Many email jobs have disappeared overnight. The material economy of the Millennial manager is under pressure from automation; from DOGE-era disclosures about NGOs; and from broader, Trump 2.0 shifts back toward — or at least, an appreciation for — family and church, farm and toil.

The Millennial economy was a virtue economy. Some of the most successful among us held managerial roles in tech, education, finance, arts, and politics that centered on controlling and reshaping language and brand perception — what might be called “virtue refereeing”. The most ambitious American Millennials, in a broad sense, became the apparatchiks of the globalized economy built by our parents, in part because there were few other pathways to the American Dream: stable jobs, home ownership, rising wages. Successful Millennials scuttled across the narrow footbridge between the eras. Many others, however, fell into the voids on all sides.

The new economic and political paradigm that is settling into place suggests redress, and greater social dignity, for those who didn’t land managerial email jobs in the first place, who didn’t sell out to become virtue referees. Put simply: many Americans look forward to paying fewer taxes indirectly into the managerial caste’s pocketbooks and to the potential reshoring of industrial jobs. Thus, these changes may be bad for the few and good for the many; many of them deserve to be celebrated.

More from this author

How Boomers blocked the open road

By Matthew Gasda

Start with politics. Because former President Joe Biden’s staffers ran his administration, the Biden years were the first Millennial presidency: inauthentic, bureaucratic, neurotic, seduced by jargon and theory, indifferent to the needs of those outside their own caste. The Biden era was a great reveal: we saw the wizard behind the curtain (and that wizard talked like us, with upspeak and a tendency to twist declarative sentences into the interrogative tone). More damningly, the wizard also made things worse: there was a seeping sense of decline in the Biden years, which produced the inevitable political backlash.

Beyond politics, virtue-referee work has lost its appeal, and the way Millennials talk about their jobs is shifting. Sunny, Obama-inflected language about contributing to progress is an embarrassment for all but the last true believers. My friend Sam Venis, for instance, a journalist and part-time corporate consultant, admits that he is “completely disenchanted by the notion of a ‘job’, which makes me much more comfortable exploiting the money sloshing around the corporate world”. Halfway through this decade, he feels “freed of the delusion that that portion of my work matters in some spiritual [or] societal way, which allows me to view it transactionally, and take even more seriously my creative work”.

There were always, broadly speaking, two groups of Millennials (at least, among the millions with college degrees who attempted to make it in the big cities). There were those who, in some way, kept the faith of early-2000s hipster bohemianism — the late-30-something who still shares an apartment and doesn’t have a spouse or kids and has slowly turned toward Trump. The second group are the careerists and strivers, who built up good credit scores and used grad-student jargon to facilitate unnecessary meetings for the last decade and voted for Kamala Harris — the professional overclass.

Suggested reading

Why virtue signalling won't pay

By Kathleen Stock

While the two groups have always co-existed, socialized, even aligned politically for a long time, the bohemian caste not only voted for Trump, but did so with a deep sense of vindication. Trump’s high approval ratings aren’t coming from rural evangelicals or blue-collar voters alone. Recall that the areas that shifted most sharply to the GOP in last year’s election were the blue strongholds; the calls are coming from inside the house of urban liberalism.

This turn of events flows from 2008, the year of the financial crisis and a pivotal moment for older Millennials. The economy of our parents disappeared in that year. As a consolation prize, we were offered the opportunity to be morally better than them. Our generation might be a generation of baristas and bartenders saddled with debt, but we could nurture our own inflated sense of importance by being more socialist, less racist, more liberatory, more linguistically sophisticated. Maybe we wouldn’t own homes, but we’d have doctorates.

Those who managed to parlay moral superiority into actual, dependable, well-paying jobs remained staunchly progressive — because fervency unlocked job security. Those who didn’t manage this feel some sense of hope now, only because practicing the verbal rituals of liberalism is no longer a prerequisite to social credibility.

