We are the guinea pig generation.
In 2005, three male tech entrepreneurs, recently enriched from their work on Elon Musk’s PayPal, created a video-sharing website. They planned it as an online dating service and offered women $100 via Craigslist to send and upload content. A lack of responses meant this scheme failed but from its ashes emerged YouTube.
Ten months after the URL went live, www.youtube.com averaged 8 million hits a day. Its success came with a new Internet phenomenon: the “viral video”. One year later and Google bought the site for $1.65 billion in stock. YouTube’s new slogan, “Broadcast Yourself”, heralded an era of rapid expansion from 2007 to 2013.
At the time of YouTube’s creation, I was four. It colonised the Internet while I was in primary school. Hence, the “Yourself” being broadcast was not from my generation but a little older and predominantly White American. Viral sensations like Bo Burnham, Jenna Marbles and Shane Dawson found audiences in the millions before a second Millennial wave arrived in the 2010s, spearheaded by Felix Kjellberg (PewDiePie).
Still, my peers and I used the site. The brand-new iPod Touch I received for my 11th birthday gave me unrestricted access to YouTube, alongside 700 million annual users. In the ten years since that number has quadrupled.
YouTube, at that age, was a godsend. I had at my fingertips all the (Western) world’s content: movie clips, news channels, comedy skits, music videos—a television station I controlled. Where millennia of children before me confronted boredom, I had a conveyor belt of entertainment.
However, until becoming an adult, I never questioned where that conveyor belt came from or what controlled it. The complex mechanisms tech wizards created to maximise my screentime—and thus exposure to advertising—went over my head. I was simply a contented consumer of content.
The Internet raised Gen Z
It’s a story many Gen Zers know. There was what I learnt in school, from my peers and parents, and what I watched on YouTube or read in its comments section. Feminism, gender, race, and sexuality—rarely discussed where I came from and certainly not with children—came to me through the algorithm. Did it give me the best information? No, I received the information, calculated from my behaviour, that was most entertaining to me.
Why is this important? As parents throughout history have struggled to come to terms with, they are not the sole creators of their children. Rather, our development is tied to the technology and means of expression available during our childhoods.
Just as colour TV raised Boomers, the cassette-tape Gen X and text messaging Millennials, the Internet raised Gen Z. That was not the same Internet Millennials faced around the year 2000. I grew up with the Internet in my pocket, instant streaming and the social media boom: an era of rapid change in how humans communicate, understand, and above all, pass the time.
I mention YouTube because, for myself, it was the primary website I used growing up. YouTube embodied an Internet culture within which YouTubers were, to me, the first movers of art. However, sites like Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and even the late Vine were all staples of a Gen Z education.
I mentioned it also because, in the last 10 years, YouTube has sparked controversy due to its infamous “rabbit holes”, and because this is a feminist essay.
“Feminists” were presented as laughable, nonsensical or irrational
The meaning of that word has changed since I was 12.
As a boy, I found it in video titles on my YouTube recommended list, that never-ending conveyor belt of entertainment: “Feminist Cringe Comp” or “Feminist Gets Destroyed”. The thumbnail was probably an image of a dyed-hair, glasses-wearing woman resembling Chanty Binx. Over that there might be an all-caps font, bright colours or “deep-fried” effects—anything to grab the attention of my preteen self as I watched an innocuous vlogger.
These recommended videos appeared at a crucial time in my development. As puberty kicked in, I arrived at high school to find boys and girls at separate lunch tables. Gender became painfully visible through a turned back, a push and a shove telling me I was a boy, and this is what boys do and who they are. Thankfully, I quite liked being a boy—I can’t pretend it’s the same story for everyone.
Thus, for my peers and I, isolated from “the girls” by unspoken norms and without much guidance from above, much of our information came from the Internet that raised us. The “secret world of women” could be unlocked in a YouTube video a male Millennial had created: one facetious member of the generation before us who had found an anonymous persona to hide behind and a means of getting their voice across to groups of impressionable boys. It was as easy as a share button, a Messenger chat or a smartphone at the school lunch table.
I never questioned at the time if our female classmates across the canteen watched the same videos. How that might’ve affected their psyche, I’m not sure; it must be frightening to understand one’s gender as a laughingstock. Or perhaps our fellow Gen Zers descended a different rabbit hole. A 2018 article in Convergence examined the impact of heteronormative, middle-class beauty vloggers in the 2010s, concluding their role as “an effective illustration of how the YouTube algorithm causes the polarization of identity markers such as gender” and the reproduction of “hegemonic” femininity.
The same article highlighted “the sovereignty of the algorithm”, and this was as true for girls watching makeup tutorials as us boys watching memes. You’d start on a well-known male YouTuber, a “comedian” or gamer; then, in your recommended, you’d find a meme compilation. The humour would get “edgier” (more shocking) while sticking within YouTube guidelines. Then you’d arrive at one of the videos above, mocking frustrated members of marginalised groups, and then perhaps an alt-lite, “dark web” commentator like Ben Shapiro.
