Jake Paul & Obnoxious Teenagers
Where do they come from? Who invented them? How do we get rid of them?
Jake Paul started posting videos on Vine in 2013, when he was 16 years old.
His stats today:
737 videos on YouTube.
18 million subscribers.
5.4 billion views.
And Obama invited him to the White House.[1]
Here’s Mr. Paul enjoying a questionable (but entirely typical) conversation with his mother.[2]
I suppose I should stipulate that Jake’s primary audience — by his own admission — is children aged 8 to 16, but, of course, all his revenue comes from adults and, ultimately, his work is supported and encouraged by adults.[3] He’s got a brother named Logan who is just as popular. They’ve both often gotten in trouble, been denounced by the masses (online petitions, articles, videos), condemned by YouTube, and have issued apologies.
And so, they’re wildly popular, wildly detested, and inexorably affixed to our culture like Cheetos dust on the crop top of a motorized scooter-riding woman in hot pursuit of the last of the bacon scented pillow at Wal-Mart.[4]
How did this happen to our culture?
Back in oldie times, there weren’t really teenagers. There were kids and adults. Typically, adulthood started at 13 or 14, though in some places it was as early as 12. This was generally true until about 100 years ago and it’s still true in some places today. This is also why religious rites — confirmations and bar mitzvahs — happen at around age 13. For thousands of years, 13-years-old was when a child became an adult.[5]
If you were under 13-years-old, then you were a child. Usually, your mother looked after you for the first few years. But your mom had things to do — milk cows and pick berries and mend your father’s one pair of pants. Yeah, that’s right, in oldie times, everyone worked, including women. So you were often raised by older siblings, relatives, neighbors and anyone else who would make sure you didn’t fall down a well or lose a toe to a dropped meat cleaver.[6]
Once you hit 13 or so, you were supposed to become useful or leave. Maybe you worked on the farm or you got an apprenticeship, or you worked as a laborer in town. Maybe you went to college or worked on homemaking skills. Regardless of what you did, you had to become useful. Or leave.
But then in 1800s, we started to invent “public school,” which differed from schools before it because it was intended for everyone. First, there was grammar school (or elementary school), and kids up until ages 8 or so were in school. Then we invented middle school. And finally, by the end of the 1800s, we invented high school. Even then, a lot of kids still didn’t go to high school. They often worked in factories or on farms or took apprenticeships to learn employable skills.[7]
At the same time as the invention of high school, the industrial revolution was really picking up steam. Machines became better and could increasingly do the work of more humans. This meant that fewer humans were needed. So a factory that previously needed 100 humans perhaps now only needed 80 humans. A few decades later, the same factory maybe only needed 20 humans. So where were all the humans going to go? We just don’t need so many. We’ve got machines now.
Then there were a few wars, but after World War 2 and into the 1950s, nearly everyone was attending high school. So instead of becoming an adult at 13 or 14, you were now an adult at 18. No one expected you to work at 14. You were in school. It was like being 12-years-old for four more years. This was good for the economy, because many of those humans who previously worked in factories and on farms were now replaced by machines. Factories were automated and farms had tractors. There just wasn’t enough manual labor for teenagers, so staying in school longer made economic sense.
But it also created something new: people — lots of people — aged 13–17, who had nothing to do but grease their hair and hang out. They didn’t have any factory or farm responsibilities. Their families didn’t count on them to make money. It was like being a little kid for many more years — no one really expected you to do much of anything. Maybe learn the Pythagorean theorem because, yeah, that’ll come in handy some day.[8]
At the same time as all these teenagers kept attending school instead of contributing to their families and the economy[9], something else very important happened: a battle over the nation’s institutions.
An institution is a core part of your country — institutions may include your government, king or queen, church, really, anything that’s very important to the nation and its culture. America has very distributed institutions. No king or queen. No state church or religion. No single major university. This is very different from most countries.[10]
Instead, American institutions include its founding documents — Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — its independent courts, its many colleges, its major businesses and even Major League Baseball. We have a very distributed power structure, which means you can’t just kill a king or blow up a building in order to take over the country. If you destroyed MLB, the NFL would just take over.
But in the 1950s, this power structure began to shift. The federal government — really starting in the 1860s but more firmly since the 1930s — emerged as a significant institution.[11] Universities began to grow quickly and established themselves as a major institution in large part due to the flood of post-WW2 government funding.[12] The entertainment industry established itself as a major institution, particularly through the TVs that everyone increasingly had in their living rooms. Other institutions began to fade, particularly religion but also the military — of course, the military fought back and has successfully maintained its ground as a national institution.[13]
But this great battle for the nation’s institutions exposed another problem: death. Specifically, how do Americans deal with death? Most people by the time they hit middle age become very aware that death is a real problem — and not really a solvable problem.[14] With the retreat of religion, Westerners didn’t really have a way to deal with death. So we replaced religion with two new institutions.
