Social Media
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Keep your travelgrams to yourself
Nope! It’s just too soon. Pardon the overt social shame, but if you’re posting happy, bubbly, #blessed travel photos to Facebook, Insta and the rest of social, you can be sure that everyone scrolling on the other end is either rolling their eyes or searching for the “unfollow” button. Or “snooze.” Or “Jesus Christ, go away.” We get it. You just want to go back to normal. We all do. But, in the name of common purpose — and pure human decency — please stop. No one (zero people, total) wants to see you in a t-shirt and Ray-Bans rejoicing…
How young people are using wit and dry humor to overcome toxic work culture
When I saw TikTok influencer Rod’s recent video about his morning routine, I breathed a shuddering sigh of dread and relief. With Shania Twain’s “I Feel Like A Woman” playing in the background, Rod gets ready for his day. “Let’s go girls,” he lip-syncs to the song, motioning toward two personalities set to accompany him on his remote office job: “Anxiety about getting fired” and “Addiction to coffee.” “Just one of many guests I have throughout the work day,” the caption reads. Rod looks up at his minions, already exhausted. “Come on,” he says with a resigned sigh.
I had…
How I Got Radicalized
For years, I was an anonymous vigilante against their extreme hate
Welcome to How I Got Radicalized, a series from GEN that tells the story of a cultural moment that made you drastically rethink how society works.
I remember being on autopilot as I went through my process of wiping my identity on Tor, an open-source browser dedicated to maintaining internet anonymity. I exited the browser, double-checking that everything related to it was closed and triple-checking before finally turning off my VPN. I then slammed my laptop shut and sunk back into my bed, exhausted.
It was a weird liminal time of night. If I went to bed right away, I…
Vaccine scolding is the perfect end to a pandemic year full of personal judgments
No matter how you’ve conducted yourself over the past year, someone has decided that the way you’re handling the pandemic is wrong. This judgment, anger, and confusion stem from the fact that nobody at any level of government is providing us with specific guidelines for conducting our behavior, so in absence of any real leadership, we’re all becoming snitches.
We got mad at runners for running, even while masked! Then we got mad at people for going to parks, posting pictures of people who wanted to relax on a patch of grass after being confined to their homes. We were…
We’re misinterpreting the other side on purpose because it makes arguing easier
Last August, the actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus of Veep and Seinfeld fame, hosted the fourth night of the Democratic National Convention. She performed her hosting duties perfectly competently, but also, I felt, tried to balance being edgy and family-friendly in a way that was at times cringe-inducingly awkward. As I watched online, I tweeted, “Let’s be honest, this is the low point of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s career.”
A Twitter user who commented often on my posts responded, “You sound a lot like Christopher Hitchens.” They were alluding, of course, to the late essayist’s misogynistic Vanity Fair essay arguing that women aren’t funny.
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Don’t worry, it will be your turn soon
Social media has been an accelerant to the demise of so many once-foundational aspects of our collective culture, from democracy to journalism to basic human decency, but I have to say, as a 45-year-old human in the month of March in the year of 2021, it has been an absolute blast lately. It won’t stay this way for long; it might not be like this next week. But I can’t stop scrolling right now.
The reason? Vaccine FOMO. After a year of pain and isolation and stress and loss, there is clear reason to believe dawn is coming, that it’s…
The roasting of earnest Millennials reflects an ancient, intergenerational war of feelings
There’s a moment from college that I remember with mortifying clarity. It was 2002, and I was sitting in a classroom, midway through a course on memoir writing as a form of social justice. This entailed a lot of personal disclosures from my classmates, all of which I found brilliant. Racism, sexism, homophobia; the war, which had recently started and which we vowed to end; the worst president in American history, George W. Bush. These issues concerned us, we cared about them, and more importantly, we were right about them every single time we opened our mouths.
“It’s amazing,” I…
It’s time to rethink how much power these platforms have given to lawmakers and government agencies
If you feel like our leaders are too online, you are not alone. Some of the biggest, most important government announcements these days are released via social media; lawmakers who’ve trolled their way to power can’t stop spreading disinformation online even after assuming office; and the art of the politician clapback tends to dominate the headlines above and beyond actual public policy. That’s without even talking about how the former president and his enablers incited an insurrection by steadily cultivating a cult of online disinformation.
Jennifer Grygiel, a social media expert and assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University, has…
You don’t have to be religious to see the value in temperance
I tell people I was raised “very Catholic,” by which I mean that my parents usually dragged me to mass once a week unless they were too tired or forgot or just didn’t feel like it. But whenever we didn’t go, they’d feel really guilty about it, which is the Catholic way. I had a first communion and cried when I had to drink the wine because it tasted gross, and I assumed my distaste for the wine — the blood of Christ — signaled my imminent eternal damnation. I am now what you’d call a “lapsed” Catholic (unless my…
Lauren Oyler on the Millennial long con of simply being alive
“People often say my generation values authenticity,” remarks the unnamed narrator of Lauren Oyler’s new novel, Fake Accounts. It’s the kind of statement that begs to be read wryly under most circumstances, including those of Oyler’s narrator — who, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president, has discovered her boyfriend’s clandestine double life as a popular alt-right conspiracy theorist on social media. Eventually, she becomes an online con artist of sorts, too.
Oyler doesn’t have her protagonist put a name to “my generation” until much later. But she doesn’t need to. Millennials — having been formed by…
