'The Drama' and the microgenerational digital divide

PLUS: The "forklift model" of A.I. education

This newsletter is brought to you by Who Broke It

The line between “political media” and “internet culture” has basically dissolved, which maybe sounds kind of “fun” until you realize that keeping up with both simultaneously requires a level of online immersion that is, frankly, bad for you. The solution is to let someone else do it, specifically Grace Weinstein, whose sharp twice-weekly Substack Who Broke It tracks the social-platform and alternative-media trends, ideas, and personalities shaping traditional electoral politics.

I recently started subscribing to Who Broke It, and have enjoyed Grace’s funny, engaging reports from both the front lines of internet politics and culture. Looking for a guide to spotting D.N.C.-run social accounts (”Lowercase letters in all posts, cursing even if the politician would never”) or Tucker Carlson’s merch? Want to better understand the gravitational effect of both Nick Shirley and suburban millennial moms? Look no further.

This week is a particularly good week to subscribe, since Grace has been covering the Met Gala—a nominally fashion event that also happened to be a coronation party for Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez; a non-event for Mayor Mamdani, who skipped it entirely; and, of course, an occasion for George Santos to call Grace for a funny (and kind of refreshing?) conversation about his favorite looks and what he’d have done to Jeff Bezos if he’d walked the red carpet. The event is shot through with connections to power, money, and politics that the the average (i.e. normal) person might miss and that Grace won’t. If you want to be ahead of the curve, subscribe below.

Paid sponsorship by Who Broke It

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In today’s edition:

• An exploration of “A.I. literacy” and the “forklift model” of A.I. education policy;

• a critical read of The Drama as an essential text in generational studies on Millennials and Zoomers.

A reminder! Read Max exists thanks to the generosity and support of a few thousand paid subscribers. You’re reading this for free because of those people, and if you yourself find what I write valuable--entertaining, enlightening, clever, funny, not-boring--consider exchanging some money for my labor. At $5, it’s only about the cost of one (1) beer a month.

The ‘forklift model’ of A.I. education

It’s hard to pick a favorite paragraph from Jessica Winter’s recent New Yorker piece on A.I. in grade-school education, but if you held a gun to my head I’d go with the paragraph about her third-grader’s A.I.-knower certification:

In February, my son, who is in third grade at a public K-5 in Massachusetts, came home with a piece of paper in his backpack that read “Certificate of Completion,” for “demonstrating an understanding of the basic concepts of Artificial Intelligence.” He and his classmates had earned this honor, I learned, by playing a computer game produced by the nonprofit Code.org in partnership with Amazon Future Engineer, called Mix & Move with AI, in which the student “designs” a cartoon dancer and “remixes” a popular song—available, needless to say, on Amazon Music. The game is an inane drag-and-drop affair that has little to do with A.I.; the certificate, it turned out, was merely a memento of a pointless and deceptive branding exercise.

I thought of Winter’s son’s “certification” in A.I. when reading 404 Media’s report this week on a new bipartisan bill proposing an N.S.F. grant to promote “AI literacy” in schools. Both partake of what I think of as the “forklift model” of A.I. education, so-called because it treats A.I. more or less like a forklift: a complex and potentially dangerous piece of industrial equipment whose use must be taught in a formal sense, and in whose practice students might become “literate” or “certified” to better their future chances of employment.

This attitude toward the role of A.I. in education (or, really, vice versa) is a natural outgrowth not simply of institutional anxiety about the necessity of traditional education after the advent of the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-doing chatbot, but also of the increasingly pervasive idea of college as mostly an employability signal--rather than mostly an education--described by my friend Jay Kang in his recent New Yorker column about the post-A.I. uneases felt in higher education. One response to this kind of cynicism--now widespread, as Jay documents, among the college-aged population--is to embrace it. If college is already effectively a certification process, why not formalize it as such, and refashion the general-education program into a quasi-vocational one, in which students receive the white-collar equivalent of a C.D.L. or forklift certification?