It would be fascinating to see time-lapse movies of Millennials’ Facebook pages (and later Instagram and Twitter feeds) from, say, the mid-2000s to 2025. Essentially, 20 years of social media: from apolitical to staunchly progressive to whatever we have now — skeptical, realistic, finally clear-sighted, and even optimistic in ways we have never had reason to be.

The weird reality of Facebook, the ur-social media for older Millennials, is that it has always been a place to advertise personal triumphs. I’m so excited to announce that I have been accepted into Georgetown’s security-studies program; I’m delighted to share that I’ll be serving as an editorial assistant at The Nation this summer; here’s our first child. And secondarily, for fears: Can’t believe Orange Hitler is taking away the presidential fellows program; climate change is so scary; I don’t feel safe here.

It’s a strange zone of contradiction, where the expectation is that one poses simultaneously as successful and fragile: I can afford to take an upscale vacation to Europe, and I’m afraid of the future and the responsibilities of family; a place where one’s network can watch and participate in this strange spiral of anxiety and bold confidence.

The Millennial virtue economy — the rump of the Boomer white-collar economy — had no room for people who couldn’t tap into this mix of anxiety and celebration, self-interest and “purpose”. They couldn’t do it, either because they’d chosen entirely different paths — farming, construction, small-scale entrepreneurship, odd jobs — that didn’t lend themselves to online self-celebration. Or because they were simply too dignified to post: I’m delighted to announce. . .

I think of people with whom I grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. One of them is working odd jobs in halfway homes, going for long walks, praying — essentially, a secular monk. Another, last I checked in, was working on a hydroponic lettuce farm, painting every morning, ever an artist. Another works on film sets when possible and bounces back and forth between New York and Bethlehem. They, and many others like them, may relish the collapse of the virtue economy and the rise of something once again material and dignified — or at least, less self-righteous, less bloated with gaseous smugness.

Suggested reading

Beware the AI leisure class

By Olivia Ward-Jackson

Clearly for others, especially in the absurdly affluent DC suburbs, the pain is real. Friends from college and my early 20s in New York City, who successfully tapped into the zeitgeist of the 2010s, who became Obama-era media figures, seem to be confronting not just joblessness, but irrelevancy for the first time. The magic produced by saying the ritual words the right way has run out. No one’s up for progressive scolding anymore. You can’t make a career out of it. The outrage, the nitpicking, the Ezra Klein voice — it’s out.

That doesn’t mean that what comes next necessarily makes for a good society. Far from it. There is a plausible version of events in which many jobs are automated out of existence and universal basic income will play the role that state distributions of bread played in the late-stage Roman Empire: a fragile band holding together urban civilization.

Cutting fake, grating, pompous virtue referees from prestige jobs that drive up the federal deficit is inarguably egalitarian. It is no guarantor of substantial progress and meaningful social security, however. Moreover, the Right shows signs of creating its own, reciprocal patronage and virtue economy, stocked with influencers and thought-leaders who similarly produce little more than anger at their now dethroned Left-wing counterparts. That ought to be abhorred as much as its progressive forebear.

2025 is partly about coming to grips with how tenuous, silly, and demoralizing the last era was for the many; this clarity has to be exploited, not obscured in new ways. This is the Millennial reckoning: the end of the moral-superiority economy, and the slow, painful realization that tangible value lies in places and communities many of us had long considered beneath us.

If you spent 10 years trying to write a satire that encapsulates our present moment in American Democratic politics, you could do no better than this story. It is practically art. It is divinely ridiculous. But it’s also an incident from which certain conclusions can be drawn — about where the Left stands politically, and what the future holds, here at the almost-halfway point to our next presidential election.

The LatinX IncluXion Luncheon took place on Monday, in the Texas city of San Antonio, and Biden was attempting to compliment civil rights activist Raul Yzaguirre. “Raul helped build this organisation with the understanding that the diversity of this community, as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami, and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio, is your strength,” she said — mispronouncing “bodegas” as “BO-guh-duhs”. For the uninitiated, that is basically the closest thing we have in New York City to the crime of lese-majesty.

