The age of Me is over. The age of Them has begun
- March 30, 2026
- Bryan Appleyard
- Themes: Technology
It is half a century since Tom Wolfe coined the phrase the 'Me Decade'. Yet Me, We and You no longer capture a world increasingly shaped by 'Them' – the systems and machines that now structure human life.
Almost exactly 50 years ago the cover of New York magazine announced the ‘Me Decade, the new alchemical dream’. This was a way of ‘changing one’s personality – remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self’. The 10,000-word article inside was by Tom Wolfe, the greatest and showiest journalist of the age. With dazzling virtuosity he announces the end of an American era of sacrifice, mutuality and nation-building – call it The We Decade – and its replacement by an age of ego, separation and, above all, self-building. His evidence is convincing.
‘If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!’, cried a very Me advertisement for hair dye. Preening movie stars and near sociopathic famous-for-being-famous types cruised the streets and restaurants of New York demanding, ‘Let’s talk about me!’
That is all over. Even Wolfe’s word ‘decade’ was wrong. The Me Decade lasted three decades; it expired on 9 January 2007 with the announcement of the first Apple iPhone. There are now eight billion so-called smartphones in the world – some people have more than one, so the number of users is around six billion. Three quarters of the world is connected by their mobiles. This could be described as the new ‘We’ years, but, in reality, neither ‘me’ nor ‘we’ are adequate to describe the age we now live in.
How can it be described? In 2017 author Will Storr suggested that it might be the age of You.
‘By 2014, 93 billion selfies were being taken’, he wrote, ‘every day on Android phones alone. Every third photograph taken by an eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old was of themselves. “You” had arrived.’
He had a point. Just before Apple announced its iPhone, Time magazine’s cover was dedicated to ‘You’. But, flattering as it may sound, this was not a calming idea, Universal connectivity put enormous pressure on every ‘You’.
‘To get along and get ahead in this new you-saturated social media arena’, argued Storr, ‘you had to be a better you than all the other yous that were suddenly surrounding you. You had to be more entertaining, more original, more beautiful, with more friends, have wittier lines and more righteous opinions, and you’d best be doing it looking stylish and interesting.’
Eight years later, the concept of You feels inadequate. The landscape of universal connectivity is dominated by a small group of American companies – Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft and Meta. These four have a market capitalisation of $11.6 trillion, about a third of the GDP of the United States. If anything, we should be talking about ‘They’.
Lately, however, They have stumbled. Money, as Bob Dylan sang, doesn’t talk, it swears. Meta has been hit by a $375m fine for the way their devices had lured the young into internet addiction leading to suicidal thoughts and depression. An appeal is in process, but was this a turning point? Julia Angwin in the New York Times thinks so: ‘It finally happened: Social media companies are starting to be held accountable for the toxicity of their algorithmic grip.’
On top of that, there is the equally toxic way that any under-10s can be lured into seeing the hardest of hard pornography. There are ways of stopping this – not giving young kids mobiles would be a good start – but a child with even minimal tech skills can breach these barriers.
None of this alters the fact that we have entered a new world far beyond We, Me, You and even They. The pronouns cannot capture the sheer novelty of universal connection.
‘Mobile phones’, concluded one study, ‘are no longer just communication tools; they have morphed into essential devices that influence our interactions, our productivity, and even our leisure activities.’
As long ago as 2003, before the launch of the iPhone, the Stanford social scientist BJ Fogg saw this coming. He saw that such devices could use ‘persuasive technology’ that would ‘suggest, encourage and reward’ rather like ‘gamblers pumping quarters into slot machines’.
He saw that our devices would become essential, not least because of the sheer range of seemingly benign devices now available on almost any mobile phone – they can diagnose or warn of the onset of illness, they can even detect earthquakes long before we can. In California in 2022, people received warning of a 5.1 magnitude quake, which, in the event, was minor but the point was that phones felt the threat before the humans did.
As if all of that wasn’t enough, AI has now arrived. Almost all new smartphones now include artificial intelligence. They know your voice and your face, they anticipate your typing, they have become ‘digital curators’. This, of course, is just the beginning. In time, AI will no longer recommend, it will demand. This has been anticipated in countless science-fiction movies, in the next decade it will become true.
Human identity is already being modified by technology. If you have ever sat in a crowded London tube carriage without looking at your mobile, you will often be alone. Even the elderly – those who were around when Tom Wolfe’s article appeared – will be peering at their screens. Much of who we are will flow into devices; and soon – using AI – much will flow into us.
The great James Lovelock once said the machines will take over, their machine minds will think 10,000 times faster than our own. Lovelock welcomed this – at least theoretically machines could solve global warming. The earth, not humans, comes first.
Meanwhile, the mobile phone will have moved us all into a new age – not We or Me, but perhaps Them, meaning the machines not the technocrats. Some will find this consoling; others – me included – will not. Human society is predicated on the idea that we are the intellectually dominant species, and from this springs our entire culture. Will AI write poetry? Of course it will. I once persuaded ChatGPT to write a Petrarchan sonnet about me. It did so in about five seconds. Was it good, i.e. moving? No, but that’s not the point. The point is, like it or not, Tom Wolfe’s Let’s Talk About Me! slogan must soon become, Let’s Talk About Them. But will we have anything to say? Them certainly will.