I jokingly referred to Ninajirachi’s I Love My Computer as “Gen-Z, terminally online post-covid internet existentialism,” but, as much as that sounds like an insult, it genuinely does feel incredibly accurate to what the album feels like to me.
Infohazard, from that album, is a track about 14-year-old Ninajirachi seeing a snuff film online and wondering how it changed her. It’s also a dance track with an insane beat-drop, and I can’t seem to see past the dichotomy. (It feels very Bo Burnham; like That Funny Feeling, or the entirety of INSIDE (I still need to watch that…!) Like, laugh until you can’t think about the consequences, drown yourself in smiling to try and block out the seeing something as horrific as a decapitation or the constant stream of bad news that seems to make up the majority of the modern Internet
Like, Gen Z is the first generation to be raised with the Internet from a young age, and the first generation be majorlly impacted by it (i.e., had it from birth), and now we have the older zoomers entering their twenties and thirties, and now we’re starting to see art and media by people who were online from day one, and we’re wondering “How has the Internet changed us? Should we be this connected?”
Gen Z had social media; we grew up with all eyes on us, if you were one of the billions of people that used Facebook, Instagram, etc, etc—we never had the “Luxury” of fallen forums and cringy screen names. Everything you do on social media will haunt you in the future in one way or another
We’re seeing the same phenomena happen with Gen Alpha who are growing up now; they’re kids that’ll soon become teenagers, and they’re growing up with the sycophancy machine, The Box That Always Says Yes, and does everything they want, and, honestly, I’m kinda scared. It’s like every issue that Gen Z had with the Internet just kinda turned up to 11, and I’m genuinely worried about how they are going to act, as they mature into adults.
Are we making things so streamlined that it's driving us to some kind of thought-extinction? I don't know.