The behavior of the Millennial generation is not infrequently criticized, especially regarding their relationship to technology. But if Millennials live their lives via screens, says Lewis Black, it’s because the Baby Boomer generation gave them digital technology like an unsought after acid trip: “That generation turns around and drops on these kids something that was just as potent as LSD. That phone and the amount of apps and the amount of crap and the computer, it’s the extension of the human nervous system.”
Lewis Black: This whole idea of millennials being this or that or the other I find it ludicrous to be critical because you're talking about the generation that was the tipping point of why the Supreme Court past the marriage for gays. They're the tipping – they're the ones going are you kidding me? They're the gender fluid group. I mean I don't get that at all. I mean it was hard enough for me just to be a guy, let alone I'm going to figure that I'm fluid about this. I don't get it but it doesn't disturb me. A lot of my generation, I might as well of been born on a different planet than some of these pricks. I feel like they're dinosaurs. Really, you're going to carry this stuff from the '50s on with you? Really? You're going to stand there in Congress? That I find more enraging. My real anger is is that they scream about these kids and the way in which they operate and interact and socialize and the way that they are, and yet this is the generation that had the phones dropped on them and the computer dropped on them and things changed. And so you've got a whole generation that is living in a different world than we are. And they live on screens. Their whole life is on a screen for most of them. When I was a kid I did LSD. And they said you can't really do a lot of LSD. So they made it illegal and then they took it away kind of. You couldn't get really good LSD after a while. But it was like you can't do that. That generation turns around and drops on these kids something that was just as potent as LSD. That phone and the amount of apps and the amount of crap and the computer, it's the extension of the human nervous system. It's a drug and it's not treated that way. And then they go boy, I can't believe they're doing that. Well schmuck it's because you didn't. Because you didn't do it. And that's it. And I think that's, going back to politics, that's part of the reason we live like we live now. That's part of the reason things are the way they are. We are in the midst of a total sea change. We have gone from one age to another. We have not entered the new age and we haven't left the old age, but boy it's happening and it scares the shit out of a lot of people.