Nilay Patel, the editor-in-chief of the digital technology publication The Verge, has lately taken to describing theverge.com as “the last Web site on earth.” It’s kind of a joke—there are, of course, tons of Web sites still in existence, including the likes of Facebook.com—but also kind of not a joke.
I recall having breakfast at a hotel in Brussels in 2017 and sitting across from Douglas Coupland, the author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the 1991 book that gave my generation a sort of name that was really only a placeholder for a name. I wanted to tell him how much I resented him for this, but I couldn’t muster the courage to be disagreeable.
