The Generation War (Jackpot January #14)

The generation war is a scam. I hope to make that clear by the end of this.

Today, I saw a post on Reddit (yikes!) about how Gen Z no longer approve of Trump overall. He went from +10% net approval in November 2024 to -38% last week, according to a CNN poll. As you can imagine, the comments were flooded with suggestions on who to blame. “Yes, Gen Z voted for him, but younger Gen Z barely know anything about politics. Millennials let it happen the first time. Ah, but Boomers supported him both times!” And so on and so forth.

Perhaps the most interesting point to me is the suggestion that Gen Z voted for Trump because of memes. Now I’d generally describe myself as a people person, I have very few misanthropic tendencies, but if that’s true then I think I’ll throw myself into the sea and transition to living as a mollusc.

I hate memes. I think they are evil, and I mean that with no trace of irony. Irony, in fact, is exactly the problem.

Concise communication is, to an extent, important. The problem with memes is that they are too compact to convey anything substantial. A meme will be funny because it will be relatable. It is a structure of feeling in that it references something that feels true without unpacking the truths behind it. Even deep-fried post-ironic memes, like the whole ‘E’ thing, are too devoid of context for meaning.

A meme is an in-joke writ large. There’s a pretty fundamental category error here. Memes are shared with no context, but in-jokes only make sense because of the specificity of their context. It is by nature exclusive, you have to be in the group to be in on the joke. If I tell you that in Year 8 there was a kid called Eddie and people used to say, “Steady, Eddie!” to annoy him, you would shrug and struggle to care. But to anyone in my class who reads that, there’s an instant recollection of the particular nature of that teasing. A meme, on the other hand, is a false democracy. We share funny references to dark feelings not as a way to acknowledge that we share them, but precisely so that we don’t have to talk about them.

The only relevant divide in politics is people who communicate in memes and people who don’t. Internet slang and online humour can be a strong connector for those who struggle to socialise in real life, but too many treat them as real life. If you spend more time sharing memes with friends than having conversations, then I’m sorry but that’s part of the problem.

As much as it is very funny to share a chuckle at an amusing moment or an iconic person, this chuckle will always be one-sided. No matter how compassionate your laughter seems, you can only ever be laughing at someone because they are not in the room to laugh with you. Screens turn life into performance and records can only ever represent reality, not capture its essence. There is no substitute for living something.

And this is what we forget when we talk about this issue solely in terms of generations. It would be a lie for me to deny that younger people do tend to skew more liberal, or that Gen Z is an especially polarised generation. Those things are true, but they are a byproduct of the Internet’s impact on our lives. It’s screens what have done it.

As I write this, there are people five years younger than me who voted Trump because they thought it was funny and didn’t really know or care about the consequences. There are also people thirty-five years older than me who voted Trump because they earnestly believed that there was a Deep State conspiracy to protect paedophiles and invaders which only Trump could put a stop to. There are people who thought that Haitians were eating cats and dogs, and people who thought it was funny that others thought Haitians were eating cats and dogs. This seems like a very clear-cut divide: gullible people believing something vs. the trolls who laugh at them.

But this is not a real divide. Here’s my version of horseshoe theory: these two groups are the same. Both of them are internet addicts, they’re just exposed to different memes. What you believe is no longer relevant. The only thing that matters is how you believe. If you are addicted to reductive algorithmic slop, you will not stop to think. You won’t remember how. That’s all there is, at the end of the day: those who think, and those who don’t.

Of course, the Internet does turn out leftists at an appreciable rate. I’d argue I’m one of them. But many of the leftists that stay online cease to believe in enacting the change their politics demand. Slowly, their ‘praxis’ becomes more and more about tone-policing or judging others for being less effective than them. And then liberals come and criticise those leftists for being ineffectual, ignoring the fact that they themselves are wasting their time telling off strangers online for a whole day instead of… I don’t know, volunteering or community-building or campaigning.

Brain rot isn’t funny. The fact that predatory social media apps are destroying your ability to think critically isn’t a joke. Is it unfortunate that we are all being preyed upon by billionaires who don’t even know we exist? Yes, of course it is. You know who has the power to stop this? Nobody. No one single person can do anything to stop it from happening. But you know who has the power to stop you as an individual from becoming prey? You do.

Don’t waste your time pretending that the Internet is real or that anything online matters. Remember that people are suffering, near and far and right where you stand. You are suffering too. Let’s stop telling our elders it’s all their fault. Let’s do something real.