Given the nature of the essay in question, one might expect to begin this discussion with a statement – verging on fatalism – about the state of the modern world and the challenges it faces. It is a tradition, almost a formality, to list the crises of our time before any speech, debate or introduction: the climate crisis, the socio-economic crisis, the demographic crisis, the geopolitical crisis, and so on. According to the general perception, we are living in a time of crises and, as such, this calls for a tone of concern, which sometimes becomes distorted and turns into catastrophism. In response to this constant negativity, another set of assertions emerges, this time concerning the banality of crisis across all historical periods and the notion of relativism. Usually voiced by older figures or experts on the intricacies of history, the argument can be summarized as follows: the world has always been in crisis; the current crises are not unique in history; comparatively speaking, compared to other eras, ours is particularly comfortable and prosperous; thus, according to the underlying logic, there is no reason for pessimism or fatalistic complaints. Here, a third and usually final position enters this debate. Described as a compromising centrist stance, this position asserts that both sides are correct. Whilst it is true that humanity today, on the whole, does not experience the same levels of physical suffering, poverty and destitution as in past centuries, this does not negate the importance of, nor the attention given to, current problems, for they are precisely current and present, not an abstraction.
However, I believe that this cyclical debate on attitudes does not go far enough; in particular, it overlooks a more metaphysical aspect of the nature of our times. Given that a crisis is defined as a problem that existing systems are unable to resolve, thereby demanding and fostering restructuring, we could describe the history of humanity, and of civilization, as a journey. Whether or not there are global crises and challenges – and to what extent they are unique – is a pedantic question, for history is the process of overcoming problems. What has truly changed between the crises of past centuries and those of this century is the speed and immediacy with which they arise and unfold, regardless of location. The metacrisis of modernity is its very promise: acceleration.
Modernity, from its initial conceptualization in the Enlightenment minds of the 18th century to its uniformly diverse manifestation across almost the entire world, has proven to be, at its core, the acceleration of time, of the rhythms of civilizational development, of human action and its expansion, and of the accumulation and use of all natural and human resources, with the aim and promise of improving the human condition, of having more and being more. The acceleration of scientific knowledge and technological development, the industrialization of the economy, and the globalization of culture and communication are processes that have enabled us to build, in the record time of just two centuries, our industrial civilization, with its modern medicine, mass production to meet all our imaginable needs and comforts, and virtually instantaneous and global telecommunications. But this very acceleration of time also entails an acceleration of the conflicts, upheavals, disasters and crises that progress inevitably brings. The concern surrounding the climate crisis is not the climate changes and disasters themselves – these have always occurred, as recently evidenced by the so-called ‘hunger stones’ uncovered during the droughts of the summer of 2026 in Europe[1] – but rather their frequency and unpredictability. In response to our increased presence and industrial dominance, glaciers are melting faster, ecosystems are disappearing and reappearing at the whim of the market, and extinctions are less protracted and more definitive.
However, it is we ourselves – the human dimension – who suffer most deeply from the ever-increasing pace of life. Faced with constant technological and productive progress, industrial societies are forced to restructure themselves at a dizzying frequency and with a speed that is all too often too much to bear. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we see – first in Central Europe and then across the world – landowners and peasants being replaced by industrialists, managers and factory workers; an ancient regime of divine right being supplanted by a system of written and agreed rules, rarely unanimous but always politicized across all social strata. We also see a world of empires and colonies resisting violently but in vain against a world of nation states, which transformed into bellicose ideological states, leading to half a century of the Cold War and culminating in the ultimate victory of an optimistic liberal capitalism that lasted not even two decades. Even this turbulent course would be considered relatively stable when compared with other dimensions of civilization: technology, socio-economic developments, and even culture and art have had (and continue to have) far more convoluted and dramatic trajectories, where various currents of continuous progress are punctuated by drastic changes, creating new lines and extinguishing others – a kaleidoscopic process whose precise delineation must be made in terms of decades, rather than centuries as was the norm in pre-industrial times.
Thus, navigating the modern world requires not only prioritizing the challenges of the present, but also looking to the future, to change, and how to respond to it. In other words, the smooth functioning of our global civilization depends on memory and experience, but also on perception and understanding of changing realities. These characteristics are highly contingent on an individual’s year of birth and their generation. Unfortunately, even here, the acceleration of modernity has disrupted the continuity of generations – our barometer of collective time. The already complicated relationships and dynamics between generations have become even more complex, polarizing and significant, to the point where, in my view, they are one of the greatest socio-economic, political and cultural defining factors of our times, far more so than social class, ethnicity or religion. Differences and conflicts between generations are very much present in the ecosystem of public debate; there are countless examples of newspaper articles, blogs, and even videos and tweets that either glorify or denigrate a particular generation: ‘Gen Z don’t know how to live’, ‘the Boomers have destroyed the world’, ‘Gen Alpha can’t read’ – all these are arguments and memes that we hear almost daily on social media and on television. Let me clarify: this type of conflict has always been part of the collective discourse in all human societies. Feelings of disappointment at the rebellious and ‘chaotic’ behaviour of the younger generation, and criticism of the dogmatism and inability—or unwillingness—of the older generation to adapt to new realities, are a universal experience of life in communities and society, and have always caused some tension in their stability.
