CW: 
and generally horrifying information about the state of affairs. Some choice quotes:
People always say that every generation thinks the younger generation is getting weird, and is crazier. But I believe that what I am witnessing of the gen alphas is just completely different from the type of rebellion of my generation (gen z).
People will keep saying “we’ve always complained about the newest generation,” but society is fundamentally different now and it’s not just this generation. My parents are victims too, slaves to their devices. It seems like only some Gen X and Millennials are at least technologically aware enough to see what’s going on.
The screen and media addiction of generation alpha is actually an emergency that requires government intervention. Its literally like a black mirror episode what this stuff is doing to kids.
They are that incapable of looking at stationary with print on it. If it doesn’t have a back-light and it doesn’t move, it will not keep their attention.
I teach teens. I approach it with the perspective that apps are supposed to be addictive. And have a bit of empathy for the kids, it’s not their fault they’re addicted.
Also we were saying four years ago that repeated COVID infections would mess kids up cognitively. Kids today are on their 8th infection now?
Kids during the reopening periods were getting 3 discrete re-infections per month and the suburbanites in my office were laughing it off.
I think the best period of human history to have lived in is long gone, and it’s all going to collapse within our lifetimes. But at least I have some treats I guess.
I’m shocked at the level of “well fuck 'em” modern society demonstrates towards children. What level of sociopath does one need to be to not care about our kids.
US horseshoe -
Me (I work therefore I am … a GOD!) 🧲 Kids (fuck ‘em) Seniors (fuck ‘em)Also this concept made sense in my head, but spray this shit away if not lol
Nah it’s a work of text art. Really.
It’s always been that way with kids. Victorians weren’t enploying orphans as chimney sweeps or machine operators out of the kindness of their heart.
But at least I have some treats I guess.
the treats are 3x smaller, cost 3x more, and 4x shittier quality
my treat: I am going to be sad when I can no longer access an 18th century or earlier king’s ransom in spices for a mostly bearable cost at walmart. we’re getting there slowly but surely. as another example, olive oil costs so much now 😑
I’ve heard from a lot of teachers saying the same thing. The newer cohorts of students are performing far lower academically and have a lot of behavioral issues.
It’s really hard to parse out what’s actually happening and what’s sensationalism.
My material analysis pet theory is that we’re increasingly seeing that dual incomes are necessary to survive. The state does not provide access to childcare. Overworked parents don’t have the time to spend and socialize their children. Then kids spend way too much of their developmental years on devices. To me, the devices alone wouldn’t be so bad if economic conditions made it easier to actually raise children.
Regardless of what people say about new tech every generation, what we’re seeing now is an order of magnitude higher than what we’ve seen before. The devices and the apps on them are engineered to keep people on them as long as possible. China has recognized this and attempted to limit screen time for young people. Anyone who says that these devices are having no effect on how we process information is unserious.
To me, the devices alone wouldn’t be so bad if economic conditions made it easier to actually raise children.
Also I think it wouldn’t be so bad if online entertainment wasn’t a capitalist hellscape with a predatory SEO economy and zero oversight.
It’s really hard to parse out what’s actually happening and what’s sensationalism.
In my following of online communities like that /r/teachers one and a few others it doesn’t take long before you notice some very concerning patterns. Overall they’re all saying the same things about attention span and whatnot.
Another big issue I’m seeing pop up on those communities is illiteracy. Kids in middle school that can barely write their own names, for example.
The fact that video has replaced text as the default medium for conveying information is not helping to say the least.
In my following of online communities like that /r/teachers one and a few others it doesn’t take long before you notice some very concerning patterns. Overall they’re all saying the same things about attention span and whatnot.
Just keep in mind that what you see in a subreddit for teachers is only representative of teachers who willingly use reddit lol
Tbf I willingly use Reddit as much as I hate that about myself, so the equivalent of me who works as a teacher probably also does
It makes me wonder where they’re teaching. I’ll sometimes visit family in Upstate New York where they live in a nicer part of the city they’re in. The teens I’ve met from my younger relatives seem no different than we were at their age. They read novels, gossip, play sports, etc. The only real difference is how much more they speak in internet lingo and are on their phones but even then it isn’t anything unbearable. They also happen to go to school in the nicer suburbs.
The city schools are notorious for all the issues mentioned in subreddits like the teachers one. I have another relative who teaches in those schools and the stories she tells fall directly in line with the stories I’ve seen on Reddit.
Which would go well with Thallo’s theory about double incomes. Wealthier families in upstate NY can afford to only have one parent working.
I’m not a fan of slop and the whole attention economy / arms race social media has created, but fwiw I think it’s less important to make sure people are literate and more important to ensure our society does not require literacy. Iirc over half of Americans are already considered at least partially illiterate, and they’re not really accommodated for adequately.
Also, language and mediums do shift over time and preferring video over text isn’t an inherently bad thing imo.
I truly believe that the current onslaught on young people’s attention is a weird manifestation of how utterly alone we all are. I don’t want to be all woo-woo about it but I do think the “attention economy” and “brainrot” exists purely to fill the psychic wound we collectively share. I think the wound is uniquely bad for young people in that they don’t even know it’s a wound because it’s always been there. It’s normal to them because they have never known otherwise, which is a damn shame. It’s not their fault to be frank.
