A demographic poster child for DTLA I’m not, given that my neighbors are in their 30s. And 80 percent of them work downtown, making about $100,000, while I’m retired. But when it comes to gender I fit right in (57 percent of downtown residents are women, according to surveys). And my reasons for choosing to live downtown seem to be in tune with the millennials—being part of a rejuvenated, vibrant area; the luxury of using your car sparingly or not at all; the ubiquity of eclectic restaurants, bars and food trucks; a fantastic range of arts, music performances and sports venues; and the sheer diversity of the neighborhood.

Upon moving in, my more advanced age did attract some attention. The millennials on my floor were puzzled about that folded-up newspaper, left by my door each morning, wondering exactly what it was. My nextdoor neighbor gently advised me that his late night gatherings would interrupt my sleep. (Clearly I did not exude party girl.)

Billie, second from the left, with neighbors and dog in her apartment.

Approaching my ninth decade, I took heed of a suggestion from researchers at UC Irvine’s Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders, that learning a new language would help stave off Alzheimer’s. So, I listened carefully to those in my elevator and in the Starbucks downstairs and mastered an amazing language, aka DTLA Millennial-ese. My new vocabulary includes: dipset, hundo P, JOMO, perf, JK and phubbing. And, those brain cells are a growing.

Settling in, I learned some valuable lessons. Never pet the dog in the elevator or you will miss your next appointment as the owner waxes on and on about his or her beloved. Do hug teenagers in the elevator as they are generally ignored in the presence of so many babies and dogs. Resist buying earplugs—the beep-beep of construction trucks backing up, sirens screaming, Uber cars circling and the around-the-clock noise becomes part of the magical music of downtown. You get so used to it that, if suddenly there were no noise, you wouldn’t sleep.

Day view from Billie’s Balcony.

This year there has been a 2 percent drop in violent crime in the LAPD’s Central Division, which includes parts of downtown, Skid Row and Chinatown; ours is the only division in the city to experience a drop. Still, never hesitate to ask a stranger to keep you safe in DTLA. Case in point: I was attending a Laker’s game at Staples Center and had driven my car there for some reason I’ve forgotten.

Being a non-VIP, I parked in a lot three long blocks from the venue. It was a good basketball game, but I had to leave at halftime. Consequently, there were very few people on the sidewalks as I hurried to my car. Soon I noticed several men loitering at the corner of my parking lot with no one else in sight. About that time, someone walking behind me passed by and I looked him over—not too scruffy and clearly preoccupied, with his cell phone glued to his ear. When I asked if he would mind walking me to my car, pointing to the possible gang ahead, he replied OK and never said another word. As we strided next to each other, I overheard several conversations he was having on the phone and it clicked in that my escort was a drug dealer. Instant protection! No one was going to mess with me.

The view across the street from Billie’s place.

I’ve learned that first impressions often don’t hold up. I arrived convinced that my green thumb would not yield anything in DTLA with all its concrete and construction dust. But I was pleasantly surprised. Although I live on the 12th floor of a high-rise, pots full of succulents are happy on my balconies and a humming bird visits every day. There is also another interesting bird downtown—the crane, known to frequent construction sites. Roosting throughout much of downtown, this bird is deserving of being recognized as the official mascot of DTLA.

After years of being a ghost town after 5 p.m., downtown LA is now being called, “the Capital of Cool” by GQ Magazine. Some millennials might think migrating seniors will change the vibe of DTLA. Unlikely. We will continue the cool by helping with dogs and babies and offering some wisdom along the way. So, if you want your grandchildren to insist on visiting you regularly, join me. Downtown doesn’t disappoint. In fact, when it comes to DTLA, I am definitely ‘hundo P’.

The post Approaching 80, I Learned to Speak Millennial-ese appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

 
Stanley Hall grew up in the tiny village of Ashfield, Massachusetts, near the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains in the northwest corner of the state. At age 18, he left home for Williams College, just 35 miles away, with a goal to “do something and be something in the world.” His parents were farmers. His mother, Abigail, wanted her son to become a minister, but young Stanley wasn’t sure about that plan. He had different ideas about college; he saw the four-year degree as a rite of passage—a chance to follow his passions and to explore.

Though Stanley excelled academically at Williams—he was voted smartest in his class—his parents considered his undergraduate years a bit erratic. When he graduated from college, he told his mom he didn’t think he had the “requirements for a pastor.” Even so, he moved to New York City and enrolled in a seminary.

The big city was intoxicating, and living there persuaded Stanley to abandon his religious studies short of a degree, and at the age of 25, after securing a loan, he set off for Germany to study philosophy. While there, Stanley traveled extensively, visiting the theaters, bars, and dance halls of Berlin. “What exactly are you doing over there?” his father sternly asked him. He added physiology and physics to his academic pursuits and told his parents he was thinking about getting a Ph.D. in philosophy. His mother questioned the benefit of a Ph.D. “Just what is a Doctor of Philosophy?” she asked.

