Is the internet a consolation prize for having to live with a stagnant economy and fewer opportunities for steady employment? Are we consigned to pandering in the online attention economy to escape from our nostalgia for the time when the young could actually become self-sufficient? This comes from an Edge.org conversation with Jaron Lanier, the author of You Are Not a Gadget:

And there is a disturbing sense in which I feel like that’s the world we’re entering. I’m astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online. There are just a lot of people who feel that being able to get their video or their tweet seen by somebody once in a while gets them enough ego gratification that it’s okay with them to still be living with their parents in their 30s, and that’s such a strange tradeoff. And if you project that forward, obviously it really does become a problem.  . . . 

To me, a lot of the culture of youth seems to be using the Internet as a form of denialism about their reduced prospects. They’re like, “Well, sure we can’t get a job and we need to live with our parents, but we can tweet”, or something. “Let us tweet!”

On my PopMatters blog about a year ago, I wrote a few posts about this possibility — young people being paid in personality and attention for their freelance immaterial labor on social networks. Basically, being a hipster, working at being cool, would become a literal job rather than a figurative one. Those were written in the context of the debate over whether US unemployment was cyclical or structural, that is, whether high unemployment’s persistence is because of the recession and lack of effective demand, or if it was because entire sectors of the economy could no longer productively support hiring (it would cost more to hire new workers than those workers could add in profit potential). If unemployment were indeed structural, I wondered if online immaterial labor — basically self-fashioning in social networks to generate data about what is cool to whom — might be a emergent job category for creative class types, one in which worker-hipsters would be perpetual freelancers at best. (Indeed, Matt Yglesias notes “the continuing blogger boom” here.) At worst, they would vanish from traditional formal labor markets and instead be paid in attention and virtual pats on the head.