"Monopoly for Millennials" recommends playing in your parents' basement

Their coffins are in a glass mausoleum, and when push down on it…

But then he would be forced to replace his large mansion with 4 McMansions

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… also known as “Monopoly: Late Stage Capitalism edition”

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Not so sure. Yes for the civil rights movement; but lowering the voting age really got the impetus to passage from the student movements and opposition to the war. The idea was kicking around since Eisenhower with no real traction.

The lgbt rights movement- no. The Mattachines were the conservatives as opposed to the street activists at Stonewall and other places. Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were kids at Stonewall.

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Well the tag line and the student debt thing show it’s definitely knowing and tongue in cheek.

The fact that it’s loaded down with shitty, marketing to millennials tropes and other bullshit kind of muddles this.

Is this for actual millennials and full of jokes about all the actual shit you deal with? Or is it for the get of my lawn set and full of jokes about how millennials are the worst? It’s not clear. Seems like both.

The kids these days bitching is hardly limited to that set. I know multiple millennials who continually bitch about millennials, not realizing it means them. And I recently called out a 22 year old for it by pointing out “hey I’m a millennial, and I’m 10 years older than you, all that bitching about young people you’re repeating? It’s supposed to be about you”. She was confused.

That’s because the entire concept of cohorts is borderline useless and hopelessly muddled. That happens because it’s no way clear when one ends and the other begins. Even if there was agreement on that. Culture just doesn’t work that way. And it wouldn’t mean what people ascribed to it even if it did.

Generational cohorts are basically horoscope.

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“I’ve never understtod this kind of gift giving”

Its called christmas

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My gut feeling is that the marketing department wanted the former, but the designers that made the actual product fall in the latter category.

In a side note, I am reminded of how often Parker Brothers would make shitty games that were tie-ins to popular TV shows. My sister had the Mork and Mindy board game, and I recall playing the Escape the Death Star board game a lot.

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You have hit on one of the reasons, there, why the American puff-piece industry’s concept of named generations is such infuriating bullshit.

The Baby Boom was (briefly) a real statistical phenomenon, but even that was never an identity cutting across class, race, gender or any other lines. “Generation X” and “Millenials” are just straight up bullshit, and in an era of malignant identity politics, sticking random toxic labels on people is far from being harmless fun.

I know right? It started as a way to illuminate economic issues, and evolved into a lusty, drooling celebration of hardcore ignorance.

Which, ironically, is a pretty good illustration of what that Marx guy said about all that is solid melting into air and all that is sacred being profaned.

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Monopoly is late stage capitalizm. The winning strategy is to buy everything you can get your hands on, never cooperate, thereby preventing development by other players, take on debt underwritten by your least valuable properties, and massively run up the rent anywhere you can. Then get tired of winning and run for president.

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Yeah but the baby-boom started in the 40’s and ran to around 1960 as a population dynamic. In terms of cohorts we run it to about 1970. There’s not a terrible lot of continuity between. Some one born in 1947 and some one bone in 1963.

The “boomers” were often talking about now, were largely children when the “definitive” Boomer events like Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, and Woodstock happened. And as they came to increaingly dominate the electorate there was an indentifiable conservative shift in the US population. That chunk of people dominated politics from the late 70s to the 90’s and gave us Ronald Reagan, neoliberal ecconomics, and a DNC with little more than a vestigal progressive wing. That’s why we have Hillary Clinton instead of Hillary Rodham.

I also get the feeling that amid this “millennial” board game boom. These old classics and the companies that make them aren’t doing particularly well, and they can’t figure out why. So they’re resorting to novelty products and actually listening to the “millennials don’t want to buy soap, they want to rent a soap experience, introducing Soap Share.” Grade marketing.

Terribly boring and largely forgotten game makes attempt at relevance and fails.

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Monopoly is actually early stage social democracy.

It’s just that it’s both a bad game most people don’t play properly, and so divorced from it’s origin that it’s just a shitty novelty at this point. It’s one of things you buy for kids out of obligation.