But, not to ask a stupid question: Is A.I. actually like a forklift or a semi truck? It’s neither as immediately dangerous nor as patently useful; more importantly, it’s not actually very hard to use. Indeed, one of the uncanny miracles of A.I. chatbots is that the main interface is… writing and reading. Large language models are complex technologies, but, as Henry Farrell keeps pointing out, they are cultural technologies, and the skills and knowledge necessary to use them “safely” and effectively are skills you might call “cultural” rather than technical: the ability to write clearly and read critically, a working knowledge of science and technology, familiarity with culture in general and the specific. What you need to be literate in A.I., in other words, is… a well-rounded liberal-arts education.

In a world being reshaped by a natural-language interface to a compression of All Written Culture, surely everyone should want to hone their skills in the classic trivium, and some other arts besides? If you want to understand and use LLMs to your benefit, an education in statistics, philosophy, literature, and psychology is vastly more useful than anything that might be described as “prompt engineering.” Indeed, there is some (exceedingly anecdotal) evidence that this is bearing out in, at least, the finance industry, per the Financial Times:

A few months ago a New York financier told me he had just experienced a “first”: his 2025 summer interns “were the first true AI natives I have seen”. This meant they had grown up not only among digital tech, but AI too. So how did it go? He winced. While those wannabe masters of the universe initially seemed wildly impressive, when senior financiers later probed their ideas they found them alarmingly shallow. Consequently this person’s company made fewer return offers and is now focusing less on graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics — and more humanities students instead.

But I wouldn’t get too excited. As Jay’s piece documents, A.I. is just one of multiple, long-gestating causes and symptoms of the malaise affecting higher education--“a big deal inside a bigger deal,” to smugly quote myself. The problem is that on the systemic level, the drive to reshape education around the imperatives of artificial intelligence is not really about a set of correctable misapprehensions on the part of college presidents and policymakers. I’m inclined to agree with Hagen Blix, who places the A.I.-driven “disruption” of education in the context of an era of work “characterized by precaritization, unstable and interrupted career paths, constant threats of deskilling”:

In this sense “forklift model” is a poor name: The point of “A.I. literacy” programs is not to make your labor more valuable through credentialing. It’s to prepare you for a world where your labor is less valuable because the skills you developed in school are no longer strictly necessary for production.

The Drama is the best movie I’ve seen about the Millennial-Zoomer divide

To write about The Drama, Kristoffer Borgli’s new-ish A24 movie with Robert Pattinson and Zendaya, effectively requires that you “spoil” it. The secret that’s been conspicuously and tantalizingly withheld from the marketing material is not a late-breaking twist but an act-one revelation that is, in effect, the premise of the entire movie. Interestingly this means that what’s being “spoiled” isn’t so much the pleasurable jolt you get from a narrative surprise, but your ability to enter the movie and settle into its world free of prejudgment about its subject. Which is not nothing, especially not in this decade, and in this present moment’s mode of discourse-enwrapped moviegoing!

Still, I suspect Read Max subscribers are the kind of critically minded honest interlocutors who will be able to leave their preconceptions behind, and therefore I think it would be fine to know before you see the movie (and I recommend that you do: It’s very, even surprisingly, good!) that it’s about an engaged couple, Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Pattinson), whose relationship begins to go off the rails days before their wedding when Emma drunkenly reveals that as a teenager she’d planned out a school shooting but never followed through. Yipes!

There are many ways to look at The Drama: As a bit of glib provocation from a Euro bad-boy auteur (it’s not); as a deranged and highly successful rom-com (it mostly is); as an exploration of narrative and linguistic performativity in the Austinian sense (sure, why not); as a vehicle for a perfect 5-minute cameo from the great Jeremy Levick (100 percent). Personally, and surprisingly given its aggressive contemporaneity, I found myself thinking about The Drama in the multi-century lineage of Much Ado About Nothing, or (more provocatively) Dion Boucicault’s The Octaroon--“damaged-goods” dramas and comedies about weddings derailed by “terrible” revelations about the betrothed. (What it means that in this case Emma’s “damage” isn’t sexual impropriety or racial impurity but “school-shooterness,” a kind of potential for anti-sociality, is a fascinating question for more qualified people. Gotta go!)

Above all else, though, The Drama is the best movie I’ve ever seen about the differences between Millennials and Zoomers.

