...Or, on gen z slang...
Ideas that spread, win.
News that travels fast, event-izes.
Letting someone "cook" falls into no proper category.
It and its makeshift, linguistic compatriots fail to be labeled an event or pseudo-event, a concept or anti-concept, an eternality or ephemerality.
Language is as precious to digital generations as audiovisual techniques. When communication is everything, thoughts, expressed in language, are endowed with a unique power.
Gen Z has always understood this, if subliminally, to operate within the world. Impact, reach, image. These ideas were thrust upon them as ideals, metrics, and ways of being. They knew them to be dead-ends, each, but plodded on with them anyways because the world told them they were powerless.
Living within a "a claustrophobia of interiority," they made their way by spreading re-coded and viral adaptations of the little they had been traditionally taught in the midst of the large to which they had access.
They established a hierarchy, lexicon, and culture, through bits and bytes, to become one with the online world in a way that, to the outside, made them appear (read with a generous amount of mock indignation) untoward and primitive.
So, Gen Z.
Anxious? Certainly.
Lost? Quite possibly.
Cooked? I don't think so.
We're flirting with a technology and epochal change in the definition of intelligence, work, and existence. At its core, this innovation is built on language models and possibly always will be.
To intentionally incorporate a cohort that has cut their teeth on the same kinds of interaction this shift is built upon might be the proper handling needed.
Perhaps the most generous thing one generation can offer another is exactly this: the space to continue what they've started. Let them cook. They've already seasoned the language. The chance to go further and shape the very architectures of meaning, not merely as users, but as co-authors, is one this generation has proved they are able to do.
Every generation is, in some sense, a translation of the one before it.
Gen Z translated silence into signal, alienation into argot, and powerlessness into a vernacular so nimble it outpaced the institutions that tried to name it.
The models we now build, the ones that parse intent, generate language, and simulate understanding, are, at their best, mirrors of the communicative ingenuity that came before them.
And Gen Z's fingerprints are already on the glass. For better or worse.
// "a claustrophobia of interiority" ~ Bogna Konior