Tweet by @julesterpak | Are.na

There is a growing desire among Gen Z to reclaim their autonomy from their phones and remove themselves from what Shaz describes as a passive state of being. Last year, anti-tech activist and writer August Lamm predicted that abstention would be the next big thing. On X, she wrote: “I’m calling it right now, abstention is the new big thing; sobriet... See more

I think that part of people's problem is they're not in enough gangs. There's this great tension in life where you desperately want to belong to something else and you want to stand apart at the same time. You want to be special, but you want to be accepted, too.

It makes sense that norms are shifting in this direction as Gen Z’s influence spreads. Raised on social media, with access to once illicit bad-taste touchstones like Rocky Horror just a click away, they’ve largely replaced IRL subcultures with a constellation of aesthetics—cottagecore, dark academia, Y2K—to be performed, then discarded or demoted t... See more