A prisoner can oppose incarceration while remaining confined’: The paradox of Gen Z, capitalism, and consumption

A reader wrote in this week to challenge a recent column of mine about Gen Z and their spending habits . Essentially, aggregated Bank of America credit card data shows this supposedly deeply-anti-capitalist generation is very fond of consumer capitalism. But is that really hypocrisy?

“A worker can oppose capitalism while still being forced to sell labor and buy necessities,” the reader wrote to me, “just as a prisoner can oppose incarceration while remaining confined.” Buying a secondhand jacket or a $5 treat—or waiting on a long line in a bout of “democratized snobbery” or “conspicuous waiting” —doesn’t abolish wages, rent, debt or the fact someone else owns the means of production. It just changes how a person survives inside a system they have no way to leave.

He’s right. Just because you spend money in capitalism doesn’t mean you love it as a way of organizing economic life. What’s interesting to me, though, is every generation since the original countercultural capitalists—the baby boomers—has expressed some version of this antipathy. What’s changing is what happens to that opposition afterward, as a generation grows up, gets a mortgage and a career, and joins the masses. Even if you think generational framing is like financial astrology, these dynamics reveal something genuine about the evolution of society—and business’ role in it.

Up until now, this tension has more or less resolved itself as generations grow up and grow less radical as the fruits of their labor are recognized. But economic data increasingly suggests this mechanism may be breaking down. And maybe, to paraphrase a cultural critic who still haunts these times, Gen Z is responding to a future that has slowly been getting canceled for a long time.

The prison that doesn’t need bars

The reader’s prisoner metaphor is useful beyond the economics. The British writer Mark Fisher , aka “ K-punk ,” spent much of his career arguing capitalism’s most effective tool isn’t coercion—it’s the capture of the imagination. His term for this was “ capitalist realism “: the system’s capacity to make itself feel like the only conceivable arrangement. He built on Frederic Jameson ‘s quote that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” to argue it’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than whatever comes afterward. To paraphrase my reader, the prison works not because the bars are strong, but because the prisoner can no longer picture the outside. Opposition persists; the idea of an alternative doesn’t.

Fisher’s related concept—” the slow cancellation of the future “—extended this to culture. Since the 1990s, he argued, art and music had been stuck recycling the past not because nothing was happening, but because the culture had lost the capacity to imagine a future meaningfully different from the present. The music critic Simon Reynolds reached the same destination from a different direction in his 2011 book Retromania : Pop culture had become addicted to its own past, the internet making all of recorded music history simultaneously accessible and paradoxically producing less genuine innovation rather than more. Where previous generations related to a specific, bounded nostalgia, the post-internet era recycled everything at once, all decades available for simultaneous revival, none of them pointing forward.

The writer Freddie deBoer has argued something compatible but distinct, what he calls “ the long boring “: the stagnation isn’t a recent phenomenon. The American cultural and technological landscape has been flat since at least the 1970s, he contends—predating both 2008 and the internet—and most of what reads today as political urgency is really just content, media cycling through moral controversies that generate engagement but no leverage. Economic historian Marc Levinson offered up this thesis in book form with An Extraordinary Time , which argued everything following the 1970s in American culture and society has reflected a less innovative, less productive economy. Brad DeLong also took a spin on the subject in book form, arguing for a productivity boom in the 1990s, petering out by 2008.

Here is how the last four generations have weathered this great economic slowdown, and how it shaped their attitudes down to the present.

1971: the revolution’s own verdict on itself

In 1971, Pete Townshend wrote arguably the sharpest line the counterculture ever produced about itself. “Won’t Get Fooled Again” arrived on The Who’s classic album Who’s Next after Kent State, after the peak of New Left radicalism, and its refrain—meet the new boss, same as the old boss—was a warning revolution doesn’t touch the underlying structure of power; it just replaces the faces at the top. The man who had previously written the line, “hope I die before I get old” rode that message to massively lucrative rock stardom in his own old age and world tours that lasted until 2025, at the latest count.

Townshend’s cynicism proved prescient as the generation that marched, occupied, and dropped out in the late 1960s spent the 1970s watching the New Left splinter. Tom Wolfe caught the pivot in real time: His 1976 essay “ The Me Decade ” argued postwar prosperity had given ordinary Americans, for the first time in history, enough surplus wealth and leisure to stop thinking about collective politics and start thinking about themselves. Est, primal therapy, encounter groups—the communal energy of the 1960s didn’t die so much as it privatized. By the 1980s, the generation that had once marched on the Pentagon had become the yuppie class—homeowners, 401(k) pioneers, the cohort that built the modern investor class. Oliver Stone made Gordon Gekk...

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