| When my evil bit gets randomly flipped by a cosmic ray every now and then, I think about questionably ethical ways for young folks to financially exploit older folks. For all my malicious cogitation, I just can't come up with anything more promising than a cyber-cold war. Essentially, it's the same con Boomer pulled on Greatest. You drum up a lot of fear in the older folks, and get them to spend a lot of money defending against the bogeyman, which is invariably spent on jobs for younger folks. A lot of money changes hands, and no one has to go out and actually risk getting killed. Except the trick this time is you don't have an identifiable state enemy. The bogeyman is "hackers" and "terrorists", who will crack your Facebook and somehow steal all the money in your IRA by turning it into Blitcoins, a digital form of heroin that uses encryption to kidnap your grandchildren. The only way to stop it is a "cyber-corps" staffed by patriotic defenders of digital freedom, who will pre-emptively crack your Facebook to ensure that the money in your IRA is rightly going to cyber-taxes, rather than getting stolen by hacker terrorists or terrorist hackers. Cyber-stolen by cyber-criminals. From the cyber-cloud. Cybercybercybercyber. We explicitly partner with China and Russia, to show that the cyber-situation is so bad that we have to cooperate with the filthy Commies to fight it. And they could probably also stand to siphon some cash from their old guard to the newer digital barons. We run a few media-frenzied false flag operations to demonstrate that critical infrastructure is even more vulnerable to cyber-attack than to decades of chronic neglect and mis-maintenance. Eventually, young folks get at the voting machines to "secure them against tampering". Or should I say foreign tampering? It's really just too bad the USSR fell apart before Gen X could take over the con. If we have to work in bullshit jobs to get by, there's no particular reason why Boomers should be the only ones inventing the bullshit. A distant second place is jacking up the cost of geriatric health care, then swabbing retirement home toilet seats with resistant strains of chlamydia. Those "free love" bastards would finally learn what it was like growing up in the 80s, when kids were taught that their genitals were ticking time bombs that could kill not only you, but also everyone you ever loved (in the literal sense). |