In the winter of 1989, as the Berlin Wall was being dismantled and Western capitalism was declaring victory, the Whole Earth Review published an intriguing document. The centerpiece of a larger package, the 30-plus-page special report on “The Global Teenager” chronicles a commissioned research expedition tracking youth values across five continents, and, in retrospect, quietly marks a turning point in the Whole Earth network’s own evolution—and in the history of globalization itself. 

The issue’s cover design announced this special theme in uncommonly-punk visuals—a jagged neon-pink banner proclaiming THE GLOBAL TEENAGER above a photo of fashionable Tokyo kids in a crowded Harajuku street scene, their outfits a pastiche of world cultures from Scottish kilt to sari silk (with a Mickey Mouse logo prominently visible on one girl’s sweatshirt). The visual grammar itself suggested something major was happening to youth culture around the world, and that this rising generation was perhaps quantitatively and qualitatively different from the one defined twenty years ago in part by the Whole Earth network (who were, of course, now middle-aged). Inside, the Table of Contents laid out a typically eclectic Whole Earth buffet: readers were served features on Soviet Rock’n’Roll, “gun-proofing your children,” arctic cycling, Buddha shopping, Usenet communities, and the unfortunate fact of penis fractures, among others. But several articles linked to the issue’s focus on a youth demographic which promised to be, in the words of WER editor Kevin Kelly, “a generation that [would] dwarf the sixties in impact and surprise.” The issue began with two coupled hypotheses: first, a demographic premise that by the mid-1990s, over half the world’s population would be under the age of twenty; second, that these billions of teenagers would share an unprecedented number of common cultural touchpoints through global media and the foreseen digital revolution, creating a new breed of “global teenager” unified both in proportion and perspective. This all sets up the main course—a globe-trotting odyssey to test the global teenager hypotheses, culminating in a report authored by 54-year-old journalist Will Baker. 

The phrase “The Global Teenager” was coined by Stewart Brand, who “brought the hypothesis to WER’s attention” and set in motion the gonzo experiment in defining this emergent demographic. Author and UC Davis professor Baker was commissioned for this task, circling the globe with Actual American Teen™ and photographer Amon Rappaport (equal parts, it seems, sidekick and foil). The mission? “Go around the world and ask teenagers directly what they think. Use a standard questionnaire. Visit the most representative countries on five continents. Talk to teenagers from as many backgrounds as possible.” In six weeks from May–June 1989, Baker and Rapaport hurtled through twelve countries: Guatemala, Argentina, Brazil, Kenya, India, Thailand, Hong Kong, China, the Soviet Union, England, Israel, and Egypt. Accompanied by Rappaport, a precocious 17-year-old student from the Bay Area, Baker embarked on the “Around the World in 80 Days”-esque trip, trying to maintain a 50-50 balance between interviewing boys and girls, and making efforts to spend time in small towns and rural areas, not just urban centers. They returned with a mountain of information—interviews, questionnaires, notes, and photographs, which informed Baker’s long-form report. This wasn't the first time the Whole Earth Review had published ad hoc ethnographic expeditions—indeed, the very same issue featured another instance of what we might call “gonzo ethnography.” In another article, technologist Michael Naimark recounts a spur-of-the-moment trip he took to the rural Philippines to get an Ifugao shaman’s perspective on human-computer communication. But Baker’s teen-tracking mission was different; the published report was merely the tip of a for-profit research iceberg, with all its raw material to be synthesized for a consultancy’s clients to better understand the “global teenager” as a demographic, and as an emerging market. And this was hardly a hidden agenda.

Just as revelatory as the report’s content was the frank acknowledgment (and comical ambivalence) in its introduction that its commissioner and financial sponsor (putting up the $5,500 travel budget) was the Global Business Network (GBN)—Stewart Brand’s recently-launched consultancy venture founded with foresight specialist Peter Schwartz, among others. Besides a few brief mentions in previous issues, this is the first prominent appearance of GBN within Whole Earth Review’s pages, making it a notable “crossover event” and milestone. In retrospect, Baker’s article and the research project it documents, as well as the blossoming of GBN, represents a key inflection point where Whole Earth’s countercultural ethos and network were explicitly repurposed for corporate interests. The subversive bible that once celebrated “access to tools” for self-sufficiency was now facilitating corporate access to youth markets, becoming a willing scout for the very global capitalism its earlier incarnation had sought to provide alternatives to.

