One of the more interesting phenomena in the US over the last several years is how the social contract is collapsing for elite Millennials. The population grew but the whiteshoe law firms, DC mandarin bureaucracies, and high fïñâñçē haven't grown at the same rate.

A great example of this is how the smarter bloc of post-2008 rich "Greek" kids started getting liberal arts school "CS" degrees instead of engaging with the traditional fïñâñçē curriculum.

This might seem like a good idea at first, but most of these people don't have The Knack (mild to severe Asperger's) and consequently have a tough time as actual working engineers, so they pile into rank and file or middle management at places like Uber or a FANG.

The post-2008 image of the "tech bro" is mainly a product of these people and their culture. But there's not enough room for all of them at the FANGs, most technical founders hate this sort of dude with a passion, and their impact is to make Big Tech a lot more like fuĥnænz.

So as the elite bros are thrashing around unproductively in legacy tech, elite women have responded to the same conditions by piling into the increasingly hellish fields of healthcare and HR/administration. Being a doctor or VP of X is always high-status, but it's not productive.

So we have this culture of people who were born into high-status families with few traditional high-status employment prospects who are now desperate to have a good version of their life story to tell at Thanksgiving. This is the root of idle hipsterdom as well.

Large groups of aimless, insecure young people constitute a major problem for social structures because once they all find something to do to change the situation things start to move very quickly. This is part of why unconventional politics grew so much in the last decade.

Everybody talks about how we need to find something for truck drivers to do. Sure, that's true, but something tells me most nominally self-driving trucks are gonna have safety drivers when they're off the highways. We'll find something for those people to do.

The looming truck driver disemployment problem is straighforwardly fixable. We can invent our way around that. We can't invent our way around legacy institutions with a capped headcount and social sacrosanctity. You can't just say "we're gonna 5x the number of whiteshoe lawyers".

There's a popular memetic framework among institutional folks that classes new technologies and the Schumpeterian disruption they cause as among society's biggest problems. But what if it's the inflexibile legacy institutions that are actually the root cause of much dysfunction?

A few years back a fairly apolitical friend of mine said that if the existing establishment doesn't kick off big changes to our social systems soon, millennials will do something drastic. I think we've already crossed the event horizon for drastic.

Over the last couple years I've become much more skeptical of incrementalism, and much more open to concrete political vanguardism. There's probably going to be a revolution, and it's folly not to be prepared.

The existing set of institutions are constitutionally ill-equipped to deal with the tectonic demographic and technological shifts coming down the pike. New institutions are coming sooner than you think. If you want a say in how they look it's time to start building them.