The Gen Z Shake and the Millennial Pause
Also, why Republican attacks on TikTok are really about the kids being weird
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Substack is becoming slightly more difficult to grow because of Elon Musk.
For those who hadn’t heard, Twitter’s CEO has started blocking, labeling, or demoting Substack links because Musk felt Substack was getting too competitive with Twitter. I could write a bunch more sentences about other ways that Musk is ruining Twitter, but honestly it would be like a meth addict complaining the blue meth isn’t blue enough anymore.
A little later in this newsletter, I’m going to get into why so many people want to ban TikTok for bizarrely divergent reasons, some of which are really about dissatisfaction with Gen Z, and also how people in Congress seem to be missing the major reason why we should ban it.
Apocalypse soon
I also just want to point out something that the media seems to have forgotten about since they rediscovered how fun it is to cover Donald J. Trump. And that is that the federal government has been statutorily out of money for a few months, and Janet Yellen has been paying the bills with black magic finance spells that will run out of ingredients this summer.
If the House doesn’t vote to raise the debt ceiling before then, the US government will be rolling down a steep ski slope towards “default,” and crashing through that barrier would make the 2008 financial crisis look like a moderately disappointing Christmas. And the House could literally just pass a debt ceiling increase right now — or even eliminate this dumb fake constraint that exists only to give Congress a doomsday device — but the GOP House majority is demanding “spending cuts,” but they haven’t actually demanded to cut anything, so instead they bash Joe Biden for “failing to negotiate” with demands that they haven’t made!
So, that sucks.
OK, now let’s unfairly generalize some large groups of people…
Do the Gen Z Shake
Millennials and Gen Z both started going after Baby Boomers a few years ago. Remember that? You may recall that the mainstream press discovered the “OK, Boomer” meme, and then a lot of Baby Boomers got mad about that.
The story wrapped up beautifully when an executive at AARP responded: “OK, millennials. But we're the people that actually have the money.”
It was a remarkably self-unaware comment because, well… yes, that’s why young people really dislike you? This would be like Ron DeSantis sneering, “OK, libs. But we’re the people actually trying to engineer a fascist white Christian ethno-state.”
After the last three US elections failed to go the way they liked, Boomers (and conservatives) have been hammering Gen Z with more than just memes. More on that a little later in this newsletter.
In the meantime, Gen Z and Millennials are starting to skirmish amongst themselves. The “optimistic” Millennial gen has turned disillusioned (for excellent reasons), and Gen Z is extremely online and feeling pandemic-cheated. They are ready to take it out on uncool people who are slightly older than they.
Oh, and where is Gen X in all this? You already know.
As a man approaching 50, with two teenagers living under my roof, it’s my responsibility to worry and complain about the younger generation. And yet, I can’t. Because I love Gen Z. I mean, f***ing LOVE them. Gen Z rules.
Gen Z — the Zoomers — could be more sour and doomsaying than even Gen X was. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Gen X watched our communities hollow from globalization and mass layoffs, experienced surging violent crime, and survived under the threat of nuclear war. In the 2020s, young people have housing shortages, normalized gun massacres in every state, loss of fundamental bodily rights, and a worsening climate crisis. The only thing that looks worse to them than the present is the future.
What links those societal and global problems across generations is that a handful of powerful older men seem committed to making them worse, and definitely not better. Gen Z: Gen X gets you.
While some older people have replaced mainstream media with dodgy Facebook groups, younger people don’t even have a concept of what mainstream media is. They’ll never read a daily newspaper or watch the nightly news (except maybe when they’re visiting their grandparents). They have no reason to know that the Washington Post and the Washington Examiner are not equals. CNN is just a channel deep within one of several apps on their smart TVs and nowhere on their phones.
Mainstream media has been the world’s reality construction device for a century; it’s now been mostly de-funded, and people under 30 don’t even see it.
While Millennials were the first generation to grow up with Internet-connected computers, Zoomers are the first to grow up fully and unceasingly connected to the Internet. And that’s actually an important distinction.
The ribbing between Millennials and Gen Z is actually fairly petty. They’re both facing the same economic despair and long-term existential crises. They both feel politically disempowered. They’re generally on the same page politically.
So instead they’re just fighting over how they use the internet.
Have you heard of the Millennial Pause? It’s a phenomenon that I didn’t even notice until teenagers started pointing it out. It’s not even particularly “millennial,” but just a tendency of anyone who didn’t fully form their attention span from TikTok.