Reading Baker’s lengthy reportage from this questionably -rigorous study of the global teenager, it’s intriguing to note the number of column inches devoted to his reservations about the whole endeavor. Though he eventually accepts the challenge, he starts by bemoaning the hubris of the whole approach: “Who in his or her right mind could believe that an investigator in six weeks might learn something substantial about the billion or so teenagers on the planet? Six days in China? Five in Brazil and Russia? Three in India? Ridiculous on the face of it.” He describes feeling too busy, too overcommitted, too old for the project (“Most obviously of all, I was not a teenager and had not been one for a very long time”). Beyond all this, he’s ambivalent about the corporate imperative behind the research, and the uses to which it will be put. He elaborates:

He hedges with self-consciously “skimpy rationalizations,” writing that “at least, I told myself, it wasn't research in biological warfare or moving contraband toxics into impoverished countries. Plus, Levi Strauss does make a good pantaloon. You have to give them that, and Coke provides a medical service in hot countries with bad water.” But eventually, sheer curiosity gets him out the door. (And honestly—how many writers, then or now, would turn the offer down?)

What’s particularly revealing is that Baker’s self-aware criticism was not only permitted but prominently featured in the final report. This suggests something deeper than simple corporate co-optation—it exemplifies capitalism’s capacity to absorb and neutralize critique by incorporating it into the very system being critiqued. Baker’s ambivalence becomes part of the product’s authenticity, his reservations lending credibility to what might otherwise appear as crude market research. This self-reflexive posture would become integral to the very brand cultivated by GBN over the coming decade: acknowledging contradictions while proceeding anyway, and bringing countercultural bona fides and a sense of “progressive” critical awareness as a form of credibility and a unique selling point. 

The expedition’s methodology centered around a standardized questionnaire (the “Teen Chat Questionnaire”), as well as a custom-designed “Visual Values Index,” a set of cards with pictogram-like images depicting themes like a car, family, water, TV, voting, and education which they’d ask informants to arrange in order of importance.¹ But the duo immediately encountered cultural barriers: the very concept of a one-on-one interview proved foreign in many countries with more collective and community-based approaches to communication. Despite these challenges, they forged ahead, inadvertently reinventing anthropological fieldwork as they went, with all the colonial baggage that entails. Baker and Rappaport also discovered the classic anthropologist’s observation paradox (the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of the social sciences): that their presence altered the dynamics they set out to observe, and therefore influenced the insights they gleaned. “In fact our ultimate and greatest discovery was that our impact on a neighborhood or community could by itself generate interesting interactions,” Baker wrote, “and that our flashcards and questionnaires sometimes served only to launch free-wheeling, open discussion on vital local issues.”

What they discovered contradicted their initial hypothesis that perhaps this generation would break with the typical social values of their elders, for instance suddenly prizing television over all other priorities (à la the epochal whine: “I want my MTV”). Baker wrote, “There is, in fact, something like global agreement on the primary human values. The predominant pattern ranks family at the top, with education the usual and often close second, water and the vote vying for third.” One notable outlier came from interviewing the Maasai in Kenya, who ranked water above everything else: “Every mother chose the water symbol and spoke emphatically on the subject. It was, I gathered, in a category by itself, beyond all the others.” Baker reflected somewhat patronizingly, “I wondered if, ironically, these ‘primitive’ tribespeople have shown us the future.”

What makes the Global Teenager expedition particularly fascinating is its unintentionally momentous timing. Baker and Rappaport could not have chosen a more historically charged moment to conduct their research. The jet-setting duo were in Hong Kong on June 6, 1989, two days after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing, where Baker writes that “quite obviously answers were influenced by the emotions running through the crowd. Some young people were in tears, some unable to speak, and some offended that I would ask such inane questions in the wake of so great a tragedy.” Similarly, in the West Bank, Baker felt “foolish trotting out my little packets of cards and questionnaires” when interviewing Palestinian supporters of the ongoing Intifada and young Israelis in military training. They visited Moscow during the acceleration of perestroika (as the “Peaceful Revolution” was elsewhere chipping away at the Eastern Bloc), and Argentina during the hyperinflation crisis that led to food shortages and riots, literally traversing a world in the midst of massive upheaval.