The backlash came swiftly from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, which released a statement that read, in part, “NAHJ encourages Dr. Biden and her speech writing team to take the time in the future to better understand the complexities of our people and communities. We are not tacos.”

More from this author

The white privilege of BLM

By Kat Rosenfield

The First Lady, of course, did not write this speech herself — as evidenced by the fact that it included a word she didn’t know and couldn’t pronounce. And the “tacos” line, of course, is not something she — or any normal person — would ever come up with organically. It’s pure political strategy, a too-earnest pandering to various identity groups that has dominated the liberal discourse for the past six years. It’s just unfortunate for Jill Biden that her speechwriters and political aides failed to realise that this type of rhetoric has not only reached the limits of its usefulness, but has lately become akin to walking around with a sign on your back that says “cancel me”.

This happened quite fast. It is only two years since the racial reckoning of 2020, a year when you couldn’t open your email without combing through half a dozen new corporate diversity declarations from every organisation you’d ever had contact with in your life. Your newspaper, your cable company, your dermatologist, the company that mails pineapples to your in-laws every year as a holiday gift: all of them wanted you to know that they stood in support of social justice. This was the year when the diversity industry climbed to a $7.6 billion valuation (and counting), and expensive DEI consultants flooded en masse into corporate life. It’s when Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility was a bestseller in its (approximately) 53rd millionth printing; when Democratic politicians took the knee wearing kente cloth; when celebrities purged their white guilt in self-produced confessional videos.

The momentum of the diversity movement was unstoppable, partly because Americans were united in genuine horror over the murder of George Floyd, but also because the country had been in pandemic lockdown for months, and everyone was bored and stir crazy and absolutely desperate to do something. Here was something to believe in and an excuse to flout the stay-at-home order, and by God, we were going to take it.

But as the landscape of daily life became littered with solidarity statements and BLACK LIVES MATTER signs, the significance of these expressions began to subtly shift. What started as legitimate outrage and demand for change was evolving into a sort of status signal, a code by which good liberals could recognise others of their kind. And as the summer wore on, the signs started taking on a subtext: not just I’m one of you, but also please don’t hurt me. Store owners plastered social justice slogans in their windows in the hope that their businesses would be spared if a riot broke out. Diners at sidewalk cafes were confronted by mobs of angry protesters who refused to let them eat until or unless they raised a fist for black lives. Silence, of course, was violence — and power was coalescing in new and different places.

Suggested reading

Why Hispanics gave up on the Left

By Alex Perez

The desperation to demonstrate that you were down with the cause was palpable, and not unfounded. In one viral video, released at the moment when cancelling so-called “Karens” had become America’s new favorite spectator sport, a sobbing woman tries frantically to shield both her face and her licence plate from view. The unseen videographer accuses her of calling him the n-word; she protests that she’s done no such thing. “I have a black husband!” she shrieks, terrified.

To some people, the sight of that sobbing, desperate woman was deeply distasteful: a sign of things gone too far. But to others, it was a lightbulb moment: here was an opportunity. You could see it in the way that allegations of racism began to run rampant — not on the political Right, but through the most diversity-conscious, progressive spaces. The industries rocked hardest by the reckoning, and where most cancellations occur today, were not hotbeds of white supremacy but Left-liberal havens, populated by highly educated white people who prided themselves on their progressive bona fides and lived in terror of causing offence.

Media, fashion, publishing, television, the non-profit industrial complex: somehow, it was always the people doing the most who were next on the chopping block. The yoga studio owner who hosted free classes for students of colour. The novelist who diligently sought sensitivity reads in hopes of avoiding offence. The café owners who set out to create a welcoming LGBT community space. The summer camp with not one but two separate diversity committees to address issues of racial equity. The greater your dedication to diversity, the less likely your business was to survive a callout for even the most minor offences against it. Suddenly, nothing made you a target quite like being an ally (except apologising, of course).

