Millennials: The Blamed Generation
Kevin Roose, a writer I largely otherwise respect, went with one of the laziest tropes in today’s writing, saying that the “millennial lifestyle subsidy” of venture-backed startups and their discounted rates was going away. The piece, which manages to somehow blame millennials - apparently the only consumer spending class of the last decade - for taking advantage of the exploitative labor and dangerous monetization of the Uber-For-Everything generation. He even decides to include the half-assed generalization of Kara Swisher calling these apps “millennial assisted living,” an even lazier summary of how people spent money on stuff using apps.
I’ll confess that I gleefully took part in this subsidized economy for years. (My colleague Kara Swisher memorably called it “assisted living for millennials.”) I got my laundry delivered by Washio, my house cleaned by Homejoy and my car valet-parked by Luxe — all start-ups that promised cheap, revolutionary on-demand services but shut down after failing to turn a profit. I even bought a used car through a venture-backed start-up called Beepi, which offered white-glove service and mysteriously low prices, and which delivered the car to me wrapped in a giant bow, like you see in TV commercials. (Unsurprisingly, Beepi shut down in 2017, after burning through $150 million in venture capital.)
It’s not that it’s offensive, it’s just fucking lazy. It is not descriptive of anything, other than another boring, lazy, half-assed way of blaming millennials for something that would’ve been taken advantage of (and was taken advantage of!) by other generations had these apps existed 10 or 20 years ago (somehow). It also manages to magically, while spending a third of the piece talking about who used these apps, choose to not blame the Gen Xers and Boomers that actually subsidized these companies, gently gesticulating toward how VCs funded them. In fact, he gives them a free pass!
