The kids are more than all right. It turns out they're absolutely great.
I've been following this week's protests at Yale avidly because I have a strong personal connection to the place. I went to Yale, where I was the managing editor of the Yale Daily News. But the kids protesting at Yale are also our future leaders, and what they do will have a huge impact on society. They're showing us the future of politics.
To recap the controversy, in my totally biased view: Yale "college masters" are glorified social directors who organize enrichment activities. One master, who is apparently widely seen as chilly and standoffish, sent out an email that a bunch of minority students found offensive; he then doubled down by saying it isn't his job to make the dorm feel safe and friendly, which unfortunately it is.
Following an incident where some frat boys tried to say "white girls only" at a party, this snowballed into a big discussion of race relations at Yale—which, by the way, still has a residental college named for a major defender of slavery and another dorm that was, in my day, informally known as the "slave quarters." Outside agitators keep trying to raise the temperature, marching around campus with racist signs and making "hate calls" to black professors.
Now Yale is having a long, painful, necessary discussion about the history and impact of race on its campus. Students are refining demands and talking to the administration. Passions occasionally overwhelm reason, but this is actually America at its finest: citizens petitioning what they perceive to be their government for a redress of grievances (and sometimes, for the recall of officials not doing their jobs.)
This is the point at which you're saying: this is PCMag, right? Where's the tech angle? Is Sascha just writing about his bright college years, with pleasures rife, the shortest, gladdest years of life? (Yes, that is the college song.)
The End of Hashtag Activism
What's happening at Yale—and Missouri and at a host of other universities—is the maturation of Internet culture and its final merger with physical reality.
The Yale protests weren't organized through Twitter, but the Internet is critical to them in a much more elemental way: it makes activists feel like they're not alone or powerless. To be a tiny minority at an institution like Yale is to feel like few other people live your experiences, and it makes you doubt them. Social media lets students feel connected to other people having the same experience in real time, giving them the courage, the pride, and the strength to stand up and say, "I deserve to be respected when I'm away from my keyboard, too."
And it gives those of us who don't have those experiences the ability to listen to people we may not otherwise socially interact with. Not to dictate to them, which we've always done; to listen to them, which we've rarely done.
This is not hashtag activism, anonymous cyber-warfare, or Change.org activism. This is the activism social media was always supposed to create: physical people with courage taking stands, and putting their names, bodies, and reputations on the line.
As crusty, middle-aged adults, we like to criticize Kids Today for spending all of their time on their Tumblrs and Snapchats as opposed to going out and doing "real stuff" in the "real world." But maybe these kids today are the generation who can finally seamlessly negotiate between the online and "real" worlds. Online trolls, who I so frequently rail against, are a last gasp of an earlier, transitional Internet culture where we pretended that "online" and "reality" were different things. It's all real now.
All those hashtags are giving kids the courage to change the world. Isolated in pockets, they may have felt alone and powerless. What's the point of taking action if you're not going to do any good? But social media has knit together networks that are now starting to take shape in the physical world, giving people courage to step forward and demand respect—empowered by keyboards, not hiding behind them.
It's All Good
Now, some of these activists are making mistakes, because they are young. But their opinions will get refined in collision with others', as they scream their passion and find that their perspective is unrealistic or futile or maybe, even, correct. This is what young people do, and they're now doing it on the streets, not just through online petitions or Twitter mobs.
These kids are privileged, and that's part of the point. Yale students are future leaders; if you look at my Yale classmates, they're by and large in positions of influence. For future leaders to get angry about injustice is a good thing, unless you think our society is perfect and doesn't need to change.
For teenagers today, there is no Second Life; there is no "online," no boundary between those phone screens they're always staring at and the physical world. #BlackLivesMatter jumps out of the screen and pulls black kids out of their rooms to say their lives matter. This is the future of activism, it's the future of change, and it's the future of America. Let's not stop it.