When people who aren’t teenagers make a video, they tend to wait a second or two before they start talking. Which… feels like a normal thing to do? It gives the person watching the video a moment to establish context and understand who’s talking. To Gen Z, however, this is actually a relic of their ancient experience with older phones and cameras that didn’t start recording right away. Maybe millennials just don’t understand that their camera is rolling the millisecond they tap the record button!
But, honestly, getting a running start before you record — that’s new and weird! And it’s very much a phenomenon driven by TikTok, where one second of silence at the start of a video is death. TikTok trains the viewer’s thumb to be itchy. What is this? A person not talking or dancing or singing? Swipe.
And a pause at a start of a video doesn’t only look bad on TikTok. If you’re flipping through Instagram or Facebook before an election, your feed is likely full of candidates staring at you for a full second before they ask you to stop scrolling and donate $5. That pause actually does look quite strange. Autoplay videos just don’t mix well with a multimedia feed.
OK, so pausing is now bad. But you don’t want to just start talking. So the alternative to the Millennial Pause is the Gen Z Shake. This is when a video begins with a chaotic camera movement before stabilizing on a table or car dashboard. I’ve seen this repeatedly on TikTok. The creator could also pretend to be mid-task — pouring milk into their cereal, drying off their hands, finishing a french fry — when the video starts.
Unlike the Millennial Pause, the Gen Z Shake is intentional and performative. It’s a faux demonstration of authenticity. I was just in the middle of doing this thing, when I decided to make a video. I didn’t even have time to prepare! I really caught myself off guard. It’s the equivalent of a TV narrator looking up and saying, “Hi! I didn’t see you there.”
Some Zoomers are pushing a hypothesis that the Gen Z Shake is somehow a form of ironic rebellion against a system that forces them “to be perceived online.” But I think that too conveniently excuses the fact that this tactic exploits TikTok’s mechanics for more attention and views.
Much like Gen X tried very hard to appear indifferent, Gen Z is also manufacturing a perception that the creator just isn’t that into this. They’re not thirsty for your attention. They’re barely trying. That’s how good they are at this.
So while Gen Z has started attacking Millennials for their Buzzfeedy/Mashable 2000s/’10s internet euphoria (“That episode of Gossip Girl was everything”), Gen Z has been developing its own online tics that Gen Alpha can rip to shreds in a decade or so. I’ll be almost 60 and can’t wait to see it go down.
Why Republicans really want to ban TikTok (and the completely unrelated reason why they actually should)
To use the parlance of Gen Z, Gen Z doesn’t f*** with Republicans.
And why would they? As previously stated, young people today live in a world of great diversity and freedom, unshackled by the crushing gender expectations of the old patriarchy. But they also despair about a future clouded by debt, inaccessible housing prices, climate crisis, and career paths disrupted by technology.
Meanwhile, Republicans seem exclusively interested in reclaiming an idyllic past when dad was in charge, sex outside marriage was unacceptable, and you could go your whole day only interacting with people who were like you. Plus, the psychotic gun stuff.
And… that’s kind of it? Like, that’s the whole Republican agenda.
Petty skirmishes aside, Millennials are basically on the same page with Gen Z. They’re a decade or two out of childhood, and feeling very far behind where they expected to be. Economists told Gen X that we’d be the first generation in a century to do worse than our parents, economically. But the decline didn’t stop with us.
While Gen X seems to be doing the normal thing and becoming angrier and more afraid as we age, the prior generations are fiercely clinging to an outlook that says, “This is all messed up.”
Republicans see charts like this, the failed 2022 red wave, and the recent liberal landslide in Wisconsin as evidence that their message is not appealing to young people.
It’s one reason why “indoctrination” has become a buzzword on the right. By “indoctrination,” they mean schools teaching social studies and other subjects in a pluralistic way, that acknowledges that LGBTQ people exist among us, and that much of the American experience is shaped by racism. Across states with Republican governors and legislatures, we’re seeing a wave of censorship from kindergarten to college, with the entire history of slavery and civil rights autoclaved, universities fully remade, and books removed and banned from libraries. In Missouri, the legislature voted to defund libraries entirely to protect children from woke ideas.
Following that youth-powered liberal landslide win in a statewide Supreme Court election in Wisconsin two weeks ago, former governor Scott Walker made the media rounds. He urged Republicans to find an agenda that works for young people, that speaks to their specific hopes and fears about the future… just kidding! He said that Republicans needed to double down on censoring curricula and firing liberal educators.
