Remember, Remember the 5th of November
a guest post by L.T. Zero
One of my founding members—those lovely souls who pay $200 a year to support my writing out of sheer goodness—sent me this. I do not promise to publish any guest post that a founding member cares to write, and have in fact declined past submissions. But I do promise to consider publishing any guest post a founding member cares to write, and I really enjoyed this one. I learned a lot from it about how and why some of American culture was shaped in the way it is. I think many of you will enjoy it, too.
The comments were open but are now closed, because some of them were stupid and the stupidity was making me angry and ruining my day. People, L.T. doesn’t know you exist. He is not personally threatening to genocide you because you identify with the label of ‘boomer’ regardless of your year of birth. The Woke Substacks for the people who take their identity metrics so seriously that they feel threatened with genocide because someone else is angry can be found over there (points vaguely).
You sound like the idiots on TikTok crying that they may wake up tomorrow as slaves or designated breeders in the Handmaid’s Tale. Grow up.
Thank you to everyone who appreciated this. L.T. thanks you as well, and has enjoyed the responses that didn’t remind him of his brainwashed, public-schooled, 13 year old niece. FFS.
They were a generation of rebels. Their brightest artists turned rock’n’roll into a worldwide phenomenon that helped erode the solidarity of the Soviet Union and bring into question the abuses of the Cold War security state.
Their activists bombed their way to political influence (literally), and their heroes dodged the draft.
Their prodigy hackers made their seed capital stealing from Ma Bell and made their bones breaking secure government communications to prank call the Red Line at NORAD to order pizza.
Their low-tier security nerds caught spies that eluded the State department.
Some of these rebel hackers got caught, sent to prison, only to wind up making deals to help the very Feds that arrested them to secure our nation’s communications.
Their nerds and weirdos built the Internet (starting way back in the 60s when it was DARPANet), which the whole world depends on for its informational and commercial infrastructure. They built Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Google, TED, and Sun Microsystems. They turned the world upside down. They successfully pressured the government to declassify [some of] its assassination and civilian research programs. They founded Lucasfilm and Pixar and Zoetrope and Amblin and invented video games, transforming the way the world was entertained. And because they were outlaws (often literally), they were heroes to the generation that came of age in the 80s and 90s, even as that generation resented them (every teenager is allowed to resent his parents).
Their first president was a draft-dodger who loved his pot (at least in college).
They were criminals.
And they won.
And they ruled the world.
Then, we came.
We paid attention to their lessons.
We learned to hack in ways they could only dream of.
We were freeing the world’s information and advancing liberal ideals—like free speech, radical responsibility, free enterprise, tolerance, and ruthless accountability for the powerful.
Our geniuses learned how to free art from the tyranny of the record producers and film studios...until they got snuffed out, blackmailed, bought out, or bought off.
While we were on about our business, their outlaw heroes became congressmen and sponsored the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, all of which made the kind of hacking and art their people had done a crime.1
We were onboard until their sexy outlaw President upped the ante on the War on Drugs and the War on Cults, and ordered the murder of dissenters guilty of misdemeanors, and the murder of their babies for the crime of being related to them.
Until, unsatisfied with his own history of draft-dodging, the Boomer’s second President sent our friends and brothers off to a twenty-year-long war in impossible terrain with no victory conditions, to sit around with no decent operational control for their tents to be hit with dumbfire missiles and their foot patrols to be knocked down and knocked out with IEDs and bolt-action rifles in hellholes like Fallujah, with strategy so poor and will so weak that most of the real fighting was done with mercenaries instead of soldiers—soldiers who volunteered because they believed their parents who said “We’re fighting for democracy.”
Until we watched as they framed Julian Assange, railroaded Bradley Manning, forced Edward Snowden to flee to a Hong Kong slum and then to Russia in fear of his life, all for the crime of exposing their crimes against the America we all believed in.
Until they harassed Aaron Swartz2 into suicide for the crime of using a script to download public records (court transcripts) from an pay-to-access government server whose purpose was to give the public access to those public records—and for mirroring those records, which are in the public domain.
Until they threw Ross Ulbrecht in prison for life because he ran a website that circumvented their payment systems.
The Xers who kept their heads down continued to believe, even as they lost their faith. They believed in the rebel spirit. They believed in the mythic American Way. They believed that the 60s boomers were right when they protested the wars, and advocated for equality before the law, and freedom to love. They championed gay rights, they disproportionately practiced polyamory, they built the Internet from bare Unix.
They married and raised children in higher proportion than any of the surrounding generations, and then they sacrificed the higher-paying jobs to make sure they could keep their families together (giving them the highest rate of intact long-term relationships of any post-war generation).
