I have a natural aversion to institutions that have run their course and entered into obsolescence. I felt it in churches and libraries I was dragged to as a child (though I loved reading), and I feel that way about post offices and polling places as an adult. It doesn’t work anymore, and I’m not a good enough sport to play along with the ruse. 

In his latest Financial Times column, Douglas Coupland wonders how the hanging chad still hangs around. An excerpt:

The most interesting lie I see in millennial bashing is that millennials aren’t political and that they don’t vote. I hear this, and inside my head I hear a loud screeching brake noise in my head and say, WTF?

Millennials are the most politically informed cohort ever. They know their rights. They know about power imbalances. They know about environmental degradation, they know about GMOs, Yellow 6, fuel rods, transgender politics and the near complete lobbyocracy of US politics. You can’t pull the wool over the eyes of most millennials. I think it’s because millennial political expression began with the stillborn Occupy events that they get branded as apathetic but the issue with millennials isn’t a perceived apathy on their part. I think it’s in large part the fact that they look at the mechanics of voting and compare it to the universe they inhabit and they collectively say, You have to be kidding: every four years I go into a plywood booth and use a graphite-based stylus to “fill in a box” corresponding to my decision for who’s best for the job? What century are we in? How is this still even happening?

And they have a point. The way voting works now is like taking everyone’s computers and devices away and telling them they have to instead use envelopes and stamps to communicate with each other. In the era of Airbnb, Netflix and Skype we have a political selection ritual straight out of the 19th century.•