Download My Manifesto

This column first appeared in the Sunday Tribune 20 August 2006.

DOWNLOAD MY MANIFESTO

Richard Delevan
It must be painful to be over 35 in Ireland. I can still say this because I’ve got about 10 months to go before I reach the halfway mark of my three score and ten. Which means I’m still on the right side of Ireland’s inter-generational culture war.
Eh? What war? Hmm. Ask yourself the following questions.
Which podcasts do you sink? What did you think of geriatric1927 on YouTube this week or the Un-pimp My Ride III video? Is your WiFi good enough to Skype on my Treo? How many MySpace friends do you have? Have you got the work-around for the Bebo ban at your school? Isn’t that, like, sooo Google in China? Will the blogosphere back Bertie?
If that paragraph was incomprehensible, you fall into one of the following categories: you’re over 35, you’ve been in a cave since 9/11, or you’re working for Ibec.
It’s profoundly depressing that Ireland’s employers body seems determined to compete with the teachers’ unions, Siptu, Eircom, the Rossport Five and the Catholic Church for my 2006 Preventing the Future Award – in honour of UCD professor Tom Garvin’s superb 2004 book of that title (your nominees to email below).
Yet Ibec has a good shot at winning, if the lead story in Thursday’s Irish Independent is to be believed.
Greeting the Leaving Cert results of the ‘text generation’, the Indo warned they ‘have little interest in learning on the job’, ‘take no pride in their work’ and ‘struggle to turn up on time’.
My favourite quote of the article was from Caroline Nash, Ibec’s assistant director of policy: “Texting, online chat, Bebo - they all involve a style of interaction that is acceptable among young people, but which fails to make the grade in the working world.”
This is, bar none, the most perversely ignorant sentence I have ever seen attributed to someone whose job it is to promote business and I have seen some doozies.
Nash expresses a widely-held (in Irish institutions) distrust of and, frankly, distaste for the ‘style of interaction’ that is social networking. Like the internet that made it possible, it is deeply disruptive. It is the creative destruction at the heart of capitalism, made flesh. It is corrosive to traditional authority and hierarchy. Its organising principle is irony. It revels in sex and music and argument and money and sport and laughter. It is seductive and insatiable. It is
glorious to behold. It is young.
And it scares the wits out of people over 35 who don’t understand it. Not to mention those whose vested interests it will destroy. So in the venerable Irish tradition, before it corrupts more of the youth, it is a future that must be prevented. Or at least delayed.
So some teachers charge ratemyteacher.ie with promoting defamation. Irish schools ban websites like Bebo and MySpace. Attempts are made to demonise the sites as playgrounds for bullies and paedophiles. Eircom drags its heels on broadband and the vested interests are quietly pleased, hoping the revolution will spare them.
Yet the irony is that the kids are learning more – a lot more – about the future of work and ways to collaborate and create wealth in the 21st century from playing around on YouTube and Bebo and blogs than in most classrooms or any company postroom. The kids don’t know they’re learning because they’re too busy enjoying themselves.
It’s the companies, schools, political parties, churches, unions and charities who can’t find a way to work with these kids that are in trouble. They’re Amazon. You’re Easons. They have a future. You do not.
Your organisation ought to be desperate to learn how to operate in their world, not break them into working in yours. Assembly-line, 9 to 5, must-touch-you-to-believe-you’re-working cultures are dead or on life support. That doesn’t mean you can’t hold the kids accountable. But you’d better start by holding their attention, with work that doesn’t suck.
Official Ireland likes to pretend it’s techno-savvy and future-focused. Bollocks. The instinct of many is still to try and prevent the future. Unless this time that old fear is overcome, your kids could be beaten into submission by self-interested Luddites and their useful idiots. Your kids will then make great drones at companies that will soon no longer exist.

rdelevan@tribune.ie
ends

Hi folks - things have just started to stablise enough with the bould Fionn [that and a read of The Long Tail that served as a good swift kick up the arse] that I want to put the back catalog of columns up here, plus the odd post.

By the way - anybody who fancies making some money selling me freelance articles for the Tribune Business section I'm editing in my spare time, email me pitches to rdelevan@tribune.ie. And recommendations for business books, blogs, podcasts, and just old fasioned tips on stories.