However, this ubiquitous reality of generational tension has undergone considerable changes in our fast-paced world. Firstly, increased life expectancy, combined with lower infant mortality and a temporary yet highly significant surge in the birth rate throughout the 20th century, has created a demographic in which more distinct generations coexist than in previous eras. Furthermore, given the pace of developments in communication technologies and the cultural changes they drive— for example, the way in which radio and television have transformed everyday life, or how vinyl records have altered the ways and habits of listening to music and the type of music composed, cultural differences between generations have become more pronounced and the distance between them have narrowed, rendering the convention of counting generations in 25-year intervals inadequate and imprecise, particularly from the second half of the 20th century onwards. Someone who spent their childhood in the 1980s has a different perspective from someone who spent theirs in the 1990s; the acceleration of cultural, technological, political and economic changes leaves more generations in its wake, each more marked by historical moments and, consequently, more diverse in thought and attitude. Coupled with these factors, the ups and downs of the economy are increasingly felt not only across different socio-economic positions but also across generations; the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have disproportionately affected—and continue to affect—younger generations, who have entered and will continue to enter an increasingly limited and exclusionary labour market. Adding to all this, the amplifying effect of the internet and the way in which social media encourages reductive and extreme discourse have created a social environment where serious discussions and mutual understanding are exceptionally difficult to achieve, fostering even greater animosity between demographic groups that have already difficulty understanding one another.
In other words, in our modern societies, many generations coexist, each quite distinct in mindset, socio-economic status and customs, at a historic moment characterized by difficult intra-cultural communication and countless other crises that require swift and decisive responses. Our inability to communicate, mediate and understand intergenerational dialogue has a profound impact on social functioning and well-being, and is a source of much of the discord we witness today – from the toxic state of the internet, to the growing economic precariousness of younger generations compared to the older ones, the loss of legitimacy of public institutions, and even the intense tensions and clashes between the political classes and the general public. The specific characteristics and vicissitudes of these generational relationships differ considerably from country to country and from culture to culture. For example, the reason why Portugal is not yet governed by the new populist right is that the majority of active voters are people aged over 60–70, the generations who lived through the Estado Novo dictatorship. The memory of the dictatorship, the revolution and the turbulent transition to democracy is a decisive factor in understanding the Portuguese electorate, just as every nation has its own defining moments that shape and constitute it. However, it is fair to argue that there are also moments in our globalized world that are almost universal to all countries: the fall of the Soviet Union, the growth of the internet, the 2008 financial crisis, the aforementioned pandemic, not to mention climate change, and so on; and it is on the basis of these that intercultural solidarity is possible. I would like to focus on one of these universal issues, in order to highlight the very real and unnecessary dysfunction that exists between generations: the appalling way in which governments and institutions have managed the digital sphere and the internet since its introduction in the 1990s and its rise to dominance throughout the 21st century.
There is no shadow of a doubt that the internet is the greatest catalyst for socio-cultural change of our times: it is the great universal amplifier and disseminator of voices, ideas and practices, a space in which the constraints of the material world – such as scarcity and censorship – do not apply to information; for better or worse, digital technology and the internet are technologies with eternal libertarian and anarchic potential. It is also a highly disruptive technology at every level, particularly since the advent of Web 2.0, dominated by major platforms and their algorithms which, in their quest for more data and profit, have socially and psychologically corrosive consequences. Generations from the late 1990s onwards, including my own, intuitively understand this environment – the dangers it harbours, but also the possibilities it offers – with every user’s desire being an internet that amplifies the beneficial aspects, a sense of community, and the discovery of new realities and ideas, whilst reducing the exploitation of people’s labour and time, misinformation, malicious design, and the isolating effect of social media. Unfortunately, we are living in the opposite version of this ‘better internet’, and we can largely blame our political elites, who have failed miserably to regulate and enforce this new technology. The average age of the world’s political elites is around 40 years old and above[2]; in other words, these are generations who grew up in a pre-internet world, in a culture of television, radio and cinema, where reliable information originated exclusively from institutions: academia, journalism, bookshops and libraries, etc. Compared with traditional media, the decentralized and unregulated nature of the production and distribution of information and knowledge on the internet is perceived as chaotic; it lacks epistemological and even ontological legitimacy, as it is not a physical space, it is unreal, and therefore incomprehensible.
