On September 11, the progressive Australian senator Fatima Payman approached the parliamentary podium in Canberra. “To the sigmas of Australia,” she began, directing her address to an “oft-forgotten segment of our society” — the youngest cohorts of Australian citizens, Gen Z and Gen Alpha — “I say that this goofy-ahh government have been capping.”
Drawing from the online language of memes and slang better known as “brainrot,” Payman stumbled through a scathing and often cringe-worthy attack on the country’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, calling his administration a party of “yappaholics” and disparagingly saying he sometimes seems like “the CEO of Ohio.” In between discomfiting brainrot-isms, Payman encouraged young people to consider the country’s housing issues and Albanese’s plans to ban social media for teens under a still-to-be-determined age. “Though some of you cannot yet vote,” she concluded, “I hope when you do, it will be in a more GOATED Australia, for a government with more aura.”
I first encountered Payman’s speech toward the end of a middle-school journalism class I teach every Thursday in New York City. Five 11-year-olds gathered around my desk with a school-assigned Microsoft laptop, talking excitedly about showing me something funny. As we watched, each student jokingly yelped in embarrassment as Payman talked of “gyatts and services” and “catching a dub with the bros on Fort.”
Brainrot, they explained to me, was more a series of ironic jokes than a language, reliant on nonsense. My students made it clear that Payman, well-intentioned though she may have been, was putting absurdism where it didn’t belong — and she wasn’t speaking to the needs of Gen Alpha like she thought she was.
Back on the first day of my class, I had each student draw the front page of a newspaper and write a short fictional news story. As I sifted through the pile of assignments at the end of the day, I came across a turtle periodical, a newspaper all about the fictional “Turtletown”; a “Skibidi Toilet” chronicle, an ode to the popular YouTube series that features a man’s head emerging from a dilapidated toilet; and a magazine entitled “Brainrot News Channel.”
On the cover of this last one, the student had included headlines, complete with matching illustrations, about Charli XCX’s Brat and a fight between 100 Kung Fu Pandas and 1,000 Skibidi Toilets. Inside, though, the student had written a short story about a man slogging through his accounting job: “Another [soulless] screw in the ever-growing machine of capitalism.” Here was an 11-year-old with a vocabulary far superior to mine as a teenager and a curious, if not worrying, sense of doom. Perhaps, to the younger generation, Brainrot isn’t just ironic jokes but a way of dealing with the intensity of our world.
In the US 2022 midterms, less than half of 18- to 24-year-olds — my Gen Z peers — were registered to vote, a statistic I believe is reflective not of apathy but of an atrophying trust in the merits of American democracy. Although members of Gen Alpha are currently under the age of 15, they will become one of the most vital voting cohorts over the next decade. My question, as I survey various members of Gen Alpha, is this: Are they inheriting Gen Z’s political pessimism? And, if they are, what could that mean for the future?
Born between 2010 and 2024, Gen Alpha is largely made up of children of millennials and, often, the younger siblings of Gen Z'ers. Globally, more than 2.8 million Gen Alphas are born every week, and by 2025, it is expected they will number more than 2 billion — which would make them the “largest generation in the history of the world,” according to a study done by McCrindle Research. Gen Alpha is also a distinctly digital generation, living alongside smartphones and tablets, video games, driverless trains, and autonomous cars.
“Digital [defines their] point of connection,” says Mark McCrindle, who is credited with inventing the term “Generation Alpha.” He underscores the empowering nature of this group's access to diversity of thought, via the internet, while emphasizing how global awareness can stir feelings of defeatism. “They have access to some leverage and influence beyond their years, and they're a bit more aware of what's happening around the world because of the technology,” he explains, “[but] they consume a lot of content that is dire in its outlook, from climate change discussions to geopolitics to just economic uncertainty.”
Each of the students I speak to, named pseudonymously to protect their privacy, expresses worry over the current political climate in the United States and, ultimately, the possibility of compromise. “People are seeing in black and white, mostly, not really contributing to each other,” Chris, who is 13, tells me. “Lately, a lot of people in my school have been kind of negative about [politics], mostly because they think that if we continue the way we're handling situations now that we'll never be able to fully run this country properly.”
Gen Alpha is growing up in an era of unprecedented politics: the rise of Trumpism and the dissolution of faith in facts; mounting fears over the urgent and irreversible effects of climate change; and the extreme isolation of the Covid lockdowns, during which most of Gen Alpha was in elementary school. They have watched many members of their older peer group, Gen Z, protest the war in Gaza, grapple with ongoing mis- and disinformation, and fight for a voice in discussions about issues like gun control and abortion.
Hannah, who is 11, says that, although I am asking about her views, she doesn't feel like politicians do the same during their appearances, like when they go on television. “It's mostly just big politicians debating about stuff and being, like, 'What's gonna happen for the future generations, huh?' Well, what you don't know, you're not gonna know because you're not asking them,” she tells me, before sharing a horrific and unfortunately all-too-common story about a shooting threat at her school a few weeks ago. “There was a picture posted on social media of a gun, and then my school — plus a bunch of other schools — were pointed with the middle finger next to it, and it said, ‘Stay on your toes,’” she recalls.
Hannah continues, “Everyone was leaving. It was crazy chaos. Parents were getting worked up. Kids were crying, calling their parents. [I] think they should be focusing more on helping kids out of this and, like, coming to an agreement about gun control so that… people will not be scared.”
“Everyone's really scared about that because… that could happen to us,” says 13-year-old Maya, referencing a similar story. “I feel like everybody's really scared about what either [of the presidential candidates] would do about gun control…. I feel like… our safety [is] being ignored.” Regarding the election, Maya adds, “It keeps getting worse and worse, and I feel like we need to fix it right now.”
Phoebe, who is 12, says the recent presidential debate “didn’t seem like it was fitting the needs of our generation as much as the needs of generations before us…. They should reach into the future a little more and think about [how] what they're doing now might affect us in the future.”
In speaking with each of the kids, it becomes clear to me that those who use social media frequently feel more pessimistic than those who do not. I don't think this means we should necessarily over-regulate online access, but that we should offer young people structured and supported avenues to grapple with complex societal issues and build critical-thinking skills.
According to Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, the Newhouse director of the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, today’s young people have a greater knowledge of and desire to play a larger role in government than past generations. She attributes this, in part, to the way the pandemic fundamentally altered how youth interact with policy.
“What the pandemic has done to these younger generations, being the people that were usually in school at the time and therefore very, very impacted by the pandemic, is that they actually saw kind of a good, bad, and ugly of the local offices,” Kawashima-Ginsberg explains. “There's a keen awareness among young people, more sophistication around examining government's accountability to the people.”
To combat a loss of faith in government among younger generations, Kawashima-Ginsberg believes, localizing global issues is crucial. “People need to support these young people to show them what they can be doing to connect with an issue and actually be taking action,” she says. “If it's climate change, there are probably ways in which supportive adults can show, ‘Sure, you can't save the polar bears from a melting iceberg, but here's something sort of related to climate change.’"
Kawashima-Ginsberg adds, "[We need to create] local ecosystems where libraries, election offices, the schools, and the community mentors are involved in thinking about how young people can be welcomed and supported in civic life.”
It makes sense that the generation growing up right now is dealing with a new kind of pessimism. We need to find a way to effectively engage their precarious hopefulness. That is how we create a United States with more aura.
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