Welcome to the world, “Technology Beta.” New child infants in 2025 are members of a model new technology, however already, some are calling for a brand new identify.
“Hmm can we workshop the identify please?” requested Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a post on Bluesky. “They’re going to be bullied by the skibidi children.”
Naming generations is among the largest scale public branding jobs there may be. Social scientists, writers, and public intellectuals can coin nicknames, however they don’t at all times final, and it takes culture-wide buy-in for these phrases to realize well-liked acceptance.
For somebody like Ocasio-Cortez, who was born in 1989, renaming a technology isn’t any large deal. The 35-year-old New York Democrat and her age cohort have at varied instances been nicknamed “Generation Y,” “Echo Boomers,” and ‘Generation 9/11” earlier than the time period “Millennials,” coined by authors William Strauss and Neil Howe in their 1991 book Generations, took off in 2013 and stuck. Different generations have had alternate nicknames too, like Technology X, which has been referred to as the “MTV Technology,” and Technology Z, which has been referred to as the “iGeneration” and “Homeland Technology.”
Why Technology Beta?
Named for the second letter of the Greek alphabet, the time period Technology Beta was coined by McCrindle, an Australian social analysis, demographics and knowledge analytics company whose founder Mark McCrindle additionally got here up with the identify Generation Alpha for individuals born between 2010 and 2024. The company is asking for standardized Greek alphabet naming constructions for future generations that will proceed with Technology Gamma starting in 2040, and Technology Delta in 2055.
“Different approaches to naming generations, utilizing phrases comparable to ‘millennials,’ usually outline a technology round a single occasion and have imprecise delivery ranges, resulting in subjective evaluation,” McCrindle writes in a blog post. “A sociological strategy to generational evaluation, utilizing set delivery years and non-descriptive labels, permits for extra goal evaluation and particular person identification creation.”
Such a scientific strategy, although, doesn’t keep in mind the likelihood that Greek letters tackle different meanings, as “beta” being a pejorative time period amongst at this time’s youth, or that future occasions change into generation-defining turning factors that entrepreneurs, teachers, journalists, and others latch onto to outline an age cohort. At this time’s newborns could be often known as “Technology Beta” for all times, however different nicknames will inevitably bubble up over the following 20 years, and there’s at all times an opportunity that considered one of them may stick.