And those statements that used to signal solidarity, even status — that used to be a tool for self-advancement in a world where caring about diversity was the best thing you could do for your brand — have taken on a new shade of meaning. Now, to say you care is to advertise your susceptibility to allegations of not-caring. You’re telling people that you can be squeezed, for apologies, or for money, or for whatever shred of publicity or attention or advantage might be gained by humiliating you.

Suggested reading

In defence of wokeness

By Tomiwa Owolade

Jill Biden is being squeezed. Not because she actually did anything wrong, but because she cares about being seen to do right, and that makes her vulnerable. Let’s be clear about this: nobody actually believes that the First Lady of the United States, a 71-year-old professional with a doctoral degree, needs to be instructed as to the difference between people and tacos. Even the group of people who just issued a public statement declaring themselves not to be tacos do not believe it. Biden’s speech was many things — cringy, pandering, clearly unrehearsed — but it was not racist, not by any stretch of the imagination.

And yet, as long as someone can benefit from claiming they believe otherwise, they will — and the rest of us have to go along with it.

This might be the worst part: that everyone, from the First Lady to the NAHJ to the media covering this ridiculous story have to keep pretending that it’s a real thing, that it really matters. Journalists have to dutifully publish the interviews with the offended parties, who in turn dutifully manage to keep saying “We are not tacos” with a straight face. Jill Biden has to dutifully apologise and thank her interlocutors for the opportunity to listen, learn, and do better. And ordinary liberals who want to remain such, in good standing, have to dutifully nod along as if the party weren’t on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its own ridiculousness.

Meanwhile, the economy is imploding, no laws are being passed, our president’s approval rating is hovering around 30%, and those Latino voters who we claim to care about so much are fleeing in droves to the Republican party — where a candidate need not bother with endless racial sensitivity charades that cater solely to the sensibilities of an elite class of progressive activists. Donald Trump not only refused to celebrate diversity, unless you count tweeting a picture of himself on Cinco de Mayo — eating, of all things, a taco bowl — alongside the caption, I LOVE HISPANICS! He also vowed to build a wall to keep Mexicans  — who, he suggested, were mostly rapists — out of the country, a comment for which he refused to apologise. And yet, for a growing number of voters, even that is better than the cringe coming out of the Left.

And if things continue this way, that tweeting, taco-bowl eating orange ex-President will be re-elected in 2024 by a multi-racial coalition who care far more about the price of gas than they do about the culture wars. Melania Trump, who not only makes no apologies for her husband’s coarseness but really doesn’t care about immigrants will resume her position as the least-enthusiastic, and least seen, First Lady ever to set foot in the White House. But sure, let’s keep holding our politicians hostage to increasingly tortured purity tests. Let’s nitpick and police and snipe over etiquette until every last normal person in our orbit has fled. Let’s keep schooling the First Lady on the difference between a taco and a person. This will definitely end well.

Amazon and Allen had been on the verge of promoting Allen’s previous film, Wonder Wheel, in October 2017, when Allen made public statements in support of the disgraced Hollywood film mogul Harvey Weinstein. In an interview with the BBC, he said:

“The whole Harvey Weinstein thing is very sad for everybody involved. Tragic for the poor women that were involved, sad for Harvey [that] his life is so messed up. There’s no winners in that. It’s just very, very sad and tragic for those poor women that had to go through that.”

Allen went on to lament the state of the American entertainment industry under the prevailing attitudes of #MeToo and #TimesUp. His perception was that this era of heightened suspicion between men and women would hinder creativity.

“You don’t want it to lead to a witch-hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere, where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself,” he said. “That’s not right either. But sure, you hope that something like this could be transformed into a benefit for people rather than just a sad or tragic situation.”

When asked to explain himself, he said: “When I said I felt sad for Harvey Weinstein I thought it was clear the meaning was because he is a sad, sick man.”

