A New Consciousness Beyond Generations
A New Consciousness Beyond Generations
The “AutoGen” is not simply another demographic label. It is the ghost in the machine of generational thinking — a decentralized, self-aware consciousness emergent from a world shaped by digital velocity, fractured realities, and algorithmic intimacy. Where Boomers organized around stability, Gen X around skepticism, Millennials around purpose, and Gen Z around disruption — AutoGen breaks from the alphabet entirely.
We are the self-authored, self-updating, post-linear generation.
We are AutoGen.
Beyond Generationalism: A Rhizomatic Awakening
Traditional generational theory assumes linearity: one group follows another in a sequence, each marked by broad social tendencies and arbitrary birth years. But in the age of infinite scrolls and deepfakes, identity no longer follows the old path. In the place of sequential inheritance, we have rhizomes — the Deleuzian metaphor for non-hierarchical knowledge and connection.
“I’ve never felt like I belonged to a specific generation. I belong to moments. To code. To memories made online and erased just as fast.” — Tabita Rezaire, Afro-feminist digital artist and healer
The AutoGen is born not from geography or time, but from shared cognitive environments — subreddits instead of neighborhoods, Discord servers instead of schools, world-building games instead of national anthems. This is the first generation not bound by linear culture, but by recursive, participatory flows.
The Interface Is the New Hearth
Just as the fire once gathered humans in storytelling circles, the screen now gathers us in collective rituals of presence and simulation. In the AutoGen world, we don’t just consume information — we author ourselves in real-time. The feed is the mirror, the profile is the body, and the algorithm is the village elder, sometimes kind, sometimes cruel.
“We were all born into systems we didn’t build — but we know how to hack them. We were born analog, raised digital, and now we build our myths from code.” — Morehshin Allahyari, Iranian-American new media artist and activist
AutoGen isn’t generational — it’s generative. It’s a feedback loop. A wiki of selfhood. A hyperobject of influence and mood. It’s not the year you were born that defines you — it’s how deeply you’ve rendered yourself into the digital strata of your world.
Fluidity as Resistance
What makes AutoGen vital isn’t just technological dexterity — it’s fluid identity as cultural resistance. In a world collapsing binaries — man/woman, local/global, real/fake — AutoGen flows through them all, refusing to settle.
“I never want to be just one thing. That’s the beauty of being born now. My multiplicity is my truth.” — Juliana Huxtable, trans artist, poet, DJ, and cultural theorist
The AutoGen’s resistance is not loud; it is ambient, infiltrating systems from the inside, reprogramming expectations quietly. Its protest isn’t always a march — it’s a meme that punctures power, a viral clip that topples orthodoxy.
An Algorithmic Kinship
If Gen X distrusted systems and Millennials sought meaning within them, AutoGen manipulates the systems themselves. They speak in hashtags and hex codes, remixing their beliefs the way they remix sound and image.
They don’t belong to a moment — they generate it.
They don’t ask for permission — they build interfaces that remove the need.
“I code my prayers and remix my rage. If I don’t build the future, I’ll be erased from it.”
— American Artist, interdisciplinary artist reclaiming technology for Black radicality
This generation doesn’t just scroll — they script.
They don’t just follow trends — they teach the algorithm to follow them.
AutoGen Is Already Here
To be AutoGen is not to be young , it is to be iterative. To be agile, not adolescent. It is to treat selfhood as software with patches, upgrades, bugs, and beautiful contradictions.
This is not an “emerging” generation it is a hidden operating system already running beneath our institutions, our economies, our languages. It is the glimmer in the eyes of anyone who has felt more at home in a shared Google Doc than in their own family reunion.
AutoGen is not about where you come from.
It’s about where you’re reprogramming yourself to go.
Sources & Further Reading
• Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980) — concept of the “rhizome”
• Tabita Rezaire — Artist website
• Morehshin Allahyari — She Who Sees the Unknown project, artist page
• Juliana Huxtable — Mucus in My Pineal Gland, poetry collection (2017)
• American Artist — Black Gooey Universe and work with The Whitney and MoMA PS1
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