And because of this belief in the goodness of the American project they joined the Boomers to elect Obama (who hailed from a CIA family and was part of political networks frequented by 1970s terrorists). He handed the world’s communications over to James Clapper. He laughed about the fun he had killing people by remote control (including American citizens traveling abroad, without trial or charge). The first black president. A champion of civil rights. A publicly-boastful serial killer.
Between 2000 and 2020, the Xers were threatened with the loss of their children (and sometimes actually lost them) for the crime of letting them play in the street. Children subsequently disappeared from public life, forced off the streets and into institutions from cradle-to-grad.
The third and fourth Boomer Presidents were complicit (or worse) in forcing masks onto those children for two years, retarding their language and social development. Those two Presidents forced vaccines on children that couldn’t die from the COVID virus—vaccines which were developed and tested in months. Those Presidents and their men claimed they knew these things were perfectly safe.
The Boomer government’s propaganda apparatus told us that the protests were peaceful while its minions burned down cities, while its mouthpieces covered up the extent of the warfare on American streets.
Its apparatchiks took away the public speaking privileges and banking privileges of those who questioned their certainty, their values, and their policies.
The fourth Boomer President set the FBI on parents who objected to radical curricular changes, and on citizens who purchased legal weapons for home defense, and on business owners who transgressed the political fashions of the day.
His apparatchiks and allies castrated our sons, mutilated our daughters, and passed laws terminating our parental rights if we objected.
And, in the endgame, they put up a venal, nasty opportunist who boasted about using her power as California Attorney General to throw parents in jail for the crime of taking their children to the hospital instead of to school, and for keeping convicts in jail after their release was ordered so the prisons could profit from their slave labor, and for railroading defendants she knew to be innocent. This candidate, who never stood for the primary, was appointed as the defender of democracy and called “competent and qualified,” despite being neither.
A gleeful shatterer of families who was going to protect the poor border-crossers from family separations.
An epitome of the Boomer ruling class philosophy. An exemplary candidate for the position of Fifth Boomer President.
The Boomers, though, made one mistake. They ostracized their third President. He was a good Boomer too. He ruled like a dictator, demanded celebrity status, and broke all the rules...including the ones they didn’t want anyone besides themselves to break. But since he did it without the backing of a political party, they hated him for it.
They forced him into the outer darkness, where he found some new friends.
He found hackers from the 1990s who managed to avoid the Boomer cull of Gen X and early Millennial talent.
He found people like Ravikant, Ramaswamy, Thiel, Vance, Gabbard, Rogan, Kennedy, and Musk; people who had beaten the system and built their own. People who’d used Boomer state corruption to get rich. People who watched their friends, their fellows, their comrades-in-arms, and their generational compatriots murdered, unpersoned, imprisoned, debanked, and crushed under the wheel by the Boomer regime. People whose children were taken from them by the politically-motivated moral panics.
He also found Scott Pressler, a gay man who personally registered 150,000 Amish to vote, securing his victory in Pennsylvania.
He made it a plank of his campaign the promise to free our last surviving political prisoner and pardon him at last.
And because of this string of promises and alliances, our Mr. Tangerine Man activated the other most married, most stable, least-voting cohort In America:
That’s right, motherfuckers. Generation X put the Orange Man back in the White House.
Dear Boomers,
For all our brothers and friends that you murdered. For all the wealth and opportunity you stole. For all our children you abused and shattered. This is our thank you note.
Fuck you all. I hope you choke on it.
We’re gonna keep fighting until every one of you self-satisfied hypocrites is farting dust from six feet under. Until our younger brothers and sisters, and our children, have a country that again belongs to them.
Consider November 5 the first payment for our upcoming blow-out sock hop dance.
On your graves.
Had these laws been in effect in the 60s, there would have been no internet, no moon landing, no rock’n’roll, no science fiction golden age, no New Wave cinema, no George Lucas, no Steven Spielberg, no John Williams, and nothing else of the technological and artistic world you know. We were promised jet packs, we got 140 characters...because of these laws.
Among other things, he was a key mind behind RSS, the technology that podcasting was built upon. He also was the technical genius behind the Creative Commons (paired with Lawrence Lessig who furnished the legal know-how), a founder of Demand Progress, wrote the framework software for Reddit (which many other sites also depend on including the Internet Archive), and too many other world-changing things to mention. He died at age 26.
The generation of "Question Authority" quickly outlawed questioning authority as soon as they became the authority. Because they abandoned all values not themselves, they became utterly corrupt. Kamala is a fitting end to that generation's power. May the next generation seek wisdom.
Proud to be a Gen Xer. Feeling so optimistic right now!