But conservatives can’t just blame schools, because kids develop their ideas from more than teachers. They get their ideas from TikTok, too.
I mentioned earlier that people under 25 are so far removed from mass media that they can’t even identify which brands are credible. Which means their reality is created by others who are themselves millennials and Gen Z, not by people 30 years their senior in newsrooms and TV studios.
Now, TikTok is not a free and open platform. Its censoriousness has actually been key to its growth, as the algorithm has typically favored fun and inspiring content rather than the nasty and combative content that drives Facebook and Twitter. It has manifested itself in good ways (knowing you’re not going to regret opening it), bad ways (censoring real news, especially about China), and very weird ways (the invention of a new TikTok censorship-beating lexicon like “seggs” for sex and “unalived” for killed).
The average American adult who uses TikTok is spending about an hour a day using it. About half of teenagers say they access TikTok several times a day or “almost constantly.” This is actually considerably less than YouTube, but YouTube is an American-founded platform with transparently successful right-wing creators, while TikTok is Chinese and less transparent.
And this where we get into Republicans’ real panic about TikTok: dissatisfaction with the political and gender identities of younger people.
It’s not hard to find conservatives who are extremely concerned about young people being indoctrinated into wokeness or seduced by socialism. They believe that these attitudes don’t only weaken Republican electoral prospects, but also the nation as a whole. If a strong country is one with traditional, heterosexual families expressing faith in Judeo-Christian God, prepared to protect their communities with violence, then maybe China is subverting this with a hedonistic alternate vision for the youth.
Don’t buy it? Montana just banned TikTok last week. In debate, Montana legislators brought up exposure to ideas that put kids and families “at risk.” Meanwhile, the creator of a particularly homophobic media entity called “Libs of TikTok” has become a right-wing media star for exposing that trans people are on there. And even Russia has fined TikTok for “LGBT propaganda.”
The recent Congressional hearing on TikTok was as ill-informed and embarrassing as everyone expected. We heard a lot of “China is snooping on our data” from both parties, as if the phones themselves weren’t manufactured in China with Chinese-made components, loaded with apps that are constantly sending our locations to data centers all over the world. And if you use TikTok, you realize that the only real “data” that the company maintains are your tastes, interests, and biases.
And that gets to the actual national security risk that the Congressional hearings generally skipped. By knowing our tastes and biases, TikTok can absolutely become the world’s most effective propaganda machine. We’ve seen a preview of this. Russians exploited Americans’ weaknesses to manipulate people on Facebook in 2016 (even organizing rallies and stunts in the USA!). Well, TikTok now has individualized personality profiles on hundreds of millions of people around the world. This is more-or-less what Cambridge Analytica promised (but didn’t actually deliver) on Facebook in 2016.
So if the Chinese government really has controlling influence over TikTok, it’s potentially more powerful than a foreign entity owning all the cable TV systems or radio stations. And we know how powerful just one influential channel or radio network can be.
The risk is more than just a Chinese-controlled information feed trying to convince people that, say, Uighur people are happier than ever, or that the Taiwanese people are crying out for reunification with the mainland. Generations of creators have become economically dependent on TikTok by tuning their content to conform with TikTok’s standards and success factors. That’s a real problem with all platforms, be they programmed by algorithms or human publishers; it’s just that this one happens to have its roots and controlling interest in China, a geopolitical rival power.
(Meanwhile, a National Guardsman just leaked a shitload of state secrets, including information that could lead to the deaths of critical intel sources, on a Minecraft forum.)
As recently as 10 years ago, foreigners — not governments but actual people — couldn’t even own American TV and radio stations. The FCC has relaxed this rule because broadcast has become such a tiny part of our information environment. But TikTok, which counts about 40% of Americans as monthly users, is arguably more powerful than owning TV or radio. It’s been more than 30 years since any TV show grabbed 40% of households.
So banning TikTok for national security purposes, unless ByteDance sells it, actually seems like a topic worthy of honest discussion. TikTok didn’t even exist a few years ago, and it’s fully replaceable. Everything that TikTok does can be (or even has been) replicated by another platform. Communities will form and re-form elsewhere. Let a thousand platforms bloom and kill your algorithms.
This is a fabulous article/essay/newsletter/etc. I haven't read anything that was as celebratory for the strengths of each generation in awhile. That, plus thank you for helping piece together the issues around tt.