> The entire generation is less likely to express a non-consensus opinion than prior generations.
I think that's pretty arguable, and I'd want to see actual research. Certainly kids today are wildly more likely to embrace Stuff that Pisses Off their Elders than at any time since the 60's counterculture revolution. Think gender fluidity and pronoun choice, body modification, protest culture, rejection of career paths, embrace of the "neuro-atypical" as routine personality types... all that seems qualitatively but inarguably higher than when I was growing up 30-40 years ago.
This just happens to be the consensus opinion for their group. Kids have never cared about being accepted by people 20 years older than they are; kids have always cared about being accepted by their peers. Social cooling means that dissent from their peer group is harder.
> This just happens to be the consensus opinion for their group.
That becomes non-falsifiable then. Everyone everywhere from every period in history has been part of some in-group or another with a consistent scripture/canon/creed/whatever. No one (especially nerd king HN commenters like us) is truly an independent thinker in the way you're constructing.
The claim upthread was that modern kids were afraid of consensus-breaking because of technological surveillance. And that's clearly false because they hate the surveillors with a passion and are not quiet about those opinions.
I think you have the wrong end of the stick. The surveillance here isn't Palinitr; it's TikTok. And the kids love TikTok.
Same goes for pissing off their elders -- as the comment above said, it's about their peers, not society at large, who matter (as it is for all of us).
Once more, the claim to which I responded was that kids today are consensus-bound/risk-averse because of the threat of surveillance. Saying that they "love" the party doing the surveillance isn't responsive (if anything it argues against the point).
Once more: kids are assholes. More so now than they used to be. Threatening to surveil them, via TikTok or not, does nothing but piss them off.
The kids are fine, basically. The point is just wrong.