Baker observes:

What comes through, he continues, is “a generalized feeling that the circumstances of modern life are new and dire, that something like a global crisis is underway and that they, the young, must find some original solutions.”

1989 revealed how far youth culture had traveled from the countercultural dreams of previous youth cohorts. Where 1960s radicals had worked to overthrow oppressive systems, and the Whole Earth generation had imagined young people as agents of transformation who could opt out of oppressive systems and create small-scale yet rhizomatic alternatives, the global teenagers of 1989 found themselves trapped within those same systems, now expanded to planetary scale. The political subjecthood of the Global Teenager was characterized not by the optimistic rebellion that had defined Whole Earth’s youth culture, but by a mixture of crisis and resignation, constrained by the tightened chains of global capital, decades of war and extraction, and the visible failure of many 1960s radical visions, inheriting globalization in a world where utopian possibilities seemed foreclosed.

Throughout the report, Baker demonstrates flashes of genuine insight alongside glaring blindspots. He deftly observes how “the economy has replaced fate and divine judgment as a supernatural, mysterious power which determines most lives,” noting it should perhaps be written with a capital E in red letters. When Baker writes about youth being “exploited as cheap labor” or “targeted… as a market,” though, he never fully completes the thought—exploited by whom? Targeted by whom? The nameless, passive “Economy” obscures concrete Global North (and particularly American) influence. Why do the teenagers of Guatemala have such bleak prospects? Baker never quite acknowledges that American foreign policy, military interventions, and multinational corporations—some of which indirectly sponsored his own research—played direct roles in creating these conditions. His observations often seem to register the symptoms of global inequality without clearly diagnosing their causes. 

In Argentina, Baker and Rappaport experienced firsthand the economic (and hence, political) chaos reshaping the world the Global Teenager would inherit. When the local currency underwent wild fluctuations against the dollar, they even participated in light arbitrage, noting “We did well, our funds had multiplied by more than 70% in one day.” Meanwhile, at one school, Argentine teenagers crowded around Rappaport’s state-of-the-art camera, all making the same rapid calculation that “this camera slung around the neck of a homegrown global teen would handily pay two teachers for a year’s work.” These confrontations with extreme inequality crystallize the project’s contradictions. He notes a bitter wit in some countries, recording “the self-mockery of some Brazilians who [in answer to the question “what makes your country notable”] found their country unique for ‘our financial debts,’ or ‘supporting foreign banks,’ or ‘a big botanical garden in extinction’ [i.e., the Amazon rainforest being destroyed].” Baker found smart kids who reflected on their situation and sometimes even named exactly some of the problems of colonialism, Cold War policies, American hegemony, and multinational corporations using the world as a resource to be fracked. The global teenagers were aware of this, even if they weren’t articulating it in academic terms, but Baker himself seems unable or unwilling to explicitly articulate these dynamics.

By the end of his Global Teenager report, Baker returns to his original question—is there such a thing as a global teenager?—and concludes: 

Yet on what he calls “the more superficial plane,” Baker acknowledges that

His final ironic advice to the brands ultimately funding this expedition: “Why not get together and send a lot of your money to these needy youngsters? They’ll use it, I can almost guarantee, to buy your stuff.”

The paradox Baker identifies remains haunting: if the global teenager as a consumer of American goods and pop culture was successfully created by post-war American marketing and corporate expansion, these same teens worldwide lacked the means to actually buy the jeans they now desired—partially because the same companies and banks that created these desires had exploited and impoverished their countries for decades. It’s a bitter contradiction that runs through the entire report and has only intensified in the decades since. Baker ultimately offers a stinging observation: “The global teenager? Sure, she’s that bright, pretty young university student whose future is serving you hamburgers at McDonald’s for 18 cents an hour.”

At the same moment the “Global Teenager” issue of the Whole Earth Review was sent off to the printers, it’s likely that the nightly news was airing footage of people—many of them teens—breaking through the Berlin Wall. Writing in the middle of the halcyon upheavals of 1989, Baker offers a blurry snapshot of the high-velocity changes underway. He describes how “various societies offer new generations their version of the origin and meaning of this terrible force,” and states that “the theory makers now riding high prophecy the collapse of all systems which attempt to impose control on the workings of the invisible hand and to free the market totally.” In the accelerating current of globalization, it was sink or swim. The Whole Earth community and its nascent offshoot that sent Baker around the world in the first place swam.