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No - they voted marginally for Carter over Regan.

https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/polls/us-elections/how-groups-voted/how-groups-voted-1980/

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And yet, it’s a concept that people take seriously and that has a history, so it must be attended to. Just because something is a social construct doesn’t we should just dismiss it out of hand as having no value. Other sorts of constructs are just as slippery and muddled (race, gender, class, cultural designations, genres of music, nationalities, etc). If we threw out everything that was hopelessly muddled, we’d have very few things to study that help us understand the world. We take the concept of a generational cohort seriously, not because it’s something that is fixed and stable, but precisely because it’s not. It was created as a concept in the postwar period, and it’s emergence tells us something about that time in history. It tells us something about today, even if it’s not something that is a simplistic answer to a question.

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No, silly, he’d make it into a #coliving space. Where the key game to play would be co-opoly.
Out of curiosity… it is a he and he’s a late Boomer, if you’re into cohortism:

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I mean, I think that both of those generations had real world experiences that they share, much like the boomers. They had social and cultural issues that were unique to how they were raised and how they view the world today. They contributed culturally relevant things that shape our modern landscape. And many of them did that with the idea in mind that they were part of a particular cohort named those things. So, no, it’s not bullshit. These labels are only as toxic as we make them.

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https://goo.gl/images/sjtZk4

Coke did it first.

Those movements were also led by Silents like Mario Savio, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, etc. born in the early 1940s or late 1930s. That’s not to discount the role of Boomers working with them in enlightened self-interest during the post-1967 phase when they were reaching draft age, but they do like to claim the older leaders as their own and discount earlier efforts that stalled more due to lack of numbers than lack of will.

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Marginally. And as late boomers became more and more to dominate the electorate. More and more of the country shifted right. Some one born in 1963 who first voted in 1981 didn’t participate in any of the things you’ve mentioned. That divide between the two subsets isn’t even something that has gone without comment. We used to talk about “The Me Generation” to refer to that group between the baby boom and gen x. That came into adulthood in the 70s and 80s.

We got Reagan, then Bush Original Flavor, and the Center Right Bill Clinton. Then Crystal Bush. Increasing GOP control of states, mostly GOP control of Congress during this period. The rise of the religious right. All kicking off when Gen X was too young to vote, during a period where Boomers were the dominate age block in the Electorate. Those Gallup tracking polls identify increased religiousity, more conservative politics, and what have during those same time periods and among the general population in that age group. Finally tapering as gen x and millennials rose as a proportion of the population and the Electorate.

And to throw another weird way none of these cohorts match up with reality. In large part when we talk about " millennials" we’re largely talking about the kids of late boomers. Rather than the kids of gen xers. Even as there’s something of a crossover there as well.

“Boomer” doesn’t really have much more utility on this subject than “millennial”

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The thing is I don’t think the generational cohorts have much utility. And I genuinely think they complicate things and prevent us from understanding or tracking or dealing with the important details. Including those more pertinent social constructs like race.

Like I said there’s a major difference between the boomers who drove the mid century progressive movement and the boomers who drove the 80s and 90s conservative shift. There a pretty big difference between an early millennial in their late 30’s and a late millennial in their early 20’s. And a “millennial” whose currently 12. And in large part when we’re talking about these groups, we’re almost entirely talking about white people.

You have additional complications in which blocks we mark. Gen xers only represent about a 10 years spread. Boomers at least 30. Millennials around 20. As a fairly early millennial, I tend to share a lot more with gen xers in terms of formative experiences than I do with the bulk of the group identified as millennials. Even as there are still connections in the other direction.

A lot of this stuff lives in pop sociology and marketing. With real science and demographic study mostly still breaking things up by more useful 10 year age blocks, and regular demographic categories that have a lot more utility. You roll it all into the cohorts. And you miss the difference between those boomers who fueled civil rights wins, and those who fueled the back lash against it. Gen Xers look like a non entity. And near 40 year old millennials are finicky teens that need to get off my lawn. Instead of multiple generations of Americans in a serious ecconomic bind.

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That very well may be true, but as it has been a concept that’s been taken seriously for a while now, it would be foolish just to dismiss it out of hand.

That depends on who you ask. I’d say it goes from the mid-60s to the early 80s, so more of a 20 year spread.

But once again, that doesn’t negate the fact that it has historical significance.

They are very much not, thanks.

I’m arguing here not for accepting these designations without any critical insight. I’m saying that they are part of a larger historical processes that we should attend to, including understanding that it’s a contentious set of constructs in the first place that are historically contingent. We should historicize it, in other words, even though it is something that is still a force in shaping our understanding of the world.

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