First, we made a fetish out of healthcare. It would no longer matter how crappy your life was as long as you lived. Second, we made another fetish out of this new thing called teenagers. Look at them — healthy, no responsibly, they just go to school each day — or not, it didn’t really matter. No one counted on them.[15] Carefree or, if worried, they worried about stuff that really doesn’t matter. Teens don’t even think about death. They obsess over silly things like clothes and makeup and gossip and their hair and are gleefully ignorant of the dark contours of reality. One day they’ll create make-up videos on YouTube. Instead of getting more sleep on Saturday, they want to do this thing called partying, and drink too much and be reckless … because it doesn’t really matter what they do. They play bingo on the beach for the love of God.[16]
So teen culture — this new opium of the masses — was invented and sought after by adults as a way to channel a youthful ignorance of death, as a way to momentarily go back to a time when death wasn’t a concern. Teens want to be adults so they can buy liquor and not have to listen to their parents. Adults want to be teens to escape the suffocating specter of death. So who do you think has the more powerful culture? Gleeful petty ignorance usually wins.
And that’s how teen culture took over the West. Teens were invented in the late 1800s and really took hold in the 1950s. Teen culture then developed and began to infect general culture by the 1960s as a replacement for religion. Shortly after, teen culture smashed with consumerism and the kraken was unleashed. That’s how we got to where we are today. Teens: celebrated for idiocy, selling crap.
So Jake Paul is a false messiah.
And teens are cult leaders, holding out the promise of youthful ignorance, responsibility-free decisions, and seductively simple analysis. And this Fountain-of-Youth vaporware is piped into your life in technicolor monetized bit-sized pieces with a pitch as old as Herodotus and as promising as Ponce de León mucking about a Florida swamp.
Well, we’re still mucking about a swamp.
[1] This is the consummate video delineating the case against Jake Paul (as well as why his videos are probably illegal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywcY8TvES6c
To get an idea of Jake Paul’s awfulness, check out these parent reviews: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/youtube-reviews/jake-paul
A typical reaction: Noted idiot Jake Paul performed in Philly last night. https://www.phillyvoice.com/noted-idiot-jake-paul-performed-philly-last-night/
[2] No bamboozle. That really is his mother.
[3] Kids may watch but it’s the parents who pay … ultimately, that’s the support that matters.
[4] Bacon scented pillows are real, but, alas, she arrived too late. They’re sold out. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Sleep-Scentz-Pillow/36203448
[5] This can also be tracked via age of consent, age of majority, and other related legal standards. Under English Common Law, the age of consent was 10–12 years old until 1875 when it was set at 13. Age of consent/majority of 13–14 was quite common in the West until WW2. Rather comically, when some Northern European countries legalized pornography in the 1970s, they “forgot” that the age of consent was still 14. Suspiciously, it took them a decade to make an adjustment.
[6] As someone who has spent too much time actually reviewing village birth and death notices from centuries ago, I can attest that children very often fell down wells or randomly ran into the ocean or just disappeared. A typical day in the 15th century English village often includes some 5-year-old boy doing something lethally stupid.
[7] The efforts of unions in promoting ‘reforms’ in the late 19th-century cannot be underestimated. America’s first immigration laws (1880s) were designed to limit Chinese immigration (mostly in California) to decrease labor supply and thus increase labor prices. This was a political payoff to unions in exchange for votes. Similarly, unions loved the concept of ‘high school’ because it eliminated a large supply of cheap labor. Worth noting that many early factories, particularly textile mills, were staffed with young women (girls, really) … just as they are today in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh, etc.
[8] I’ve taught math and when kids inevitably ask “when will I ever use this?” The honest answer is “after the test? Probably never.” Sure, training your brain on advanced math is (maybe?) helpful, but you’ll likely never be hanging out with your bros one day and say “you know what? Logarithmic functions would be really helpful right about now.” Unless maybe your bros are electrochemists and you guys work through Nernst equations for fun.
[9] Never before in the history of humankind have we generally rendered 14–18 year-olds economic non-contributors. It’s the result of the extraordinary luxury afforded to us by industrialization.
[10] Consider that America witnessed the collapse of its major and founding political party in 1815 (at the notorious Hartford Convention). What happened? Other parties emerged and the country carried on. Could China survive the collapse of its biggest (and only) political party? Concentrated power tends to offer short-term efficiencies, but its lack of dynamism makes for a brittle structure.
[11] Before the Civil War, the U.S. Federal government did very little. At times, Senators were so bored that they would walk over to the House to see if they were doing anything.
[12] The G.I. Bill vastly increased funding for higher ed. Note how many state schools were established or expanded in the 1950s and 1960s — that’s government funding.
[13] Hence Eisenhower’s warning about the ‘military industrial complex.’ Still waiting for warnings about the ‘education industrial complex.’
[14] Cf. ‘mid-life crisis’
[15] Teen rebels didn’t even need causes. They could just be rebels for no apparent reason. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Without_a_Cause)
About Nathan Allen
Formerly of Xio Research, an A.I. appliance company. Previously a strategy and development leader at IBM Watson Education. His views do not necessarily reflect anyone’s, including his own. (What.) Nathan’s academic training is in intellectual history; his next book, Weapon of Choice, examines the creation of American identity and modern Western power. Don’t get too excited, Weapon of Choice isn’t about wars but rather more about the seeming ex nihilo development of individual agency … which doesn’t really seem sexy until you consider that individual agency covers everything from voting rights to the cash in your wallet to the reason mass communication even makes sense….