The Global Business Network, founded in 1987, represents perhaps the most significant institutional crystallization of the broader Whole Earth network’s long, strange journey from countercultural catalysts to corporate consultants. As historian John Beck succinctly puts it, “What GBN accomplished was perhaps the fullest convergence of Cold War systems thinking, technofuturism and countercultural collectivism, put to work to further the interests of global corporations.”²

GBN emerged from a unique alchemy of figures, ideas, and institutions. Formally established in 1987 during a meeting over Peter Schwartz’s dining room table in Berkeley and operating in some form until 2013, GBN was a consultancy specializing in helping clients anticipate and navigate the future on a global scale. But it was a very new type of consultancy, relying as much on the cache of “access to cool” as their proprietary methodologies and bespoke advisory services. GBN’s five co-founders brought complementary expertise from across the Whole Earth network and corporate consulting world: Stewart Brand, key network entrepreneur; Peter Schwartz from Shell’s legendary scenario planning unit and previously Stanford Research Institute (SRI); Jay Ogilvy from SRI’s Values and Lifestyles Program; Napier Collyns, another Shell veteran; and Lawrence Wilkinson, Bay Area financier and media producer. 

GBN’s core offering was scenario planning—a practice of developing multiple future narratives to help organizations navigate strategic uncertainty, created by bringing together diverse groups of experts, artists, and thinkers to imagine how technological, social, and economic trends might unfold. Scenarios had emerged from the Cold War military industrial complex but were then famously first imported into the business world by Schwartz’s predecessor at Shell, the enigmatic Frenchman Pierre Wack. (According to company lore, Wack’s innovation had helped Shell navigate the 1970s oil shocks with remarkable foresight.) GBN further refined their scenario methodology and helped disseminate the practice through corporate, government, and policy spaces, both through direct consulting on specific client needs, and through workshops and trainings available (for a fee) to their clients’ staff or individual entrepreneurs. As a sampling of client work, over the 1990s, according to reporting by Joel Garreau in Wired, GBN explored military threats to the United States over the next 30 years, including “the challenging possibility… of decades of peace”³ for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff; anticipated consequences of events like the LA riots and potential collapse of the California economy for Pacific Gas and Electric; generated perspectives on “the future of women around the world” for L’Oréal’s Parisian vice chairman; and charted telecommunications futures for AT&T. ⁴

But beyond scenarios, GBN’s definitive offering was its “network.” For a baseline annual membership fee of $25,000, corporate clients gained access to WorldView Meetings where they could engage with GBN’s “Network of Remarkable People”—experts spanning computing, ecology, anthropology, biology, and journalism. Members also received in-house reports, a book club with monthly titles hand-curated by Brand, and access to the WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link) online forum including a private GBN conference space. Perhaps most revealing were GBN’s “Learning Journeys,” a continuation of their earlier “Learning Conferences”⁵—immersive field trips that epitomized their fusion of countercultural sensibilities with corporate consulting. The June 1988 “Learning Conference” trip to Costa Rica, written up by Brand for the Winter 1989 issue of Whole Earth Review, was typical: participants engaged with the landscape and local communities as “learning systems.”

GBN arose from a moment when the Whole Earth network was facing a collective crossroads. Despite the tremendous cultural impact of the Catalog and related projects like the WELL, few of these ventures had generated substantial financial returns for their creators. The network had accumulated decades of cultural capital, alternative thinking styles, and countercultural credibility, but struggled to convert this influence into sustainable economic models. GBN offered a way to monetize not just individual expertise but the entire ecosystem of relationships, methodologies, and cultural insights that the Whole Earth community had developed. As cultural historian Fred Turner has observed, by the mid-1980s there was a sense in Whole Earth circles that “they [big corporations] are here and we’ve got to talk.”⁶ This pragmatic recognition that corporations had become the dominant force shaping technological and social change led to a strategic pivot: rather than opposing corporate power, the Whole Earth network would attempt to influence it from within.

