This Salon article about the “new slackers” really annoyed me. First of all, the reference to Richard Linklater’s film Slacker is totally incorrect. There was no “just-out-of-college temp slave” made famous in that movie. Linklater was depicting an entire culture, not some Ethan Hawke wannabe. The camera just follows interesting people around Austin, Texas, and none of them bear any resemblance to the newly unemployed dot-commers profiled in the article. What, they couldn’t spare 97 minutes for some cinematic research?
 
The whole thing just smacks of Schadenfreude, you know? It’s like, everybody’s been slagging off the dot-commers for a while now, but these authors have taken it a step further: “Hey! This means we can rag on Generation X for being unemployed, ambition-less, waste-of-space slackers again!” And that’s just bollocks. That stereotype was never true in the first place, and taking a few well-deserved months off after a year of working sixteen hour days doesn’t make you a derelict either. I swear, if I was in their situation and some smug, smarmy Boomer accused me of being a slacker, I’d kick their ass. *pause* Well, no, I wouldn’t. I’m a wuss. But I would use their e-mail address to sign them up for pr0n.