His parents wanted him to come home and get a real job, and even Stanley wondered what was next. He felt he was drifting through his 20s.

“I am 25 and have done nothing for myself, scarcely tried my hand in the world to know where I can do anything,” he told his parents. But he continued his studies and explored Germany for a few more years. By then, Stanley was out of money, in debt, and without an advanced degree, so he returned home to the United States after his parents refused to support him financially. He was 27 years old.

Stanley Hall’s story is similar to that of many young Americans today. They go off to college, resist their parents’ pressures to choose a job-connected major, and then drift through the years after college graduation, often short of money or any real plan. But here’s the difference: Stanley Hall grew up in a totally different America—the one of the late 1800s.

We think this kind of lengthy takeoff is a relatively new situation for parents, but it’s not. Sure, the timetable to adulthood is definitely longer now than ever before and affects far more people, but even at the turn of the 20th century, when the economy offered fewer career choices for people like Hall and far fewer had college degrees, young people still roamed around throughout their 20s.

Hall eventually started a career—he earned an advanced degree, taught at Antioch College and Harvard University, married in his mid-30s, and became president of Clark University in Massachusetts. While at Clark, he developed a fascination with the period in life between childhood and adulthood. He founded the American Psychological Association, and in the early 1900s, he wrote an influential book that coined a new life stage that he called “adolescence.”

Hall described this transitional period from childhood to adulthood, between the ages of 14 and 24, as being full of “storm and stress.” Industrialization and automation, along with child labor laws, meant that teenagers no longer had to work in the factories or on the farms. And the emergence of the high school movement in the United States required children to acquire more education before entering the workforce.

In reality, the adolescent stage in the early 1900s was much shorter than Hall described. Employers didn’t demand that most teenagers go to college, so they were able to get a solid full-time job after graduating from high school, followed quickly by marriage and parenthood. Then around the middle of the last century, the job market began requiring that more young Americans add a college degree to the equation. The timetable to adulthood lengthened to the middle of a person’s 20s, although it was still short by today’s standards. After World War II, the GI Bill allowed returning veterans, mostly men, to go to college for free, and the fast-growing postwar workforce quickly absorbed them. They got married, bought houses in the developing suburbs, and had kids, achieving all those key milestones in their 20s. Between 1950 and 1960, the percentage of men 19 to 24 years old living with their parents fell by half.

That post–World War II era cemented in our minds an idea that remains to this day: teenagers graduate from high school, earn a college degree, secure a job, and move out of their childhood home—all by the age of 22 or so. But the 1950s turned out to be an anomaly in a century-long extension of the timetable to adulthood. World War II forced many adolescents, drafted to serve, to grow up before they were really ready to be adults; the GI Bill made it easy and cheap to go to college; and companies were quick to hire a new crop of college-educated veterans, as the United States faced little global competition from countries still rebuilding from the war.

Yet by the 1960s, the trend of a quick launch to adulthood was ending, and by the 1970s, young 20-somethings started living with their parents in larger numbers. In other words, the “boomerang generation,” named for college graduates who return home to live with their parents today, existed 40 years ago, too. It was just much smaller.

The difference between then and now is that manufacturing was still the foundation of the U.S. economy. In 1970, factory work accounted for 25 percent of jobs nationwide (compared with 10 percent today). Even in the bad economy of the 1970s, a college degree wasn’t necessary for financial success, allowing more than one pathway to solid middle-class jobs for most young people. At that time, the wage premium for a college degree—how much more the typical bachelor’s degree recipient earned compared with a high school graduate—was below 40 percent. In 1976, Newsweek ran a cover story asking “Who Needs College?” with a picture of two college graduates in their caps and gowns on a construction site with a jackhammer and a shovel, suggesting that as much as “27 percent of the nation’s work force may now be made up of people who are ‘overeducated’ for the jobs they hold.”

But the 1970s marked the last full decade when a large slice of the population didn’t need a college degree. The recession of the early 1980s effectively killed off manufacturing in the United States, and the next decade’s technology revolution essentially mandated education after high school. The economic benefits of World War II had finally ended. The increase in the wage premium started to speed up for college graduates, and after 1983, it turned into a runaway train. In 1983, the wage premium was 42 percent. Today, it surpasses 80 percent.

The high school movement of the early 1900s, which brought about the new life stage of adolescence, turned into the universal college movement as we neared the end of the 20th century. College did not become that much more valuable, but the loss of many blue-collar jobs caused the high school diploma to become much less valuable. More education was necessary in a knowledge economy, and acquiring that education required a longer timetable between adolescence and adulthood. Beginning in 1980, the next three decades would see a massive run-up in the number of students enrolled in college (both undergraduate and graduate students), leading to further delays in passing the milestones of adulthood, from marriage to buying a house, and forever changing how we view what had been a predictable transition from education to the workforce.

The post How the Knowledge Economy Delays Adulthood appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We need to have a chat, so I trust you’re reading this.