The computer in our pockets aren’t inherently bad. I think without meaningful meatspace interactions, connections, and real social networks of love and community things like “brain rot” can grow and fester. I think really do think “brainrot” is a symptom of a larger rot in all of lives.
meat in the meet space
Exactly. Meet other meat and make that meat mean something to you. Better yet, create systems that allow for meat to meet. Meat must meet.
meet to meat communication
I think it’s bad, but the stuff listed in the thread you linked isn’t all that wild. A twelve year old girl said a really hurtful thing about someone’s appearance? Lmao tune in at seven for some real news.
If I could ban smartphones for kids below a certain age I would (really, I would much rather ban social media/algorithms/never-ending feeds, but I digress) but as a millenial, kids my age were watching hours of TV after school, staying up literally all night playing video games, and consuming absolutely horrifying content on the internet way younger than they should have been.
None of this is new. It’s just getting faster and more intense. I also worked with a lot of Gen Alpha last summer in a context mostly devoid of phones and internet access, and while COVID has been fucking rough on them, many are quite bright and empathetic, and if you can get them outside and touching grass for an extended period of time, it’s a whole different ball game. I don’t give a shit that every other sentence is skibidi or rizz or fanum taxes.
The growing gender divide is almost a bigger concern IMO, but that extends up through people in their early twenties at the least. Most young straight cis people are nowhere near ready to be in any kind of long term relationship with each other. Again, probably not a new thing, but damn is it dire out there.
Little edit: the young twenty-somethings I am with are currently watching The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. I can promise you with all my heart that the toxicity in that show is astronomical and engenders a kind of brainrot that is far, far darker than any effect a skibidi toilet might have on a young, impressionable mind.
We keep all the never ending social media feeds and pocket super computers but all internet traffic speeds are rolled back to 1995 dial-up.
The good old days where it took 4 minutes to download a single .jpeg and my parents would have to kick me offline if they were expecting an important phone call
The fuckin live birth in the latest season made my fiancé and I so uncomfortable, not even examine the trash bag ideology of the show, or how hard they try to make SLC look like a real place with shot after shot of new development and shopping malls
As always I’m going to preface this with my opinion that generational labels often incorrectly stereotype people based on vibes rather than facts, and that some of the coolest people you will meet are Gen Z, including many of the comrades here.
So I mean this in the loosest way possible, in that it’s probably just me imagining things, but I have noticed a general uptick in Gen Z being pit against other generations lately.
My conspiracy brainworms are wondering if this manufactured as a distraction from real problems. Millennials are cringe, Gen Alpha are cringe, so Gen Z becomes more isolated and self-contained.
They tried to make Millennials hate Gen Z after the election too, with the claims that Gen Z are all fash and voted for Trump.
There has just been a weird obsession with generational warfare that I haven’t seen since the “avocado toast, why aren’t Millennials moving out of home at 18?” days.
Oh yeah, big time 100%.
I do think, though, that kids growing up with a mobile device in their face with little to no regulation is not doing them any favours. Horrible attention spans, unable to focus, impatient, and so on.
I didn’t post this with the intention of shitting on Gen Alpha or stoking generational warfare. Moreso just to point out how short-form video platforms in particular and screen time are frying people’s brains.
Hell I even witnessed it with my own kid. For a while there we were not doing a very good job at regulating how much screen time she was getting. She would have frequent meltdowns over the dumbest and most pointless shit, couldn’t regulate her emotions, couldn’t focus, complained about being bored whenever she wasn’t in front of a screen. As soon as we implemented some very strict daily screen time limits all of those problems went away like magic. But a lot of parents don’t regulate screen time very well at all and it’s setting these poor kids up to fail.
Regulating screen time is definitely a good idea. I agree. I wish more parents were that caring with their kids.
I think it’s similar to the video game panic people had in the 90s, but worse because it’s even more predatory and unregulated than YouTube, insta, etc. I think it affects all generations, not just Gen Alpha, everyone is hooked because it’s the social norm now. Although, like you say, we have to make sure to teach kids to engage with technology in a mindful way so they can recognise when capitalism is trying to hook them to the slop machine.
The problem, like always, is everything revolving around capitalist consumer culture rather than what is actually good for people.
From the Gen Z side I can a little bit understand this abstract feeling that all the previous generations are the ones responsible for why everything fucking sucks and the world is ending.
I’m at the oldest end of Gen Z so I got to grow up in the “If we take these steps, we can prevent climate change and save the world!” time, unable to influence anything and watching as no one did anything.
Obviously blaming generations is not a good analysis, but it does feel like “everyone else ruined this for me.” Boomers obviously being the most to blame, but if we’re talking large scale we needed the 2008 recession to become a violent revolution and Millenials were the ones that were revolution age at the time. Millenials could’ve also done a lot in the “assassinating fossil fuel and healthcare executives” sphere, something Gen Z has started to pick up but it’s a bit too little too late, would’ve been a lot more effective 15-20 years ago, when I was still in elementary school and being told to recycle.
