Disclosure: Kevin Zanetti is of Generation Y.

The last two cover stories of The Atlantic painted sobering if not jeremiadic vistas of the prospects for Generation Y (How America Can Rise Again and How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America). Conspicuous by their absence from these analyses were the game-changing effects of the Internet on current and future American economy, polity, and society.  While the first article touted the openness and achievement of America in terms of immigration, production and innovation, higher education and research, and public health, it was silent about the Internet.

Yet the Internet is the most transformative area of American achievement. It is the potential savior of the broken, anti-democratic public sector tribulations that are so great a threat.  Modern technology, the Internet, the open-source movement, social networking, and all that these things have spawned, offer hope at a time when professors and pundits are howling that the sky is falling around us.

In the face of the harrowing unemployment statistics, political stagnation, and dumb-founding Supreme Court decisions you have a right to suspect that such optimism is drug induced.  But, as Eric Kavanagh articulated back in 2006, history is on the side of transparency. The Internet and modern technology collapse the time between revolutionary inventions that serve to further this end.  The Internet is the ultimate democratizer, shining the light of truth on governmental and private-sector corruption and waste. It presents myriad educational opportunities and introduces a multitude of children to technologies they master much more quickly than their parents do.

While Obama’s promises of transparency and accountability are now the target of derision, at least the effort was made as never before to be open and transparent with the American people, and we finally have a tech-savvy administration.  This all gets better with time, and with it comes decreased waste, increased transparency, and an open forum for discussion and exchange that even Tea Party crazies and retro Marxist Revolutionaries can agree on.

Economic Renewal

But what about the destruction that the Internet has wrought on the economy? Newspapers, magazines, the recording industry, movie studios and television networks will never be the same.  Should we not have sympathy for these cultural institutions that were held dear for so long?

Not really.

If their content had achieved anything beyond ever-evolving deplorability, maybe Generation Y would have sent them a fruit basket or two.  But these industries, and news media in particular, let the American people down, with their constant diet of bloat, coarseness, and bobble-head punditry.  These industries, like so many the Baby Boomers worked in, are simply not a viable option today.

And while Generation Y doesn’t have the stability that a job at the local factory offered, it is happy to sacrifice that stability to work for something closer to its heart.  Don’t forget, this is the generation that watched the inwardly focused ego-centrism its hippy parents brought with them from the 1960’s manifest in epidemic divorce rates.  If it is anything, Generation Y is agile and adaptive.

Amelia Blakeman has two jobs.

She supplements her work at a locally owned toy store with a fashion design micro-business she launched as her passion. The aptly named Hopeful Monsters, , is an exemplary model of what the combination of passion, entrepreneurialism, and technological and business acumen can achieve. (The name is a phrase borrowed from Richard Goldschmidt’s description of a systemic mutation that contributes to the formation of new evolutionary groups). It is what the changing face of American business looks like.

These are clothes made with environmental and labor concerns in mind, in a true micro-business model (ie, one employee), with a talent that combines artistic style with a technological command that holds it all together.  In addition to the now ubiquitous Flickr, Twitter, and FaceBook accounts used to manage brand identity, Amelia uses Google Analytics to manage her two online stores, one under her own name, and one through the remarkably successful hand-crafted specialties website Etsy.

Listen to her describe her experience with these tools. The “transparent” and “open” language jumps out at you:

“I like to let people see behind the curtain into both my life and my process so that they can really feel connected to what I’m doing, what I’m making, and how special those items are when they finally reach their new homes with a buyer. These networking tools are so fully integrated in people’s social lives that it allows me to make connections with individuals as more than simply a company. It fosters a relationship that makes you feel like you’ve got pen pals all over the country, or world!”

It’s clear from the large number of examples of such enterprises that a renewal is in progress. What the doom and gloom merchants miss is that this is not about recapturing a prior period of stability in social, economic, and familial affairs. If its reticence to get married or have children hasn’t clued you in, Generation Y is genuinely skeptical. It is skeptical of the “better world” and its great lifelong commitments and institutions it was told time and again it missed out on.

It views that world like it views the government and the industries it spawned. It sees these things as outdated and dying, like the people and ideas that hid stagnantly within them in those decades of fiscal irresponsibility and the dimming of the light.

Generation Y can right things, and it deserves a chance before the target moves to its back.