Of course you are; good. Now, let’s see … how should I put this? Look, you’ve done a great job cultivating that whole “spook” image for the past 60 years. Really, you’ve just been terrifyingly adept at creating an environment of ironclad secrecy, even more so than the CIA, who’ve bungled too many overseas jobs to be the omnipotent, untouchable agency they’d like us to think they are.

Times are changing, though. For the past several generations, you’ve been the rulers of all information, with no one to challenge you. Americans just had to trust that the good quiet folk at the NSA were looking out for them, because no one else could handle data on such a large scale. It was a simpler time, back when the Internet was young and the Web was just a seed of an idea, and our idea of “big data” was the Yellow Pages.

There are new kids in town, though; kids who grew up on data. They were raised to dish out and take in as much data as possible, and they do it for fun. To you, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and all the rest of it are the latest places from which to siphon information. To these new kids, it’s home. It’s where they grew up, which is why they’re much better at it, and why you hire so many of them.

Now, what happens when you raise a generation on a steady diet of data, and then try to keep naughty secrets? They’re going to ask questions. They grew up in a world where information was free, and they took advantage of that fact. They learned more about the world around them than could ever be learned in school, and they went online for the answers to the questions their parents and teachers wouldn’t answer. They grew up not just appreciating that information was free, but expecting information to be free.

It gets worse. Not only are you hiring millennials, for whom secrecy is anathema—you’re hiring millennial hackers. And hacking, as you well know, means finding ways of turning technology to serve a purpose other than its intended one. When information isn’t free, these people have the ability and the will to free it.

I know this because I’m one of them. I may not have top-secret clearance and make six figures working for one of your contractors, but Edward Snowden’s demographic profile still hits close to home. When I was a boy, I used to hack into my computer games to add fart sounds to them. I built my own computers. I made my sister’s Teddy Ruxpin say horrible, horrible things. When I get a new phone, its hackability is its number-one buying point.

When I get my hands on a new piece of technology, my first thought isn’t about what it can do—it’s about what it can’t do, and how can I force it to overcome its limitations to do what I want. I then wonder, “Why wasn’t I ‘allowed’ to do this in the first place?” See, we millennial hackers simply cannot take anything at face value. We’re a bit contrarian and stubborn by nature. It’s why we’re good at what we do. The more constraints you place on us (be they workplace, physical, technological, or copyright) the more we feel a need to disregard, challenge, or overcome those constraints.

To be a hacker is to be cynical about whatever “solid” information or limits you’re faced with, to remove layers of consumer sheen or government spin until raw components are laid bare to reconstruct at will. You reward people like me with fat salaries when we do this with technology, so there’s little sense in expecting us not do the same in the rest of our lives—with your policies, rules, information, even with our own personal lives. We tinker, probe, deconstruct, and reassemble for other purposes. One thing we don’t do is blindly put hand to heart and sing “God Bless, America” —unless we’re in a North Korean gulag and it’s a contrarian move.

Do you see the problem? You need my kind of people for our understanding of data, but we don’t necessarily want or need you. You are anathema to our values and expectations. Sure, you’ve got some very smart graybeards who can do some amazing things, but they’re not going to be the bulk of your army for long, if they even still are. You have no choice but to keep hiring these hackers who didn’t grow up having data hidden from them. It’s ironic that you’ve become so reliant on people who really have no business in a tight-lipped, hierarchical quasi-militarized institution. We are the ones you should be snooping on, if only you could snoop without us.

I feel your pain.

Edward Snowden smoked you, and it wasn’t even very hard for him. Now, I know what you’re going to say. “It won’t happen again! We’ll improve security!” Who is going to improve your security? Is it going to be the naval officers you used to hire, respectful of hierarchy and used to a military lifestyle? Or maybe, say, more young, technical lay-people—contractors with the information freedom ideals of the millennial hacker? Yeah, I thought so.

Let’s face it: This isn’t going to be the last time your secrets are aired to the public. It’s probably not even going to be the last time this year that your secrets are aired to the public by another Edward Snowden, because you’ve got countless Edward Snowdens on your payroll whose first—not last—instinct is to blow open your information infrastructure. I mean, you tried to recruit me years ago, for goodness sake. Those confidential recruitment materials that said “For Your Eyes Only” all over them? Yeah, I showed those to everyone I knew, mostly because you were so heavy-handed with all the confidential stuff.

The important thing now is not to panic. No tears. You’re a big, strong, spooky organization, right? You don’t have to clean out your desk. You’ve still got a big role to play in the cyber-warfare of the next several decades. You’re just learning a hard lesson here, and I realize you’re partly being demonized for implementing what the White House and Congress want. However, you have no choice but to keep hiring these young, entitled, informed, data-driven hackers, who pretty soon might not have any secrets to leak because the Snowdens in your midst will have forced you to turn into a fully transparent (but still efficient!) organization.

Now that I think of it, you really should have played up the six-figure salary and Hawaii angle in those recruiting materials you gave me. I would’ve kept your secrets. Really.

Cheers,
Cyrus

The post An Open (Of Course) Letter to My Friend, the NSA appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.