But we also need new generations of user-accountable institutions to realize the potential of new tech tools—which loops back to what I think Holgren was writing toward on Bluesky. I think it’s at the institutional and constitutional levels that healthier and more life-enhancing big-world tools and places for community and sociability will emerge—and are already emerging

We encourage researchers and practitioners to think beyond the narrow scope offered by the idea of generations, adopt a more critical perspective on our science and practice, and learn from the mistakes of the past.

As well as a widespread sense of a cancelled future, young people are for the most part much more left-wing than their forebears. Keir Milburn has labelled this trend “Generation Left,” and argues that what is occurring is not just a culture war played out across generations, as has occurred in the past, but a fundamental recomposition of class largely along age lines in Britain, America, and the many Western European countries that saw left populist insurgencies.

This has created what the writer Paul Millerd calls a “Boomer blockade” at the top of many organizations, keeping Gen-X and Millennial workers from promotions. As older workers remain in advanced positions in politics and business, younger workers who would have ascended the ranks in previous decades are getting stuck in the purgatory of upper-middle management.

commanded

If running your own website is like operating a nuclear reactor, then, yes: let’s give up on that. But what if it’s more like cooking dinner at home? That’s an activity that many people find challenging and/or intimidating, one with all sorts of social and economic ~encumbrances~, but even so, who would argue that it’s inappropriate to hope more people might learn to cook for themselves? Maybe, after everything, we’ve actually ended up in a healthy place. Maybe the great gluey Katamari ball of technology has served us well. In 2020, you can, using nothing but the free app provided by Instagram, publish something very close to a multimedia magazine. Or, sitting at your laptop, you can produce a lightning-fast website all by yourself, every line of code calibrated just so, and host its files at a domain of your choosing. Or! You can do something in between, using a service like WordPress or Squarespace. This is not a bad range of options!

We built every new page by hand. When we had more than one web page, we built the navigation by hand. We managed our Table of Contents by hand. We broke out our calculators to code boundaries for our image maps. We talked unironically about “hyperlinks.”

I take as given the evidence that human beings are irrevocably altering the conditions for life on Earth and that, despite certain unpredictabilities, we live at the cusp of a mass extinction. What is the place of digital humanities (DH) practice in the new social and geological era of the Anthropocene? What are the DH community’s most significant responsibilities, and to whom?

Vast infrastructural projects, including dams and highways—again, all debt-financed—are transforming the landscape.