For this reason, few politicians today understand the intricacies of the internet, the technology itself and the cultural space it has created; this ignorance is exploited by technology companies to deceive governments into passing laws that benefit them and to evade accountability for unethical practices. Perhaps one of the most symbolic events illustrating this reality took place during a rather humiliating public hearing in 2018, where tech giants such as Google, Facebook and others were the subject of investigation and questioning by the US government, during which the senators in office proved themselves incapable even of understanding the financial model of these platforms[3]. Although it is considered more resilient to the pressures and narratives of the tech giants, the way in which the European Union responded to the Stop Killing Games movement clearly demonstrates that, when it comes to digital technology, the main dividing line is generational rather than ideological or partisan. The Stop Killing Games consumer movement, which advocates for the abolition of a range of anti-consumer practices by the video games industry, divided the European Parliament between young and veteran MEPs, the former being universally in favour of the initiative and the latter torn between cautious acceptance and rejection, and the decision of the European Commission, which lacks young politicians, reflected this attitude, preferring to discuss and negotiate directly with the industry. Faced with this epistemological barrier and the inescapable importance of digitalization for economic development, the older political classes – who typically hold senior leadership positions – often end up paying more attention to and placing greater trust in the words of business leaders, CEOs and private sector figures, as these are regarded as the legitimate authorities on the knowledge and use of the technologies in question, far more so than the average user. By the same token, much of the hype and colossal investment in Large Language Models stems precisely from ingenious marketing campaigns and narratives that have convinced almost all the world’s elites that this technology is, and will be, the equivalent of science-fiction artificial intelligence – with the power to transform civilization into a utopia or, conversely, bring about its destruction – and that it will form the technological foundation of all economic, administrative and artistic life in this century. AI has become the new arms race amongst the world’s superpowers, blessed with a level of investment and effort that is almost indispensable, fuelled by the fear of missing out on the next great technological leap and condemning the economy to stagnation and permanent backwardness.
It is absolutely crucial, especially in the current climate, to take into account the perspectives, ideas, fears and hopes of the different generations that make up our modern societies. At present, the fact that the overwhelming majority of leadership positions are held by those over 50 years of age, management roles by people in their 40s, and staff positions by young people in their 20s and 30s – whether in government or in business – creates a disconnect between intentions, actions and the effects these actions have on the world. This generational hierarchy, whilst unintentional, has an inevitably corrosive impact on perceptions: many young people – the so-called Gen Z and Gen Alpha – feel they live in a world that is alien and indifferent to their experiences and needs, rife with corruption, precariousness and deepening inequality; a world broken by the selfish excesses of the older generations that is bequeathed to them; the generations born in the 20th century, who are still mentally rooted in that era, interpret the socio-economic failure and social practices of the so-called ‘more laid-back’ generations as deviant and absurd, seeing them as yet another expression of laziness and ‘brainrot’ rather than structural problems. Such animosities are beginning to have very real consequences, in the form of the so-called Gen Z protests, which in Nepal have turned into a full-blown revolution that brought down the government.
As future intellectual vanguards, it is our societal duty to bridge the valley of culture and communication between young and old and to design and propose new systems that take generation into account. More precisely, such systems must be more democratic, participative and give more voice and power to the younger, internet savvy generations, whilst also respecting the insight and wisdom of older, more experienced generations. However, in our search for stability in an ever-shifting world, we must be careful not to repeat the same dismissive attitudes toward future generations, even if they prove to be alien to us. For this reason, we must create institutional mechanisms for processing change as a safeguard against both reckless, impulsive adoption and outdated stagnation, whose function involves scouting, evaluating, experimenting with, and applying new technologies and methodologies for the betterment of an institution. Immutable stone cracks and crumbles under the stresses of time; the strongest foundations are made of sturdy, flexible materials whose parts can easily be replaced and repaired. Modern civilization must abandon ideas of perfect eternity and become modular.
- Jesús Maturana, Nela Heidner. “Historic drought: rivers reveal hunger stones, warships and mammoth remains”. Euronews, August 10, 2026. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/08/10/historic-drought-rivers-reveal-hunger-stones-warships-and-mammoth-remains ↑
- Roel Feeney, “How Old Are World Leaders – Ages of Presidents and PMs,” AgeFinder.Org, July 18, 2025, https://agefinder.org/age-trivia/world-leaders-average-age/. ↑
- NBC News, “Senator Asks How Facebook Remains Free, Mark Zuckerberg Smirks: ‘We Run Ads’ | NBC News,” April 10, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2H8wx1aBiQ. ↑
Marco Serote Roos, History PhD Student, NOVA FCSH
