We Were Promised Flying Cars

How a Generation Trained to Spot Patterns Got Deregulation, Algorithms, and an Encore Nobody Asked For

It All Started With Raegan

I was born in 1982, the year Reagan’s economic reengineering of the country was just getting its legs under it. By the time I hit preschool, mid-decade, Reaganomics was in full stride and so was I, sitting criss-cross-applesauce on a brightly colored carpet square being taught to circle the shape that didn’t belong. Squares, triangles, squares, triangles. What comes next. Fill in the blank. Read between the lines.

Nobody told us what we were actually being trained for. Some would argue it was reading readiness. But, it wasn’t. It was pattern recognition, drilled into an entire cohort of us before we could tie our shoes, and for a chunk of us, that training got sharpened on a whetstone of childhood trauma until it became something closer to a weapon. We grew up in chaos, we learned to read a room before we learned to read a book. We learned to clock the shift in a voice, the tell before the blow, the lie before it fully leaves someone’s crooked mouth. Combine that with a curriculum obsessed with sequence and inference, and you get a generation of elder millennials who can see the shape of what’s coming from a mile off. So, excuse us when we don’t buy the bullshit being sold to America right now.

If so many of us were built to see patterns, how did we watch this one unfold in real time and still end up here? This is the question that swirls around in my head at night as I stare off into the darkness waiting for the Sandman to come get me. I think most of us ask this question, “How the fuck did we get here – to Trump 2.0. The Sequel.”

The Promise We Were Sold

When I was a kid, I envisioned something far more beautiful and futuristic than we give that vision credit for. How I saw it wasn’t a hazy nostalgia reel but as an actual blueprint I was drafting in my head before I was old enough to spell utopia.

There was a woman president. And not just any woman, a black woman.

Just a fact of the world, as unremarkable as a woman doctor or a woman pilot, because by the time I was grown, the idea that half the population couldn’t hold the highest office, would seem as archaic as rotary phones. There were flying cars, sure, that’s the easy shorthand everyone reaches for, but underneath the chrome and the vapor trails was a deeper conviction, that the same ingenuity building those machines would also be building justice, because in my wet-behind-the-ear’s logic, progress didn’t fork. It didn’t get to hand you a hovercar in one palm while it kept its other hand wrapped around someone’s throat. Technology and equity were supposed to be the same movement, two hands on the same wheel.

I pictured a world where discernment like mine, like ours, wouldn’t need to be a survival skill, it would just be a shared civic fluency. Everyone reading between the lines because everyone had access to the truth, not because half of us had to develop trauma-grade pattern recognition just to stay a step ahead of who was lying to us. I imagined classrooms that looked like the whole country, not segregated by zip code and property tax. I imagined healthcare that didn’t require payday loans, thoughts & prayers.

I imagined a planet we were actively healing instead of actively strip mining, because surely, surely, by the time I was an adult, we’d have collectively figured out that a livable atmosphere is not a fucking partisan issue. I grew up being told we had to be cautious of acid rain and that there was a giant hole in our atmosphere and we needed to heal. My ancestral roots come from Gaulish tribes in ancient France, who worshipped the rivers, tress and wildlife around them. I felt the responsibility to heal the earth down to the molecular level in my bones. I’ve always had a keen spiritual connection to the earth. I was the little girl who had butterflies land on her and bumble bees crawl up her arm to take naps on her chest.

I imagined smart people running things. Not smart like credentialed, smart like curious, humane, rigorous, the kind of smart that asks better questions instead of louder ones. I imagined a culture that rewarded that kind of mind instead of ridiculing it, that put competence and compassion in the driver’s seat instead of treating cruelty as some kind of strength.

That was the promise I understood as the American Dream when I was a child. Not a vague sense that things get better if you wait long enough. A specific, detailed, technicolor future that a whole generation of us built brick by brick in our heads while the adults around us told us the arc bends toward justice, like it was inevitable, like it didn’t require anyone to actually hold the damn thing and pull. It wasn’t vague optimism. It was a woman president and flying cars, sure, but underneath the Jetsons kitsch was a real conviction that technology and equality were supposed to arrive together. That progress was a package deal. I was the Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers and Bob Ross generation that looked forward to a smarter world, kinder world, more equal world. We were told the arc bent. But, nobody told us bending takes force, and that force can be applied in the wrong direction just as easily as the right one.

The Actual Sequence, Step by Step

Reaganomics wasn’t just tax policy. It was a permission to do bad shit structure. Deregulation, union busting, the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 — and that last one is the rusty hinge nobody talks about enough. The Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to present contrasting views on controversial issues. Kill it, and you clear the runway for talk radio to become a one-note grievance machine. The Rush Limbaugh’s and Joe Rogan’s don’t happen at scale without that repeal. It’s not sequential conjecture. Pattern one.

Then the Telecommunications Act of 1996 consolidated media ownership into fewer and fewer hands, and local news — the stuff that used to hold your city council accountable — gets hollowed out and replaced with nationally syndicated outrage. Fox News launched that same year. The information ecosystem stopped being local and plural and started being centralized and adversarial. Pattern two.

