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Recounting a maxim a friend and I came up with on the subway home:
Whatever you could call "Gen Z" is cleaved in two: were you first online on forums or were you first online on social media? If you are the former, you are something else, not quite millennial, attuned to it, but somewhere in between - a category not worth considering? If you were first online on social media? Call it a "generation" (though we should resist generational characterization in general!)
Sep 20, 2024
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Seriously tho, for those born in '96... are we millenials or gen z?
asking for a friend.
Feb 13, 2025
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this is all super off the cuff but i think the "rise" of snark is also possibly partially due to:
-covid isolation depriving all of us of a normal level of gossip-producing social interaction and opportunities for petty gossip, so some people sought it out on the internet, see also the rise of podcasts like normal gossip
-as the digital panopticon has increased (eg., tiktoks people make of strangers?? in public??), our own reflexive self-critique and awareness has increased. being in online forums where people have some level of anonymity allows them to feel a level of escape from this and succumb to the behaviors that they now fear doing in public spaces. AND we cant ever really escape the judgments of the panopticon (plenty of which are aesthetic or normative judgments rather than moral ones) so people in these anonymous spaces still turn to the same judgments
-last thought is even more underbaked than the others but i think there's something to the younger generations being the first ones who grew up with influencers as part of the culture since adolescence
May 9, 2024
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the social internet (and rapid, inescapable commercialization thereof) makes it so that you are what you consume, not what you do, not where you go, not who you spend your time with. before if you bought the clothes or the gear without doing it or without being in community, you were a poser. if you monetized or commercialized that interest and put those incentives over expression and connection, you were a sellout. but that doesn’t exist anymore — democratization and anti-gatekeeping as both ideas and ends of an algorithm to maximize surface area for consumption have made it so that there isn’t a distinct authority on what you can attach to your identity or how you express yourself
but if the extent of our agency in a democratized landscape is to only to consume more instead of producing or connecting, or to produce only to commodify ourselves for money or internet points, then maybe it’s a different kind of “being influenced by social trends rather than authentic interest” than going to a skate park, or an open mic, or a restaurant, or whatever because we heard about it somewhere and wanted to check it out, and de-centering the internet from what we see on it and how we engage with it is a way to make that healthier or more generative for ourselves, and can create beauty without immediately thinking about how to fit into a box along lines drawn by advertisers
Jan 15, 2025
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so much to talk about, the sunglasses, the scarf, the fresh baguette and coffee, the always lovely cafe setting. I think this is the most swag ever captured on camera I aspire to be at this level
Feb 11, 2024
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alright hear me out: carbonation and coffee with a squeeze of orange shouldn’t work, but it does. Been making them daily and i feel a lot better in the morning each time i do
Mar 7, 2024
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the greatest love song of the 21st century??? wait…. They don’t love you like I love you
Feb 25, 2024