high-rise in the center of the city, eat pidgeons and sew clothes out of the pelts of alley cats.

>>8570948
Oh God I love Liberal crime squad! I try to play it like Grand Theft Auto.

"Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they'll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it's coming.

This transformation will be not so much political as antipolitical. The decision to turn away from broken and brittle institutions, like conventional schools and conventional jobs, will represent a turn toward what military theorist John Robb calls "resilient communities," which aspire to self-sufficiency and independence. The left will return to its roots as the champion of mutual aid, cooperative living and what you might call "broadband socialism," in which local governments take on the task of building high-tech infrastructure owned by the entire community. Assuming today's libertarian revival endures, it's easy to imagine the right defending the prerogatives of state and local governments and also of private citizens — including the weird ones. This new individualism on the left and the right will begin in the spirit of cynicism and distrust that we see now, the sense that we as a society are incapable of solving pressing problems. It will evolve into a new confidence that citizens working in common can change their lives and in doing so can change the world around them."

Of course this premise assumes that slackers will survive on their ability to network and work together with each other...which means an initial die-off of hikkimoris is bound to occur.

>>8571207

I quite like this vision of society. I'd support it.

>>8571258
But will you make it happen?

>>8571229

Or, desperate for cheap wetware, the corps re-tailor the cubicle experience for the kind of isolation and relaxing monotonous computer work WoW-refugees prefer.

The others keep trying to get the hikkis to join the revolution, but as long as the corps pay in cheetos and mountain dew they're happy to grind away at spreadsheets...

>>8571304

Great point. Letting your group play through the beginning of the revolution and define how it occurs would be cool and then do another campaign set decades later when the original characters are old veterans telling war stories of how things used to be.

Sounds like the plot of Higashi No Eden. "Imageboard anons save Japan from missile strike: the animation".

The titular Slacker Crackdown would obviously be a dark day during the Revolution, when it looked like the movement might be defeated.

>>8571353

An aging technocratic society cracking down on the 'slacker movement' supported by remote piloted security bots by corporate hikkis. Perhaps a squat clearance gone wrong, leading to riots and eventually the revolution.

The Camden Massacre of 2022

How would the rest of society react?

I can picture it mainly varying from "Look at you slacker..." to "Get at of here, SLACKER"

>>8571407

The hikki's would despise us, The corporations and government would see us how they currently see music pirates a complete threat to the established order, refusing to play by traditional social paradigms. And just like today, not to be negotiated with but returned to the fold of corporate consumerism by force.

Older people would just think us hippies and poltiely ignore us but a few might convert.

The young. The young are ours. The 'slackers' of tomorrow.

>>8571468

Wise old Y's, veterans of the Crackdown, focus on their localized lives; their turf, their militia, etc. and try to counsel hotheaded impetuous Z's in their prime not to go trying to export the Revolution

>>8571505

Man, I want this world.

Shit /tg/ you've managed to change my politcal orientation in 20 posts.

>>8571630

I wouldn't quite say that, but for someone who has always thought universal healthcare and a general welfare state was the answer (which is probably a common opinion among the barely taxable) it does make me think that instead of waiting for America to morph into a more laid back Europeanized type capitalist society, individuals could make more radical changes in their lives much more quickly if they wanted to.

We turn into an agrotechnological economy obviously. It's only the places that supply the basic needs that are going to get control of the market. Tech resources are probably unassembled and repairs are done mech style to keep the bits running.

Why did i get a tyler durden feel from the OP

Being a neet costs money- and the current working system is holding them up. If the system collapsed the neets would starve in their basements, not suddenly find the motivation to become independent and self-sustaining.

>>8571761

That's not quite what the OP was suggesting. He was proposing the possibility of large scale rejection of traditional models of society dominated by small scale sustainable urban eco-communities of the type springing up throughout western cities.

These aren't traditional neets, but us in 10 years, disillusioned of a world that promised us nothing and gave us nothing.

>>8571761

This article is basically just an age-specific version of a trope that's present in near-future scifi. Like in Distraction, where in the wake of a new Depression you have a lot of neo-tribal people living on DIY-technosurvivalist scavenger tricks.

The general idea that a class of people will give up the ratrace and live off the grid is not very far-fetched.

The "Generational revolution" thing would be fun for a campaign, but getting all self-referential about it (putting in Anonymous for instance) would totally kill the setting.

>>8571828

But would it be an overt, bloody revolution, or one of simply biding our time until the older generation finally kicks it?

>>8571928

Eh, revolution through arms would be too wangsty and self-satisfied.

Basically a culture clash period followed by the age of localized living.

The Buddhist vegan militias come AFTER the Left and Right in the mainstream society have made things easier (more devolution of authority to state and municipality level, mainstream gated communities getting semi-autonomy forming a precedent for slacker communes) in terms of not being hassled by the man.

That's my opinion anyway.

>>8571928

A bit of both. It's not a bloody revolution, doesn't fit Gen Yers style. Instead it's Gen Xers incompetance, screwed over by the Boomers, desperately needing to keep an increasingly difficult Y's in line to fund their failing systems, they resort to ever harsher methods of control.

I see it as a bit of a sad story really.

I really almost think it'll happen. Frankly I despise the Boomers. They fucked everything up. And the Xers are souless consumerist pigs. The Z's are still too formative to generalise.

We Y's. We're going to have to do something. Otherwise we're going to be majorly screwed.

>>8571979
Alright. That's kinda what I was thinking, but it just wasn't clear as to how the shift went from conception to reality though.

Although I imagine a few riots and bit of civil disobedience would no doubt presage this cultural shift, >>8571393 being a potential example.

>>8572007

After the Revolution, when Xers have used the situation for right (increased decentralization/de-federalization) and left (legal status for communes, greater individual liberties) political gains, there would probably be something like a truce.

The general autonomy given to local communities would mean that Y communities and the rare extragenerational converts to Slackerhood can live in peace...pieces really, but peaceful pieces. The "Buddhist vegan militia and Evangelical anarchists" living, or at least tweeting, side by side thing.

However this increased autonomy also lets X-ers create their own fantasy communities as well. So whereas slacker evangelicals are still slackers, mainstream fundies would have scary gated communities with their own codes of law. There would be paranoid "white flight" gated fortresses, consumer "paradises", etc.

So while the X are the new Boomers, the old people running things, they'll depend on the Z's as the cogs in their machine. And the Z's will be fighting the X's in these Orwellian micro-states...while the Y's are out in the sticks chilling and doing their own thing.

>>8572131

As a Y I could live with that.

>>8572131

Seems kind of low key for an RPG setting. More like Farmville or Farmtown or whatever it is called, but bumping for the night crew.