Is this good, sound, material analysis? No obviously it’s not. But it’s very easy to fall into those broad feelings if you’re aware that shit’s fucked and the planet’s on fire but aren’t deeply invested into why.
Good comment. I remember feeling the same at your age.
I can only speak as someone who is on the younger side of millennial, so I can relate to the climate change stuff. I was single digits when 9/11 happened. It was hard growing up and wanting to fix things, wanting someone to do something but not knowing what to do and having absolutely no guidance. Not knowing the sheer extent of evil we were dealing with. So much propaganda and gaslighting going on, telling us we were weak and stupid and to just work harder and stop complaining. We tried, but we didn’t know what we were up against.
Keep in mind that until Bernie started being popular in 2016, the idea of anything remotely left of Obama was laughable. It wasn’t even in the realm of possibility. That’s how fucked the political landscape was. It wasn’t until I discovered the dirtbag left that I realised communism was even an option.
But that shouldn’t be an excuse. I hate how we failed the younger generations just like the Boomers failed us (and even then, there were Boomers that tried to fix things too, in their own hippie way).
The thing that pissed me off the most growing up is when I would ask Boomers why the fuck they weren’t doing anything about climate change, they would either say “that’s a hundred years away stop worrying” or “the generation after yours will fix it, they’ll be super smart”.
Fuck that, we shouldn’t be asking young people to fix our mistakes.
In my experience (as a teacher) even the kids are aware of how bad this is for them. The term “brainrot” is a kind of “joking, but not really” piece of jargon that they use among themselves. The see their peers’ and their own attention span being ruined by social media, and their peers falling into the fash pipeline. I think it’s hard for a lot of them to muster much in the way of concern, though, because they also see that they’re living in the last stages of a decaying empire and collapsing environment. It’s hard to motivate someone to care about the future and their ability to succeed in it when it’s apparent that the best case scenario for most of them is life as a peasant in a techo-feudal dystopia. If they don’t die in the coming water wars, they’re going to live as indentured servants to Peter Thiel; they have no chance of owning a home, affording a family, or achieving anything beyond living to die another day under the bootheel of the most ruthless capitalism the world has seen in over a century. Why not just watch TikTok all day?
God damn dude that sounds equally bleak and accurate. These poor fuckin kids.
As soon as we could measure attention, capitalism decided to sell it to the lowest bidder. It really shouldn’t surprise anybody that kids growing up in an ever less-functional, less-rational world might get some weird ideas about how to survive within it. Things are changing and deteriorating at an ever faster pace, of course this is going to have an influence on people, and especially on younger people and kids.
The longitudinal data doesn’t really suggest significant impacts (beyond mental health diagnosis, which is also contributed to by diagnostic creep and greater accessibility and acceptability)
Social media and the algorithm are awful but at least we’re not still covering everything in leaded gasoline residue
at least we’re not still covering everything in leaded gasoline residue
No, instead we’re covering everything in PFAS residue and filling every nook and cranny in the environment and our bodies with microplastics. And still refusing to clean up the lead where it continues to be found in the drinking water of poor and especially black communities.
We did that before too.
Although the US is going pretty hard on trying to undo what weak protections already existed, and flint didn’t have clean water for at least a decade (to name the most notable example). remarkable country to have such a sustained decline in life expectancy
I’m gen z when I was 12, smartphones were kinda shit and most people in my country couldn’t afford it, so everything was on desktops. I think that worked as a good control.
Social media only became widespread by 2016 and most had phones by then, everyone was on Facebook, Instagram and all that. I don’t think it was too damaging. But then again, short form content wasn’t much of a thing.
I think short form video content is especially damaging, I have many times fallen for it myself with tiktok and shorts. You end up watching hundreds of videos on very different topics, it’s a time suck. There needs to be tight controls on these for everyone, adults and minors, max 30 minutes a day or something.
Not many are watching Andrew Tate’s long form videos, they watch short 1 minute clips.
I think that worked as a good control.
100%. Computers used to require work and effort to understand them, and of course didn’t fit in your pocket.
Frankly I find myself taking the anarchist position on this, is it really “brainrot” or is it simply the inevitable collapse of a stifling system of indoctrination and systematic miseduction?
Sure functional literacy has decreased and tech has become addicting FOR SOME, but is this the fault of covid or kids, or the fault of a system that has been slowly starved and malformed for decades finally entering its death rattles
The fact the complaints are coming from reddit, a place filled to bursting with the ideological fanatics of the liberal order tells me this development is necessary, the kids are revolting and I believe the crux of the situation is more THIS than covid brain damage
and I believe the crux of the situation is more THIS than covid brain damage
yeah but it’s way easier to “make 'em excited” when there are fewer other distractions around, also when the fundamental medium of the information (print and text) is something they’re familiar with
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
never believe anything written on
. it’s a creative writing forum for the weirdest assholes on the planetA Reddit link was detected in your post. Here are links to the same location on alternative frontends that protect your privacy.
