For more than a decade now, millennials like myself have effectively (and, in the case of our cohort’s richest member, Mark Zuckerberg, quite literally) run the internet. We were the earliest adopters of smartphones and we once consistently (not that I’d brag about it) led the generational pack in screen time. Over that period we’ve grown used to an internet whose form and culture was significantly shaped by and moulded to our preferences. The American internet of the 2010s was an often stupid and almost always embarrassing internet — but it was a millennial internet. There were no social networks on which we felt uncomfortable; no culture developments we didn’t engender; no image macros we didn’t understand.
This now seems to be changing. There was a time in my life when it was trivial to sign up to a new social network and pick up its patterns and mores on the fly. Now, I feel exhausted by the prospect.
Google Search and Amazon may have gotten worse in an absolute sense, but so too has my patience for finding stuff. Millennials are increasingly joined online and off by people who have never heard the sound of a modem handshake in their lives and never asked “a/s/l” in an AOL chat room. We’ve been used to wielding an innate understanding of the web’s capabilities and culture to our advantage; our knowledge of “how to search Google” and “how to use emoji” and “how to deploy the ‘Sarcastic Wonka’ meme,” which may once have given us an edge in multigenerational workplaces and social settings, is simply irrelevant to people younger than us.
According to the consumer research firm GWI, millennials’ screen time has been on a steady decline for years. Only 42 per cent of 30- to 49-year-olds say they’re online “almost constantly,” compared to 49 per cent of 18- to 29-year-olds. We’re no longer the earliest adopters, even: 18- to 29-year-olds are more likely to have used ChatGPT than 30- to 49-year-olds — though maybe only because we’re no longer being assigned homework.
These stats confirm what a brief survey of popular posts on TikTok or Instagram or X will already tell you: The heaviest users and most engaged American audience on the internet are no longer millennials but our successors in Generation Z. If the internet is no longer “fun” for millennials, it may simply be because it’s not our internet anymore. It belongs to zoomers now.
Zoomer internet is, at least on the surface, quite different than ours. The celebrities are unrecognisable (Kai Cenat???); the slang is impenetrable (gyatt???); the formats are new (GRWM???). Austerely tasteful overhead shots of meticulously arranged food posted on Instagram have been replaced with garishly lit minute-long videos of elaborate restaurant meals posted on TikTok. Glibly chatty blog posts about the news have been replaced with videos of recording sessions for podcasts. No wonder millennials feel so alienated — the language and terrain of the internet are now entirely foreign.
And yet zoomers — and the adolescents in Generation Alpha nipping at their generational heels — still seem to be having plenty of fun online. Even if I find it all inscrutable and a bit irritating, the creative expression and exuberant sociality that made the internet so “fun” to me a decade ago are booming among 20- somethings on TikTok, Instagram, Discord, Twitch and even X. “Skibidi Toilet,” “Fanum tax,” “the rizzler”: I won’t debase myself by pretending to know what these memes are, or what their appeal is, but I know that zoomers seem to love them. Or, at any rate, I can verify that they love using them to confuse and alienate middle-aged millennials like myself.
True, the fun I’m talking about is co-opted and exploited by a small handful of powerful and wealthy platform businesses. But platforms have sought to mediate and commodify our online activity since the beginning of the commercial web. Millennial memorials to the “fun” internet tend to rely on a rosy vision of the web of the 2000s and 2010s as a space of unmediated play and experimentation that doesn’t always stand up to scrutiny. Engagement-driven platforms have always cultivated influencers, abuse and misinformation. When you drill down, what mostly seems to have changed about the web over the last few years isn’t the structural dynamics but the cultural signifiers.
In other words, “enjunkification” has always been happening on the commercial web, whose largely advertising-based business model seems to obligate an ever-shifting race to the bottom. Perhaps what frustrated, alienated and ageing internet users like me are experiencing here is not only the fruits of an enjunkified internet but also the loss of the cognitive elasticity, sense of humour and copious amounts of free time necessary to navigate all that confusing junk nimbly and cheerfully.
Frankly, that should be freeing. Being extremely online, on an internet geared to your interests (in the same way that heroin is geared to your brain), is not exactly a quality conducive to personal happiness. Young people themselves will tell you they have, at best, an ambivalent relationship to their internet. The more alienating the mass internet is to me, the more likely I will put to good use the hours I previously spent messing around. Or, at least, the more likely it is I will find corners — group chats, message boards and elsewhere — geared to my specific interests rather than the general engagement bait that otherwise dominates.
And even if you’re jealous of zoomers and their Discord chats and TikTok memes, consider that the combined inevitability of enjunkification and cognitive decline means that their internet will die, too, and Generation Alpha will have its own era of inscrutable memes and alienating influencers. And then the zoomers can join millennials in feeling what boomers have felt for decades: annoyed and uncomfortable at the computer.
Max Read is a journalist, screenwriter and editor.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Max Read
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
