By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 16 seconds ago
For nerds of a certain age, Logan’s Run (1976) is one of the scariest sci-fi series ever made. The movie features a dystopian future where mankind nonetheless lives in debaucherous harmony, surrounded by automated machinery that takes care of everyone’s needs. But as the opening crawl warns us, there’s a catch: once someone turns 30 (as evidenced by a crystal in their hands), they must kill themselves in a ritual known as “Carousel,” after which they will be allegedly reborn. In reality, there is no rebirth; everyone simply sacrifices themselves in order to forcibly create a society where everyone is young and happy.
Logan’s Run (currently streaming for free on Tubi) is particularly frightening to Millennials because it crystallizes our anxiety about our own mortality. Nothing like a cinematic reminder that death is creeping closer to all of us, day by day. As an added kick to the teeth, the Big Bad of the movie is an evil computer, emphasizing how AI may very well be the ultimate death of humanity. Ironically, though, modern technology has effectively made Logan’s Run a joke. Thanks to social media created by Zoomers and even Generation Alpha, Millennials have long felt shut out of a world driven almost exclusively by the whims and tastes of younger audiences.
Plus, trust me: it doesn’t take an evil AI to make us wish we were already dead!
No Country For Old Men
For longtime sci-fi fans, Logan’s Run will likely feel like a hodgepodge of genre concepts you may be familiar with from other media. The idea of voluntarily turning yourself in for extermination, for example, feels very similar to people flocking to the suicide booths in Soylent Green. This movie also has special agents assigned to hunt and kill those who run, a bit like Deckard hunting down replicants in Blade Runner. Of course, the idea of a computer with possible sinister motives running an entire society is present in multiple episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series. On paper, all of this makes Logan’s Run very accessible, even to newcomers.
With all that being said, I can’t help but feel like modern technology has rendered the message and vibe of Logan’s Run largely redundant. I’m not even talking about AI here, though it is notable that our entire economy is propped up by attempts to make tech bros’ collective attempt to make their own evil computer. No, I’m talking about how social media sites such as Twitter and YouTube have made Millennials and older groups feel a bit like the characters in Logan’s Run: essentially dead to anyone over 30.
Never Trust Anyone Over 30 (Because They’re Dead)
In Logan’s Run, separating (permanently, as it turns out) older people from younger people was handled by an artificial intelligence, and the whole thing was baked into their bizarre culture. In the real world, no evil AIs are forcing people to unalive themselves when they turn 30 (at least, not yet). Nonetheless, older groups like Millennials still perceive a vast gulf between their culture and, say, Zoomer culture. Technology plays a major role in this because it destroyed something that older groups once considered indestructible: the monoculture.
Millennials and older demographics mostly grew up watching the same popular movies and breakout TV shows. They read the same newspapers and magazines that were popular nationwide, and they read the same great works of literature. The effect of this was what is now known as the monoculture: when almost everyone read and watched the same stuff, we all had the same cultural touchstones. If a movie had a funny line or two, they became part of our collective vernacular. We knew all the stars, all the quotes, all the pop culture moments. Like those in Logan’s Run, we had a shared culture that we all knew and understood.
A Shocking New Technology
But the internet, originally intended to unify the world, ended up tearing everything apart. Anyone with a camera could become famous, which led to the rise of influencers and micro-celebrities whose content was available at the press of a button. The monoculture was gone, quietly replaced by a series of niche cultures that are confusing and downright impenetrable to anyone outside of them. This leads, inevitably, to cultural isolation: how the heck is a Millennial raised by a television supposed to understand stuff like the looksmaxxing movement, which advocates hammers to the face as a way of achieving beauty?
One thing the fancy computer in Logan’s Run couldn’t predict was that real-world technology would create a faster, more disposable culture. Young people don’t get funny lines from movies or TV shows anymore; they get them from platforms like TikTok and YouTube, and this ephemeral slang disappears as quickly as it appears, replaced by something from the next viral vid. This is why Millennials and Gen X feel like they’re going insane trying to understand Zoomers: by the time you do figure out goofy words like “rizz” or “delulu,” these youngsters have already moved on, and they will point and laugh when you try to insert “gyatt” into the conversation.
In The Digital Age, You’re Already Dead
Obviously, language is used as a cultural signifier, and shared slang is a way of indicating you are part of the group. Hyper-online youngsters keep up with changing slang by constantly watching new videos from their favorite content creators. By the time someone as old as me tries to use outdated terms, it’s abundantly clear I am not part of the in-group. Without understanding something as foundational as the language being used, it becomes subsequently impossible for Millennials and older groups to understand the layered irony and deliberate brain rot embedded in the most popular Zoomer and Generation Alpha memes.
How does this all tie back to Logan’s Run? In that fictional world, technology simplified things by splitting society into two groups: an in-group of living young people and an out-group of 30-year-old corpses. The film is meant to dramatize anxieties about getting older and feeling out of touch and irrelevant over time. But in the real world, algorithms have split people into countless groups whose passions, humor, and even language are inscrutable to audiences born before the World Wide Web. We don’t have to be hunted and killed like in Logan’s Run; instead, Millennials, Gen X, and Boomers just slowly become quietly irrelevant, as if we were never born at all.
Is that bleak and depressing? You bet! But it could be worse: you could be getting actively hunted and murdered because the glowing crystal in your hand told everyone you had entered your dirty thirties. Carousel doesn’t exist in the real world, but you can experience the next best thing by streaming Logan’s Run for free on Tubi. By watching this classic film, you can be reborn as someone who enjoys all of the grace and understanding that comes with age. If that doesn’t work, don’t look to me for a pep talk: as a Millennial and a teacher, I’ve been waiting for young people to rise up and kill me for a long, long time!
