The Five Millennials (Actually) Changing the World

So here we are, a generation munching on the last greens of its salad days, saddled with dull, decade-old complaints about our coddledness, our entitlement, our selfies, our political correctness — most blah-blah-blah of all, by the boring cliché of our avocado toast. In a more self-serving version of this narrative, we are the generation that disrupted salad days and made them Sweetgreen days. The generation of AOC and Rihanna and DeRay Mckesson and Glossier! Of hope and protest and changing norms!

No. The world’s five most powerful millennials now, and maybe for the rest of our lives, are Jared Kushner (b. 1981), Kim Jong-un (b. 1984), Mark Zuckerberg (b. 1984), Stephen Miller (b. 1985), and Mohammed bin Salman (b. 1985). The globe is their avocado — to be splayed and robbed of its core and smashed, then spread before them for the taking — and we’re toast.

These are men who, barely having hit their stride, can tout such accomplishments as: the undermining of an American election, the erosion of privacy norms and attention spans, the desiccation of journalism, the destabilization of the Middle East, a genocide, the creation of modern American internment camps, the beheading of a journalist, the flooding of the world economy with huge investments in unsustainable tech start-ups that undercut smaller merchants, public mass executions, the threat of nuclear war, and whatever other assorted horrors might be happening behind the cloak of secrecy that surrounds North Korea, Saudi Arabia, the Trump administration, and the inner sanctum of Facebook. I am probably leaving a few things out.

Okay, you might be thinking. These men are technically millennials but not in spirit or practice. They are too unusual, too geopolitically unique, to function as members of any generation. No. They are, in fact, textbook exemplars of theirs. Name me a so-called millennial characteristic and I can name a fuckboy-despot who possesses it.

Kim Jong-un, just like a classic millennial who graduated into the recession, experienced failure-to-launch … his nuclear warheads. He is a little bit Grantland, a little bit BuzzFeed. Kim loves the NBA, especially the ’90s-era Chicago Bulls, and once supposedly tried to make a nuclear deal contingent on his access to NBA players. Also: sneakers (he recently ordered North Korean factories to get to work copying Air Jordans) and the kind of nostalgia that Only ’90s Kids Know (he made the national TV station revive an animated show from his childhood called The Boy General, which sounds like it could run on the Disney Totalitarian Afternoon). He has been coddled by helicopter parents his whole life. As a child, according to one biographer, he’d demand to hold the fishing rod when someone else snagged a fish and say, “Look what I caught!” Then there was the time Kim arranged for the hacking of Sony after he was offended by his portrayal in the Seth Rogen–James Franco movie The Interview. Talk about “cancel culture”!

Mohammed bin Salman, for his part, is also into classic millennial activities, like escape rooms. Think of when he and his father locked hundreds of their closest allies and relatives in the Ritz-Carlton, Riyadh, some for months. (MBS also seized billions of dollars of his supposed friends’ money — very Anna Delvey, very Fyre Festival, very Scammer Summer.) He’s rumored to be dating aughts icon Lindsay Lohan (though her rep denied it). And as oil slowly runs out, he has decided that experiences matter more than goods, which is why he does things like buy out the entire Four Seasons in East Palo Alto for his entourage — #TripOfaLifetime — and partied with the Rock in Hollywood while in town to lock down a stake of Ari Emanuel’s agency. The guy loves tech so much he bankrolled a “Vision Fund” to prop up Uber, WeWork, DoorDash, and other start-ups meant to replace the kinds of things a mother used to do for tech bros (especially useful for MBS, who has hidden away his mother in order to prevent her from stopping his consolidation of power).

Stephen Miller, meanwhile, came up as a typical David Brooks–style organization kid, running for student government in high school (he said students shouldn’t pick up their own trash, because that’s what the janitors were for) and writing columns for the newspaper. (In high school, he wrote that Osama bin Laden would have loved Santa Monica High; at Duke, in an op-ed called “Sorry Feminists,” he wrote about how alarmed he would be by the sight of a male babysitter or a female construction worker.) Like many a millennial, Miller has helped evolve his parents’ political and social consciousness in recent years (except in his case … toward racism). Millennials, of course, also famously love food experiences — like taco trucks, so cool! An acquaintance of mine recently saw Miller standing in line at one outside an office building in Washington, D.C., where he was likely taking a break from orchestrating raids on small children and families who have fled gang violence.

Eh. Styles change, but human nature doesn’t. If Alexander the Great had been born in the ’80s, he would have been a hypebeast, weeping over how there were no more shoes to conquer and maneuvering in Iranian politics solely so he could expand his app’s reach. Nor have the paths to power changed all that much. It is no accident that these are all men, born into privilege, three of whom inherited their grip on the world. (One runner-up to this list is Europe’s first millennial head of state, the 33-year-old far-right identitarian slicked-hair Austrian prime minister — not a story line in which the historical resonances are promising.)

Read more…