This is the start of the hypothesised “alt-right pipeline”. Researchers still disagree on its reality: a 2019 study found the YouTube algorithm was more likely to promote “mainstream” channels than fringe ones. Another article in Wired Magazine suggests “radicalisation on YouTube stems from the same factors that persuade people to change their minds in real life”—fear, self-loathing, uncertainty and not passive obedience to a source code. However, as I realise now, fringe channels and genuine hate speech were not problems for boys my age, the ones I knew at school.
The issue lies at the midway point: those anti-feminist memes. By presenting young boys with their first image of a “feminist” as laughable, nonsensical or irrational, we adopted a wider attitude. Place this within a school environment that encouraged us to compete for intellectual superiority and the admiration of our peers. Everyone at that lunch table wanted to be “clued in”; if you didn’t know feminism was “cringey”, you risked the group’s scorn. Even if you didn’t watch the videos, you got the message through cultural osmosis.
I don’t know any of my schoolmates who’ve grown up to be avid xenophobes, misogynists or racists. However, I do know many (including myself) who have struggled to escape the lazy assumptions those videos created; assumptions that hurt non-white, non-male, non-straight, differently abled or trans people; anyone that fits outside the hegemonies of Western society.
One might call it an issue of maturity. However, we cannot understate first impressions and peer pressure. If when a child is growing up their first images of non-familial women are crude caricatures or they learn to associate the word “autism” with exaggerated foolishness, it’s going to have long-term cognitive effects.
The male podcaster has replaced the meme lord
10 years on from the golden age of YouTube, we reach the point when older members of Gen Z are becoming young men. After a childhood of skimming videos like the above and developing a sense of humour from them tied to their innate manhood, men my age are once again looking for guidance. In their daily lives, the male podcaster has replaced the meme lord. Questions of life purpose, career and dating advice have replaced teenage questions of what is and isn’t funny.
Hence the rise in the late-2010s of Internet personalities like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. I think they appeal because they offer some standard wisdom in an entertaining, widely accessible format while playing to the assumptions Internet culture made young men familiar with. I doubt anyone, feminist or not, would disagree with Peterson’s “make friends with people who want the best for you”.
Tate, on the other hand, is much harder to excuse for any decent advice he gives and weighs much stronger into the kind of predatorial crap you’d hear from that one boy in the changing room. We know him now as a charged sex trafficker and self-identified misogynist—yet for his “realness”, men are willing to make excuses.
I agree with Peterson when he says there is a “crisis of masculinity” in our generation. Yet I disagree it is the fault of social justice. If men cannot value themselves beyond the dictator in a relationship, the “just-speaking-my-minder” (without considering speech as a two-way event), or the superficial tradition-bearer, how can they value themselves as members of society? The so-called “great men of history” may have taken the credit, but how many millions of silent backs did they stand on to get there? The notion of masculinity young men are falling for—an individualistic power trip—will not bring them or anyone around them happiness.
We cannot allow the same mistakes to be made for the new digital natives
None of the above is an excuse for my and my peers’ behaviour, not then and not now. A little critical thinking should be enough to realise that all people are, in fact, people and worthy of that consideration. It should be enough to realise that emotions are powerful things, but not the mark of a deficiency in intellect and that perhaps rationality or “the right way to live” isn’t as monopolistic as profit-seeking self-help gurus claim.
The above is a problem that started with education. I was and remain lucky to have a very strong, ardently feminist woman in my life, my mother, and a positive, non-gender conforming role model in my father. Both encouraged me to be emotionally sensitive and to question, as well as to be strong and to find my own way. I am indebted to them for it. Above all, they taught me that love for your fellow being is more important than any power dynamic—than money, than fear, than spite.
Still, there remain moments in my development that they could not fill, and, in their place, the Internet and my peers did. I also cannot say the same lessons were taught or taken up as willingly among my male friends.
As we find ourselves amid a second wave of social media—Instagram, TikTok and podcasts—we cannot allow the same mistakes to be made for the new “digital natives”, Gen Alpha. Furthermore, simple fixes like parental blocks on browsing or placing blame on creators ignore the point.
The issues we deal with are systemic and require education: the market demand for beauty vloggers to carry forward a decades-old fashion industry and hierarchy of beauty; violence and trauma humour that generations of young boys experienced, and which now take only one older commentator to bring forward; a collective lack of empathy and self-awareness.
We need to be having difficult conversations with young boys and girls because, in the age of the world at your fingertips, there will never be enough to protect them. I still remember being flashed snuff videos on a screen at school even though I could not access the sites at home. Snuff videos that we laughed at, were grossed out by but never talked about subsequently. No older person ever asked me what I watched online (though I’m grateful it was mostly innocent).
Furthermore, as we in Gen Z express ourselves to the next generation, we share a responsibility just as Millennials did in the 2010s. We, who are more than aware of the power of social media, must ensure the future is one of love and acceptance. Men my age must reject the learned “cringe” and be proud to call themselves feminists, as I am.
It’s uncertain where Internet culture is heading, let alone humanity. Yet it remains up to us to find the better world we seek: a better world for all, not a sniggering few.
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Written by Rab Thorne
Illustrated by Francesca Mariama
