Veteran journalist and Recode founder Kara Swisher once quipped that San Francisco was becoming an assisted-living community for millennials. She wasn’t exaggerating.
Daedalus, one of the great innovators of Greek Antiquity, is most famous for creating the labyrinth that contained the Taurus of Minos, the Minotaur. But after betraying King Minos, he was himself imprisoned within its walls. Seeking to escape Crete, he invented two pairs of wings that he and his son, Icarus, could use to fly.
The drumbeat of science, technology, engineering, and math has picked up tempo, but a crisis of culture has emerged from its cadence. As we embark ever more aggressively on the path to master machines, we are forgetting the very foundations of what it means to be human.
Hannah Horvath, the lead character in the HBO series Girls, is a satirical portrayal of the typical millennial living in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood. “I give zero fucks about anything, and yet I have a strong opinion about everything, even topics I’m not informed on,” she rifles off in season six.