Yet viewing the Whole Earth generation’s evolution as a simple shift from countercultural idealism to corporate pragmatism misses a crucial continuity in their collective worldview. Their ethos had never been so much “anti-capitalist” as it was “individualist” and libertarian, more interested in autonomous nodes forming independent systems and decentralized organization than in directly opposing market structures (Whole Earth was formatted as a catalog, after all!). The refrain “access to tools” celebrated individual agency and self-determination—values that could find expression just as well in a back-to-the-land commune as in a dot-com start-up. From the Catalog’s DIY ethos to the WELL’s early internet community and now to GBN’s scenario planning, the Whole Earth cohort consistently championed tools for individual empowerment rather than systemic revolution. Their trajectory arguably reflects less a contradictory “selling out” than the logical extension of a worldview that valued self-organization, non-hierarchical systems, and an aversion to centralized control. The same libertarian impulse that rejected government control could just as readily embrace market solutions, seeing both as expressions of emergent order rather than top-down direction. What changed by 1989 wasn’t this worldview’s fundamental commitment to decentralized systems, but rather which systems seemed most promising as vehicles for transformation. The state socialism that had defined one pole of the Cold War binary was collapsing, leaving market capitalism as the seemingly unrivaled mechanism for organizing human activity (as in the classic Thatcherite phrase, “There Is No Alternative”). The Whole Earth generation didn’t so much abandon their values as redirect them toward what appeared to be the only viable channel remaining. 

What remains consistent across Brand’s ventures—from the Catalog to GBN—is an unshakable faith in what media scholar Devon Powers calls “proactive optimism,”⁷ the belief that by analyzing and imaginatively inhabiting the future, one can intervene to shape it, or at least expertly navigate its currents (perhaps like riding the rapids of the Rio Chama River). This orientation, deeply embedded in California counterculture, proved remarkably adaptable to corporate futures research, which as Beck notes, “has constructed a future for its own present needs.”⁸ Previous waves of “systems thinking” were major influences on the Whole Earth Catalog, but were often centered on the local and small scale—the committed belief that networks of small-scale communes could succeed at creating egalitarian society where a state or nation could not. What remained consistent from the 1960s to 1989 was the fundamental conviction that the planet operated as a comprehensible system that could be mapped, modeled, and managed through the right combination of information, analysis, and intervention. What changed was the scale and the clients: where the likes of Buckminster Fuller had imagined benevolent technocrats optimizing resources for humanity's benefit, and the original Whole Earth was committed to the ethos of localized networks and “appropriate technologies,” GBN saw corporations as the new shapers and potential stewards of global systems. 

What made GBN distinctive was its explicit fusion of countercultural sensibilities with corporate consulting methodologies. By the mid-1970s, Turner writes, Wack’s scenario planning at Shell, later continued by Peter Schwartz, had 

 GBN took this fusion even further. Their workshops and field trips (rafting down New Mexico’s Rio Chama river, for instance, or traipsing through the Costa Rican jungle, as documented by a Brand article elsewhere in the Winter 1989 issue of the Whole Earth Review) had the feel of communal happenings, even as they served Fortune 500 clients like Deutsche Bank, AT&T, and Coca-Cola. (According to John Beck, in its lifetime, GBN was funded by over 200 large corporations, including Apple, Chevron Texaco, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Fannie Mae, General Electric, IBM, the London Stock Exchange, Nokia, and “Schwartz's old boss, Shell Oil.”¹⁰)

This wasn’t just the GBN-ers monetizing their countercultural networks; it was a fundamental transformation of those networks’ purpose and function. The “Network of Remarkable People” that GBN assembled—including science fiction authors, technologists, academics, and artists—became an intellectual resource for corporate insights, and indirectly, planning. But even moreso, it was just priceless PR. From Brian Eno to William Gibson, the eventual roster reads like a dinner party anyone—even the driest CEOs—would want to attend; albeit with a very white, male cast (as Turner describes, “Of the 90 network members in place in 1994, only 15 were women, and only 3 were non-Caucasian”¹¹). As Brand biographer John Markoff recounts, this dynamic created tensions within the network itself. Peter Coyote, the actor and former Digger who had been a fixture of San Francisco’s 1960s counterculture and an old friend of Brand’s, initially accepted an invitation, but later withdrew, forgoing the $2,500 annual honorarium, feeling he was “simply being used as window dressing to sell corporate clients expensive high-concept ideas.”¹²

