Confessions of a 40-Year Old GenX Slacker

"What gets lost in the pejorative use of the term slackers is that we were well educated and very literate, albeit in a world of 'outsider' culture that at the time was considered insignificant in academia or cultural discourse. We were into the cut-up writings of Burroughs; cyberpunk sci-fi by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson; paranoid fantasies of Philip K. Dick; dark humored paranoia of Robert Anton Wilson; anarcho feminism of Kathy Acker; hi-tech kookiness of Mondo 2000; kung fu and Chinese fantasy movies; B horror and zombie films; ’zines; 'zipping' (phone hacking by using tones to break into long distance carrier codes); underground comics like RAW; Max Headroom; Blade Runner; robot machine destruction spectacles of Survival Research Laboratory; and ReSearch Magazine that celebrated JD Ballard, prank culture, modern primitives, industrial music, and my most favorite, Tiki lounges. If it hasn’t happened already, you will probably find a TV network devoted to each one of these subjects sometime in the near future." /The Brooklyn Rail/