Amazon alleges the director’s comments “sabotaged” its attempts to promote his movies.

Further reading

#MeToo cowardice is threatening artistic freedom

By Wendy Earle

These weren’t, of course, the first allegations of impropriety against Allen. His adopted daughter Dylan has said he molested her in 1992 when she was seven, which he strongly denies. The claims were repeated by her brother Ronan. Those allegations were thrown out by courts in Connecticut and New York but Ronan Farrow stands by them. Amazon knew about them when the deal with Allen was signed.

According to court documents filed in a Manhattan federal court seeking to dismiss some of the claims from Allen’s lawsuit, Amazon believes that “Understood in the broader context, Allen’s actions and their cascading consequences ensured that Amazon could never possibly receive the benefit of its four-picture agreement (despite already having paid Allen a $10 million advance upon signing)”.

If Amazon had a clean track record of only working with artists that comply with these #MeToo approved standards of conduct, Allen and his lawsuit would not have a leg to stand on. You’d think they might have put some provisions in his contract to make it clear what kind of personal behaviour they expect from artists on their payroll. But perhaps it’s not as straightforward as that. A close examination of Amazon’s practices in acquiring contracts suggests that they wouldn’t appear to be quite so strict with their international artists as they have been with Allen.

Further reading

Why bad romance can't survive #MeToo

By Tanya Gold

In a sweeping move designed to increase diversity of language and offerings on the Amazon Prime platform, Jennifer Salke recently acquired a large slate of international projects. Work from India, Germany, Mexico, and Japan got the green light. While the work itself looks like it may be worth the price of a subscription, it’s not clear that these artists or production companies signed up all accord with the vague, shifting tenets of Me Too and this new era where an allegation goes quickly from public accusation to publicly assumed guilt.

The new work in development under the Amazon banner, for example, includes an Untitled Reality Series from the event management company Only Much Louder in India. The show creator and host is Sapan Verma, of East India Comedy, and the show promises to be a cross between comedy and a talk show. However, if unproven allegations and accusations, for which the artist offers denials and refutations, are the standard for cancellation, then what are we to make of the fact that Verma was accused of catcalling and harassing a woman when she was auditioning for a TV show? As Allen did, Verma denies the allegations, saying that he could “very confidently verify” that the incident never took place at all. But Verma remains on the payroll.

Further reading

Sex: a warning from history

By Matthew Sweet

Does Amazon have different standards for international artists and companies than it does for American ones? If so, this is the worst kind of cultural imperialism. American leftists have a bad habit of granting a cultural exception to the sort of mistreatment of women globally that they would not stand for in the US. If an accusation is enough to bring an artist down in America, why is it allowable internationally? Is that which is intolerable for American women in entertainment acceptable for female entertainers in other countries?

The case of Mexican production company Televisa is quite a different matter from those unproven, deniable allegations against Allen and Verma. These ones have been proved accurate. In fact, the company has a documented history of harassment.

Further reading

How we warp our moral code for genius

By Douglas Murray

From Televisa, Amazon bought an untitled political thriller series dealing with Mexican political and drug cartel intrigue. But Televisa has a long track record of bad behaviour against actresses, going back to the first complaints in 2015, which included on air groping and rape. While Televisa fired the director who was accused of rape, the network was also alleged to have paid bribes to secure rights to host the World Cup, though the execs have denied it.

Is this the kind of corporate practice that Amazon wants to associate with? A company accused of bribery, rape, and harassment surely has no place in the Amazon family.

Why are the standards to which Amazon is holding Allen so at odds with those they seem to apply to their international acquisitions? It very much looks like Amazon and Salke are more concerned with virtue signalling to Hollywood #MeToo and #TimesUp activists than upholding a moral standard.

If unproven allegations against Allen, or his opinions on the use of allegations against third parties, are reason to breach his contract, then surely Amazon must hold their international collaborators to the same standards. If they don’t, it’s simply hypocrisy, hastily applied, and conveniently meted out for public approval.