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# THE OUTDATED IN 2026
- URL: https://www.calmagris.com/technological-acceleration-historical-correspondence-youth-and-the-cultural-avant-garde/
- Published: 2026-09-08T19:11:43.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-08T19:15:16.000Z
- Author: PEPA LLAUSAS

TECHNOLOGICAL ACCELERATION, HISTORICAL CORRESPONDENCE, YOUTH AND THE CULTURAL AVANT-GARDE

**Youth remains biologically young within a system that is no longer informationally young.**

The generational divide is as old and inevitable as life itself. The sweet spring of youth brings the fullness of summer, which leads inexorably to autumn, which in turn opens the door to winter. There is no way around it. Spring is the explosion of life. Winter ends when snowdrops begin to emerge through the white snow, an unmistakable sign that life is forcing its way back after the frozen interval. Summer brings the celebration of its consolidation. And just as those tiny flowers break through the ice, new generations have the task of pushing forward and displacing what came before.

What nobody tells you is that the sweet beaches of summer have a way of making you believe you are still there, and it is from those very beaches that people addicted to the past tend to look down on the young, who arrive with ideas different from ours, convinced not only that the world must change but that such change is unstoppable and that they are the authors of what is new. And if you are not careful, one morning you catch yourself saying, “What is the world coming to?”, “These kids are crazy,” and “If only you had read…, if you had seen…, if you had…” while watching a snowdrop overtake you on the right, its brand-new petals exposing all the dust and faded colour of those books, songs and slogans you once defended with such intensity and of which today nothing remains but the washed-out colours of a photograph.

I had expected that. What I could never have imagined was that one day my already weathered skin and arthritic bones would have to confront a generation of young people for whom the first adjective that comes to mind is “outdated”. I had never heard that before. No old person ever called me old-fashioned. They called me crazy, unhinged, exaggerated, naïve and an endless list of other things, among which you would never have found boring, repetitive, obsolete or anachronistic. Those were the words we used for them.

The hero is stupid because he is ignorant; he is a rough diamond waiting to be cut. But even before it has been worked, the stone already shows promise, and just as the job of the young is to push, the job of the old is to know the difference and allow that pressure, and the resulting displacement, to take place, because the cycle of life must continue and no past age, just as no future age, is better; they are merely the times we happen to have been given to live through.

The situation of young people in 2026 does not seem to be simply a matter of retro aesthetics or technological nostalgia. I would define it as a retrospective structure of thought, because the problem is not that they reject the digital; it is that they formulate the present through inherited categories and then propose, as a solution, the recovery of previous conditions: they talk about community and physical presence while embracing slowness, calling for a return to analogue cinema and local production, falling in love with shared rituals while turning the artisanal into a kind of resistance. All of this in pursuit of a supposed return to forms apparently less contaminated by digital platforms and the international capitalist market, because anti-capitalism has become the banner of a substantial part of this group. But they do so without realising that all these positions turn the intended critique into restoration. And the two are not the same.

There is a paradox overflowing with innocent romanticism: young people talking about colonialism, capitalism, representation, Palestine, identity or resistance in a vocabulary that may sound contemporary, but within a profoundly old-fashioned intellectual architecture. The lexicon has changed, but the mechanism remains the same. A discourse has emerged of the emancipated subject confronting an external power, authentic culture confronting colonised culture, organic community confronting alienating technology, legitimate production confronting a corrupting industry. All of it combined with a rhetoric of signs imported from Hollywood and with an American puritanism of which, in many cases, they are not even aware.

And all this has serious analytical consequences because, by conceiving of the digital primarily as degradation, they lose sight of precisely what youthful resistance ought to be studying, exploiting and analysing: new forms of meaning production, coordination, circulation, identity, temporality and agency.

I will not be the one to cast the first stone at them in a world where the assimilation of what comes from elsewhere and manipulation by large corporations have become so naturalised as to be invisible. Of all the possible options, I believe the worst is to embark upon an imaginary witch-hunt in search of culprits and move from analysis to segregationist judgement. Us/them. Young/old. Life, fortunately, is not that simple.

The truth is that their concerns are not old; what is troubling is that the causality they employ and the kinds of solutions they imagine belong to another cultural regime. A visible strand of certain contemporary youth discourses seeks to correct the twenty-first century by reconstructing a puritanical and globally moralised version of the twentieth. But no matter how often you dig up a corpse, a corpse remains a corpse and, if anything, it may turn into a zombie.

Reflection, regardless of one’s age, is necessary if we are to understand what kind of cultural system has emerged and what its rules are. That methodological difference is much greater than it appears.

Traditionally, the older generation’s reproach to the young was normative: “You are irresponsible, ignorant, badly behaved; you are destroying everything we worked so hard to build.” The young could be seen as dangerous, vulgar or stupid, but they represented the new. Temporal displacement was attributed to the old. But what I encounter on the street today is different: I am not worried because the youth of 2026 have gone too far, but because they are arriving late. The problem is not that “you have broken my categories”, but that “you are still using categories that, for me, no longer explain the world”. Categories which, in fact, by any reasonable logic, should no longer be here. Because when someone in their twenties explains to me theories I was championing in the 1970s as though they had just discovered them, my heart sinks as I search for my reflection in the nearest pane of glass to check whether my wrinkles are still there and ask myself what on earth is happening. I should be hearing a new discourse: different, fresh and distinctive, radical, potentially dangerous, wild, spasmodically hopeful and hope-inspiring. Not mothball-scented phrases about how capitalist elites dominate us. When did the world stop without my noticing? And worse still, if the world has stopped, shouldn’t I have remained as young as I was when I was waving those very same banners? Yankees go home!

