I hereby define Epartheid as, “the deliberate or systemic segregation of access, authority, and ownership within technological and digital domains, designed to preserve control for one group while extracting value from another.” It mirrors the structure of political apartheid but operates in the economic, cultural, and technological spheres.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the Baby Boomer cohort consolidated control over the capital, institutions, and governance of technological infrastructure while delegating its maintenance, adaptation, and reinvention to the Generation X subgroup of Millennials. This arrangement relied on GenX’s unique dual fluency in both analog and digital systems, a skillset forged during the transitional era from mechanical to networked computing.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Boomers often delegated all household and office tech problems to their GenX kids, because they either didn’t understand the systems or didn’t want to learn them. The flashing 12:00 on a VCR became shorthand for this gap; GenX was expected to fix it without question, often with no guidance, no authority, and no compensation.
Over time, that same dynamic scaled up from living rooms to the national infrastructure of technology. The “kids who could make the clock stop flashing” grew into the workers who could keep corporate networks alive, repair codebases, integrate analog and digital systems, and adapt legacy tools to new environments. But just like in the living room, they were still expected to perform without ownership or decision-making power. That’s the cultural seed of epartheid; the Boomer assumption that there will always be someone younger, cheaper, and more technically fluent to quietly keep everything working, while control and profits remain elsewhere.
Rather than cultivate successors with the same depth of competence, Boomers treated this labor pool as a permanent, self-replenishing resource. They conflated tool access with empowerment, assuming that providing newer devices or software would naturally result in ongoing operational mastery. In practice, they withheld decision-making power, long-term ownership, and capital investment from the very generation maintaining the systems that underpinned their prosperity.
Epartheid manifests through persistent gatekeeping: restricting entry into leadership roles, controlling credential pipelines, erecting paywalls around knowledge, and privileging extraction of labor over equitable participation in outcomes. The system depends on the false premise that the technical labor pool will always exist, ready to be directed but never allowed to direct.
Like all extractive systems, epartheid contains the seeds of its own collapse. As generational skill transfer falters and competence reservoirs deplete, critical infrastructure is left vulnerable. The very group that controlled access to opportunity often lacks the operational expertise to keep the machinery running, creating a silent but accelerating risk of systemic failure.