The Millennials in this case are represented by Pattinson, born in 1986, the hero of Twilight and one of the iconic actors of his generation (the first Millennial Batman!), and the Zoomers by Zendaya, born in 1997¹, breakout star of Euphoria and maybe the definitive actress of hers (the first Zoomer Mary Jane Watson!)

Strangely, the obvious ten-year age gap is never explicitly mentioned in the movie. But the generational divide between Emma and Charlie implicitly drives almost all of Charlie’s crash-out. The confession itself comes after a late night tasting food and wine from their wedding caterers, when their best friends Rachel (Alanna Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie) provoke them into a game: What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? Mike describes using an ex-girlfriend as a human shield against a vicious dog; Rachel reveals that she once locked a “slow” boy in an abandoned trailer and left him there; and Charlie says he once cyber-bullied a boy so badly his family moved. Then Emma tells them: she came so close to shooting up her school she brought a gun to class, and only narrowly decided not to go through with it.

Suddenly, the tenor of the conversation changes. Rachel bristles: Her cousin lost the ability to walk after a shooting. How dare Emma? Mike and Charlie try vaguely to de-escalate but the damage is done. Rachel is furious, Charlie is starting to spiral, and Emma, suddenly, throws up.

The narrative deck here is stacked in favor of Emma, with whom the viewer’s sympathies are supposed to lie. But even in the context of the contrivance, this conversation is the point at which the age gap between Emma and Charlie suddenly becomes existentially relevant to their relationship. Rachel and Mike are really Charlie’s friends, which means that Emma is generationally outnumbered at the table, and Rachel and Charlie’s reactions are typically (stereotypically, let’s be honest) Millennial. Rachel--played by another iconic millennial herself--is judgmental, self-righteous, and eager to spurn Emma over her past transgression. Charlie, more interestingly, and perhaps more truly Millennially, is left at sea, unable to formulate his own response, eager for wide approval, and feeling obligated to toe Rachel’s hard line despite his love for and knowledge of Emma.

Emma, for her part, is not without guilt. But what makes her confession particularly offensive to Rachel (and, in turn, Charlie and Mike) in the moment is her Zoomerish apathy and resignation, and refusal of any of the rituals of disavowal that characterize the most irritating Millennial conversations. The seed of the problem that develops between Charlie and Emma is not so much that Emma committed an unpardonable sin, but that they process the idea of “sin” and “pardon” in these particularly different ways.

Now, admittedly, “Millennials are judgmental and Zoomers are fatalist” is not the most sophisticated limning of generational difference. Where I think The Drama actually does something interesting is in its frequent cuts back to videos recorded by Emma as a teenaged goth on her webcam--quasi-manifestoes for the shooting she will never undertake. One important bit of historical specificity communicated through these flashbacks is that there was a thing that might meaningfully be called “school shooter culture” accessible to Emma during her adolescence, in a way that simply wasn’t true for Millennials of Charlie and Rachel’s age.

More importantly, I think, the webcam videos reflect Emma’s vastly different experience as a Zoomer of online surveillance, performance, and memorialization. As Millennials, Rachel, Charlie, and Mike would not have been on a social network in middle or high school; their youthful transgressions are dismissible in part because they’re undocumented and half-remembered. (Rachel can’t recall what happened to the boy she locked in the trailer; Charlie doesn’t really seem to remember what happened with the cyberbullying). The existence of Emma’s video manifestoes reminds us that Emma wasn’t afforded the same privilege: There’s still a record, somewhere, of “the worst thing she ever did.” (That Emma still managed to reinvent herself is probably the most “Zillennial” thing about her.)

This distinction, between the hazily remembered mischief and the digitally documented offense, reflects what I think is a key aspect of the Zoomer-Millennial generational divide: How much of your past was documented? How much do you actually remember? How exposed are you? How comfortable do you feel passing judgment? Have you been granted the freedom of reinvention? From these concrete questions emerge the “vibes” that characterize Rachel, Charlie, and Emma’s differing responses--and, perhaps, the differing relationships Millennials and Zoomers have to guilt, transgression, and forgiveness.

1. If you want to be pedantic, Zendaya is a “Zillennial” cusper, but generations aren’t real and she is spiritually a zoomer anyway.