Dana Blankenhorn

Boomer Roomers

I turned 60 this year. Which means the very heart of the Baby Boom – the Steve Jobs-Bill Gates heart of it – is also turning 60 this year.

It’s painful. My back hurts. My wife’s knees hurt. Everyone around us is talking about their health, their retirement plans, or their grandchildren. It sucks.

And it’s going to suck harder, because age has a way of dealing with all pride, and is a route toward a final end. My mom is 91. She has dementia. I call her at the home she’s staying at and sometimes she doesn’t know who I am. Such is life. No one gets out of it alive.

This is not just a personal moan, however. It’s a huge societal shift, and a major business opportunity. That’s because we Baby Boomers think we invented everything, and there are just so damned many of us. We’re the “pig in the python” – a giant cohort born of the ashes of WWII into a world of prosperity we first rejected, then turned to with a vengeance, and that we’re leaving for our kids and grandkids to clean up.

Revolt of the Viewer

The biggest life change in decades is now beginning. We are leaving an age of bundled, curated video content and entering an age of self-selected, self-curated content.

The unbundling of cable, the decision of millions to go “over the top” and choose instead to get their entertainment directly from the Internet, is one of the great sea changes of this decade, driven by rising costs and (perhaps more important) a shortage of time. Lost may be serendipity, the decision to watch things because they are on.

Today, for instance, I watched George Englund’s The Shoes of the Fisherman, a 1968 MGM film in which Anthony Quinn plays a radical cross between Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis, renouncing communism and wealth at the same time in the name of secular decency. Given that it was made early in the pontificate of Paul VI (John Gielgud gets one scene playing a nice version of Paul, then dies to make way for the plot) it is many decades ahead of its time. (Quinn’s character is even proclaimed a cardinal from Lvov, which is in western Ukraine, and a starving China drives the plot.) But it’s not what I would be watching if I had the whole world to choose from.

The Battle for Silicon Valley’s Political Soul

It’s now obvious, in retrospect that an era turned on November 14, 2007, when Barack Obama spoke at Google. 

The event was symbolic of a larger change going on in the economy, and thus in politics. Oil would be replaced by technology. Power, and responsibility, would move from Houston to Silicon Valley. The Kochs would fall, the Google guys would rise.

Of course, Silicon Valley hasn’t always been a liberal bastion. The original leaders of Silicon Valley were Republican. David Packard was an assistant secretary of defense under Nixon, during Vietnam. The Valley was always more about Apollo 13 than Woodstock. The Internet was a Cold War activity.

Corporate Autocracy

A lot of people like to say these days that America is no longer a democracy.  True, absent a crisis, and it has always been true. Most of the time, most people don’t care. Democracy, for most of us, is a gun we keep locked in the drawer.

And that is actually fine. If you’re not motivated to vote, you’re voting for the ways things are, you’re voting “yes” on whatever those who do vote wind up voting for. If you don’t vote, then bitch-and-moan that “we’re not a democracy” and “my vote doesn’t count,” you’re an idiot. Because it’s the opportunity to vote that matters.

But there is an area where in the last several decades we have lost democracy, and seem to have lost any hope of getting it back. That’s in corporations.