The Global Teenager itself exemplified exactly this kind of expensive high-concept idea, though it would hardly be the only one. The concept took on a curious afterlife, rippling outward through multiple vectors into mainstream culture and business intelligence. Perhaps the most notable emissary of the Global Teen is Douglas Coupland, the Canadian novelist who coined the term “Generation X” in a 1987 Vancouver Magazine article. Coupland, who had become a member of GBN’s “Network of Remarkable People” in this period, apparently picked up this newer generational moniker from GBN and brought it into the public consciousness via his fiction. Coupland’s version described something more specific—and glossily cynical—than Baker’s sprawling global survey and textured observations. Instead, “The Global Teenager” (more often shortened to “Global Teen”) appeared in Coupland’s novels Generation X (1991) and Shampoo Planet (1992) as a cosmopolitan, consumerist young Western adult, essentially a proto-hipster with materialist tendencies, prefiguring today’s travel influencers and digital nomads. As described in Shampoo Planet: “They’re perky. They embrace and believe the pseudo-globalism and ersatz racial harmony of ad campaigns engineered by the makers of soft drinks and computer-inventoried sweaters. Many want to work for IBM when their lives end at the age of twenty-five.” The biting assessment continues: “in some dark and undefinable way, these kids are also Dow, Union Carbide, General Dynamics, and the military.”¹³ Coupland’s fictional narrator suggests that these global teens “would have little, if any, compunction about eating dead fellow passengers” after a plane crash—a savage metaphor for the cannibalistic capitalism they had internalized. But in a simultaneously poignant and ironic passage elsewhere, his protagonist embraces (or is unable to escape) the condition of the global citizen:

Though the term “The Global Teenager” didn’t necessarily become a buzzword on par with Coupland’s own “Generation X,” the concept and framing continued to have ripple effects throughout the 1990s. What GBN had presciently (even if accidentally) identified was the teenager as globalization’s central character—the demographic avatar through whom the future could be decoded and commodified. This same idea was the one that drove the explosive growth of the trend forecasting industry and particularly the figure of the “cool hunter” in the later 1990s. While consumer ethnography, trend research, and the focus on youth and marginal communities as bellwethers of cultural change were not new, these practices became an increasingly valuable type of business intelligence as the globalized 1990s took off, as reflected by Malcolm Gladwell’s proto-viral 1997 article on “The Coolhunt,”¹⁴ and the 2001 Douglas Rushkoff-hosted documentary “The Merchants of Cool.” While GBN was not technically a trend forecasting agency, their Global Teenager project (and its assumption that cultural margins could serve as early signals of mainstream trends) could be seen as responding to the same C-suite anxieties about globalization that drove the coolhunting surge in the 90s. As scholar Devon Powers documents in On Trend, her essential 2019 study of trend forecasting, these approaches, like other futures and foresight practices during this time, sold both “the fear and the cure” regarding globalization.¹⁵ By treating global youth culture as simultaneously exotic and knowable, the Global Teenager project, as with GBN’s overall practice, helped establish a template for what Powers calls “global futurity”—the idea that globalization represented “where the future resides,” a space simultaneously “boundless and manageable, reachable and elusive, quotidian and utopic.”¹⁶

As the ’90s wore on, GBN’s conception of globalization went beyond describing a trend to actively promoting a specific future that, as Powers notes about corporate attitudes toward globalization more broadly, required an “unflappable belief in the inevitability, naturalness,¹⁷ and persistence of global change.”¹⁸ This conceptual framework found its ultimate expression in the most famous “expensive high-concept idea” of GBN: the “Long Boom” thesis, which emerged from the work of GBN and was introduced to the world in a 1997 cover article for Wired Magazine.¹⁹ Authored by Peter Schwartz in collaboration with WIRED editor Peter Leyden (who would later go on to directly work with GBN as a “knowledge developer”), and under the tenure of executive editor Kevin Kelly, the “Long Boom” predicted a 25-year period of unprecedented global economic growth fueled by technological innovation, free markets, and digital connectivity—a seamless integration of capitalism and technology that would lift all boats worldwide; essentially evangelizing neoliberal globalization through rosy Silicon Valley glasses.²⁰ Where Baker’s field research had maintained a certain scrappy, nuanced quality—acknowledging both shared values and stark inequalities among global youth—the Long Boom articulated a frictionless vision of globalization that simultaneously appeared borderless yet served Western corporate interests, and aligned with what Powers describes as a future of “unfettered corporate possibility and consumer freedom” enabled by interdependence, digitization, and lowered trade barriers. The teen laborer making hamburgers for 18 cents an hour had disappeared from view; in her place stood the figure of the entrepreneurial global citizen, untethered from geography and history. 

