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13 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 31 MARCH 2021 OPINION Diletta De Cristofaro Diletta De Cristofaro is Research Fellow at Northumbria University • theconversation.com ANDY, Dag and Claire are in their twen- ties. Dissatisfied with society's structures and expectations, they move to the Cali- fornian desert looking for new beginnings and more meaningful lives. To survive, the three get McJobs – "low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service sector" – only finding solace in each other's company and storytelling. This is the plot of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the first novel by Canadian writer and artist Douglas Coup- land. Published 30 years ago, Generation X went on to become a cult text and helped to popularise the term "X" for those born be- tween the mid-1960s and the early-1980s. Coupland struck a chord, as his charac- ters' disaffection, "knee-jerk irony", and withdrawal from society chimed with de- pictions of the young in the early 1990s in popular culture. But rather than referring to a cohort of people born between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, for Coup- land "X" identifies the refusal of "the mer- ry-go-round of status, money, and social climbing that so often frames modern ex- istence". As he puts it, "X is a term that de- fines not a chronological age but a way of looking at the world". Neither is the novel just a snapshot of young people's concerns and lives in the early 1990s. Mixing narrative text with pop-art-inspired illustrations, slogans and definitions, the novel depicts what it re- fers to as our "accelerated culture". Three decades later, it is a literary classic that still speaks to issues central to today's world. Information overload Coupland was originally commissioned to author a non-fiction handbook about Generation X on the back of articles and a comic strip he wrote in the late 1980s about "the young and restless workforce following the baby boom". Yet to the dis- may of his publishers, who nearly didn't publish Generation X, he soon realised that the book needed to be a novel. Coupland's decision speaks to a pre- vailing fear in the book that with in- formation overload and technological acceleration, we may have lost the plot of our individual lives and wider society. As Dag puts it: When Generation X was published, Coupland observed: "information over- load meant 50 TV stations instead of ten." In the current era where internet connections give access to a previous- ly unimaginable wealth of content, this seems rather quaint. Nonetheless, Gen- eration X's intuitions help us understand the destabilising effects that the online world has on our sense of self today. The novel insists on the human need for narrative and on the power of sto- rytelling to make sense of the world around us. Andy, Dag and Claire try to regain direction and meaning in their lives by telling each other stories. To- day, we might take to social media. Yet the "stories" we post on these digital environments resemble the "blips and chunks and snippets" Dag was lament- ing in Generation X. Indeed, as Coupland, the British writer Shumon Basar, and the Swiss art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist discuss in The Age of Earthquakes, the internet reinforces "denarration". This is "the process whereby one's life stops feeling like a story". Instead, they write, our lives now feel like a "lineup of tasks". There is no story in a life that is made up of short burst of mundane ac- tivity; it is not flowing and engaging but stilted and of little consequence. Apocalyptic anxieties Many of the stories Andy, Dag and Claire share with each other have a dis- tinctly apocalyptic flavour. Fittingly for a novel published at the tail end of the cold war, the fear of "the flash", namely nuclear apocalypse, is prevalent. Anxieties over pollution also emerge, which speaks to the 21st-century climate crisis. One of Generation X's chapters is titled "Plastics never disintegrate", while the novel's definitions include "Paper Rabies: Hypersensitivity to littering" and "Dumpster Clocking: The tenden- cy when looking at objects to guessti- mate the amount of time they will take to eventually decompose". The climate crisis would remain an important thread running through Coupland's ensuing works, from Generation A to Vortex. Andy's, Dag's and Claire's apocalyptic stories express their "futurelessness". Saddled with McJobs, angry at previous generations handing over the world to them "like so much skid-marked un- derwear", envious of boomers' wealth and security – something that reso- nates with Millennials and Gen Z today – Coupland's protagonists have a hard time imagining the future beyond a nu- clear blast. Our perception of the future might not have changed much since 1991. As Coupland puts it in a recent Instagram post, "The future feels like clickbait". The post follows the style of his Slogans for the 21st Century, which Coupland began in 2011 wanting to capture phe- nomena that "would make no sense to someone from 1991". Andy, Dag and Claire might struggle with the idea of "clickbait", but I'm sure they'd get the sentiment of an empty future made up of an unending list of meaningless things forever vying for our attention. Generation X: 'The future feels like clickbait' A entitled '24/7: A Wake-Up Call For Our Non-Stop World' from Douglas Coupland's Slogans for the 21st Century