Life & Mortality Quote by William Gibson

“Generation X is dead” lands like a pronouncement from someone who understands how categories mutate once they hit mass market. Gibson isn’t mourning a cohort; he’s mocking the way culture industries flatten time into a demographic spreadsheet. “Dead” here means exhausted as a meaningful signal. A term born to name a specific post-boomer sensibility gets stretched until it becomes a sloppy synonym for “not old” or “not quite young,” which is to say: useless.

The second sentence is the knife twist. Thirteen to fifty-five is an absurd range, and Gibson knows it. The exaggeration exposes how generational labels are routinely weaponized as catch-alls for trends marketers don’t want to explain. When a label can describe teenagers and middle-aged adults with the same confidence, it’s no longer analysis; it’s a vibes-based sorting hat.

The subtext is classic Gibson: a warning about language under late capitalism. In cyberpunk terms, the label has been hacked. “Generation X” started as a cultural diagnostic, then got copied, pasted, and repurposed until the original referent vanished. That’s not just semantic drift; it’s a power move. If institutions can redefine your cohort at will, they can also redefine your anxieties, your spending habits, your politics.

Context matters: Gibson came up alongside the era he’s describing, watching underground attitudes get packaged, sold back, and finally diluted into a broad “youth market.” The punchline doubles as critique: when everything is “Gen X,” nothing is. The death is the moment a name becomes a net.