Citizens United in 2010 opens the floodgates on dark money, and now the sharpest tool in the box isn’t persuasion, it’s saturation. Whoever has the most capital gets the most airtime, and airtime is reality for people who don’t have the bandwidth to fact check everything screaming at them. Pattern three.

The Tea Party era is the field test. Birtherism is the prototype. It’s where the GOP discovers that a lie doesn’t need to be true, it needs to be repeated with enough conviction and enough repetition that pattern recognition itself gets hijacked. Goebbels and Hitler did the same thing. Remember, our brains are built to find the signal in the noise. Bad actors figured out you can manufacture false signal faster than the brain can debunk it. That is the exact vulnerability elder millennials were trained on, and it got turned against us. Pattern four.

Then social media arrives and does something Reagan-era propagandists could only have dreamed of. It personalizes the manipulation. The algorithm doesn’t just repeat the lie, it learns your specific triggers and feeds you the version engineered to bypass your discernment. Our generation’s superpower, that pattern recognition we were drilled on since preschool, becomes the very thing the algorithm reverse engineers. Pattern five.

But, 2016 isn’t the beginning. It’s the payoff of thirty years of engineering. And enough of us saw it coming. We said so. We were called alarmist, hysterical, dramatic, and stupid. The people with the sharpest discernment in the room got gaslit by the people who benefited from us staying quiet.

I still get that pushback today. Every single time I call out a pattern, someone shows up to tell me I’m overreacting, reading too much into it, seeing conspiracy where there’s just coincidence. Some just tell me I’m flat out wrong. Coincidence, six times in a row, with the same actors, the same money, the same playbook. That’s not coincidence, that’s choreography. The only difference now is that I don’t give a fuck. I’ve stopped modulating my voice to make the truth more palatable for people who were never going to believe it anyway. I just get louder. More annoying and speak matter-of-factly, digging my toes into the ground. Unshakeable. Because apparently loud is what gets heard in an ecosystem engineered to reward volume over accuracy, so fine, I’ll meet it there. I will not shrink myself into a tone that makes cowardice comfortable.

And I will outlast the lie. Lies require constant maintenance. They need new coats of paint, new scapegoats, new distractions, because the moment the machinery pauses to catch its breath, the truth underneath starts showing through the cracks. Discernment doesn’t get tired like that. Discernment just waits. And I got nothing but time and all kinds of snacks.

Confederate Flag toting traitors participating in an insurrection at the People’s capital on January 6th, 2024. Image Courtesy of: Rueters/ Stephanie Keith

January 6th should have been the reckoning. Instead it became a Rorschach test, and the same bad actors and their bullshit that built the lie in the first place got to work laundering an insurrection into our story. Project 2025 isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s a published document, and it is the blueprint for exactly what we’re watching happen now. Pattern six.

And then 2024 happens, and the same electorate that lived through pattern one through six delivered a fucking encore.

Where It Went Wrong

The uncomfortable truth is, it didn’t go wrong at one inflection point. It went wrong every single time a guardrail got quietly removed and nobody with power stopped to ask what it was actually there to prevent. This is why corporations have “personhood,” because nobody in power cared to look at the legitimacy of the clerical error that was made. I wrote about it here:

Every deregulation, every merger, every “both sides” segment, every dollar of dark money, every algorithm update chasing engagement over truth — those are all the same decision made over and over by people who profited from an electorate too exhausted, too distracted, or too gaslit to connect the damn dots.

And I refuse to give a pass to the individual bad motherfuckers who made each of those decisions knowingly. Reagan’s Republicans knew what killing the Fairness Doctrine would do. The DCCC strategists who keep starving progressive challengers to protect donor relationships know exactly what they’re doing. Zuckerberg knows what his algorithm optimizes for. Elon Musk knew exactly what he was doing when he threw up the Nazi salute during that Trump rally. Knowing and doing it anyway is not a policy disagreement, it’s a moral choice, and moral choices deserve moral judgment.

What Gets Us Back

I don’t think the fix is nostalgia. We’re not getting back to some 1996 baseline, because that baseline is what built this. The fix has to be structural and it has to be relentless.

Rebuild local news as a public good, not a profit center for whoever’s buying up the last independent paper in town. Break up the media consolidation that turned information into a monoculture. Get billionaires and dark money out of elections with something that actually has teeth, not a wishy-washy disclosure agreement. Regulate the algorithms the same way we’d regulate a toxin, because that is functionally what an engagement-optimized feed is to a discernment-trained brain. And stop mistaking civility for strategy. Not a damn person owes good faith to people who have shown you, repeatedly, exactly who they are.

The generation that was drilled on pattern recognition needs to stop doubting itself. We saw it. We called it. The problem was never our discernment. The problem was a system engineered by people who understood our training better than we understood our own conditioning, and then used it against us.

If a paid subscription isn’t in the cards right now, I completely get it — truly. But if you’ve ever read something here and thought “damn, she needs to keep doing this,” you can throw a few bucks in the tip jar over at Buy Me a Coffee.

No pressure. No guilt. Just me, asking nicely, with my hand out like a very earnest raccoon who writes controversial essays.

☕ buymeacoffee.com/eeviebateman

Thank you for being here. Seriously. You make this worth doing.

~Eevie