I suppose that new technologies have produced, among other things, a historical paradox: the more accelerated technological transformation becomes, the less we can assume that youth is equivalent to the cultural avant-garde. A person can be perfectly adept at TikTok, AI, platforms and digital culture while interpreting all of it through inherited intellectual frameworks in which authenticity is defined in opposition to artifice, culture against the market, and the analogue against the digital. From there, to my profound disbelief, I see active resistance to the system re-emerging, and I wonder beneath which tree I fell asleep and dreamed that the years were passing when, in reality, barely a few minutes had gone by.

Young people do not bother me because their ideas surprise me; what worries me is that their interpretive apparatus is one I recognise all too well. Have we reached, for the first time, a situation in which cultural acceleration is so great that chronological age has ceased to provide a reliable ordering of who belongs intellectually to the present? That strikes me as a serious question indeed.

I would argue that an asynchrony is emerging in which technological capacity changes at a speed that institutions, political frameworks, cultural categories and collective mechanisms of adaptation cannot absorb. The wheel has not stopped; it is spinning so fast that our social instruments are ceasing to represent its movement adequately.

And that can indeed increase fragility. Not because a society “needs” a war in order to reset itself, but because during an asynchronous transition the gap between capacity and control widens. We have extraordinarily fast military, communications, financial and AI technologies operating within much slower institutions, borders, strategic doctrines and national imaginaries. This is why I find it worrying that, when faced with a transformation that is difficult to conceptualise, retrospective responses begin to appear. I see discourses springing up everywhere about reclaiming sovereignty, borders, nation, territory, spheres of influence, lost greatness and traditional identity. In other words, new problems are beginning to be managed through old political grammars. And this is where I see the greatest danger, because the point is not to make the disastrous and naïve claim that “transition causes war”, but rather to observe that rapid transition combined with structures incapable of synchronising can reduce the system’s ability to absorb disturbances. An incident that would normally be absorbable can then propagate.

It is like being in a petrol station packed with people smoking: the analytical problem is not to predict which cigarette will start the fire, but to determine how much the flammability of the system has increased.

Perhaps what we are facing is not a crisis of change, but a crisis of synchronisation among subsystems evolving at radically different speeds and finding it increasingly difficult to synchronise with one another. And that does not fit a simplified description based on dominant capitalist elites controlling power. That kind of discourse does not account for the complexity of the reality that all of us have been given to live through in the twenties of this dangerous and complex twenty-first century.

I believe that the kind of analysis we need to undertake at this point in time should not be based on comparing levels of well-being, but epistemological conditions. This is far less romantic and requires a different kind of interpretation and different tools, but it is also far more necessary and operational.

In the past, youthful inexperience operated within a relatively bounded world. You did not need to understand the entire system in order to construct a functional representation of it. Family, school, profession, media, territory and a handful of reference points provided a fairly small initial library. It was incomplete, but manageable. Experience gradually expanded it. But now something strange is happening: young people retain exactly the same biographical limitation —twenty years still provide twenty years of experience— while gaining immediate access to a potentially unlimited number of representations of the world. Much of the scarcity of information has disappeared without the scarcity of experience disappearing with it, and without any increase in either the time or the means available to absorb it.

And that is a crucial distinction: access to information is not equivalent to knowledge, much less to judgement. Judgement requires comparison, memory, the detection of recurring patterns, experience of the failure of previous explanations, and the ability to distinguish exceptional events from recurrent patterns. All of this requires time and certain analytical tools. Ignorance and inexperience are the prerogative of the young because time is an objective reality —in terms of lived experience— that cannot be altered. Young people today enter a space in which they apparently already have access to everything before having travelled through anything. Information massively precedes experience because information without the mediation of passion cannot be processed.

And then a new vulnerability emerges: young people have to select among millions of explanations before possessing sufficient criteria to evaluate those explanations. Platforms, communities, influencers, films, political movements, brands, fandoms and algorithmic systems do not merely provide information; they provide pre-structured packages of causality, identity and meaning. “This happens because of this; these are the people to blame; this is who we are; this is what it means to be you.”

Today, it is no longer enough to “have information”, because almost everyone has information. The genuinely scarce resource is the capacity to intervene in its architecture: to select what appears, establish relationships between data, determine relevance, produce interpretive frameworks, control distribution and repetition and, ultimately, make a particular representation synchronise large numbers of people.

This is where what I have called [**narrasis**](https://www.calmagris.com/the-concept-of-narrasis/) comes into play. Contemporary informational power does not consist primarily in concealing information. It may consist precisely in the opposite: producing an environment of virtually unlimited information within which a small number of structures manage to organise meaning. Not only do forms change; each individual is simultaneously exposed to multiple dynamic systems that change, interact and represent one another. The problem of youth is no longer simply “Who am I?” but has shifted to an earlier question: “What the hell is this world within which I have to figure out who I am?” And answering that second question requires precisely the one thing no technology can deliver instantaneously: a library of one’s own, built through time, comparison and experience.

Without it, the sweet, tender white petals of the snowdrops that herald change cannot possibly break through the frozen snow of the dying winter.

Pepa Llausás