It’s telling that in his “Global Teenager” companion essay “Selling the World,” Kevin Kelly explicitly references Francis Fukuyama’s just-published “End of History” thesis, which declared the game-over dominance of Western liberal capitalism. The timing is remarkable—this celebratory narrative of capitalism’s victory dovetailed perfectly with the rise of GBN’s commercial imperatives. If history had indeed “ended” and all the global teens were destined to grow up as participants in Western consumer capitalism, then GBN’s corporate clients could rest assured of expanding markets. Yet Baker’s on-the-ground reporting seems almost prescient in contradicting Fukuyama’s optimism, arguably anticipating instead two phrases coined by the British philosopher Mark Fisher. The first, “Capitalist Realism,” is defined in his 2009 book by the same name as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”²¹ The second is “the slow cancellation of the future,”²² describing how capitalism flattens time and drains the future of its potential. Fisher notes that “the slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations,” which echoes several of Baker’s observations in the report. When he reflects on teenagers in various places, his generalizations suggest that young people worldwide have been shaped by “very large, pervasive forces, the economy, the media, the new militancy in politics and religion, to be cautious, dutiful and industrious. Life appears too short and too precarious to allow any foolishness or many mistakes,” and elsewhere, “These days it’s a tight game for big stakes, professionalism is the word, and all your stats go into the computer.” Through on-the-ground witnessing of grinding inequality, the exploitation of the Global South, and simmering conflicts from Tiananmen to the Palestinian Intifada, Baker glimpsed the polycrisis that would define the 2010s and 2020s. His report reads now as an early warning of the exact crises Fukuyama’s totalizing claim obscured.

What’s additionally striking about the Global Teenager hypothesis is the distance it creates between observer and observed. Stewart Brand had originally formed the Whole Earth Catalog for and with his fellow youth generation—now he and the editors of WER were regarding the teenagers of 1989 as exotic animals, or anthropological specimens to be studied.²³ What might this project have accomplished if it had attempted the radical leap of viewing these global youth not as “others” to be put under the microscope, but as “their people,” their peers, their friends, their little siblings or children, an extended community across borders? What alternative trajectories might have emerged from this moment of interest in global youth had it not been so thoroughly co-opted by commercial imperatives? Or colored by the easy assumption that technology would be the ultimate liberating force, a portal to some imaginary place beyond politics? One particularly haunting paragraph in Baker’s report describes a Palestinian boy who, “in a household full of the manic energy of those under siege, cared about nothing except his computer. It was his hero, what he would be doing in 10 years, what made his generation special.” Unable to attend school due to Israeli restrictions, “he seemed to be burrowing ever deeper into cyberspace as the only feasible refuge from the horrors all around him.” In 1989, this anecdote so perfectly fits the worldview of Brand, the WELL, GBN, and the Silicon Valley they helped shape—that technology might provide escape when political solutions fail. And in 2025, this willful, convenient, and profitable delusion is simply obscene in retrospect. 

The Global Teenager offers a perfect lens to examine a pivotal moment: when the generation that once questioned capitalism’s foundations became its most sophisticated enablers. If in the 1960s Stewart Brand founded a publication dreaming of a whole earth, by the late ’80s the dream had narrowed to a globalized one—a shift from universal community to universal market. Just as the Whole Earth Catalog was once the “operating manual for spaceship Earth,” by the late 1980s, GBN had become the operating manual for “The Globalized Future”—a future increasingly defined less by its possibilities for human flourishing than by its opportunities for corporate expansion.

What was lost in this transformation was not just a certain countercultural idealism but a plurality of possible futures. As the Berlin Wall crumbled and the Cold War binary collapsed, a brief window opened when multiple futures seemed possible. The Global Teenager project inadvertently documents this moment of potential divergence before the singular vision of neoliberal globalization solidified into the only imaginable path forward. The messy contradictions, the local specificities, the unresolved conflicts—all were gradually flattened in the journey from Baker’s nuanced and compassionate, if imperfect, observations, to GBN’s streamlined scenario work, and finally to the erroneous mono-future of “The Long Boom.” The teenagers Baker encountered from Moscow to Mumbai represented alternate futures that were foreclosed as the very tools designed to imagine multiple scenarios paradoxically narrowed toward a single narrative—be it triumphalist or resigned.