Governments from Manila and Kathmandu to Mexico City and New York are supposedly being transformed by Zoomers. This year, the new generation reached political maturity, and so momentous changes are in store. Yet this is a surprisingly short-sighted conclusion. A little over 10 years ago, the Millennials were likewise heralded as vanguards of historical change. From Wall Street to Tahrir Square to Gezi Park, they were credited with wielding social media technology to remake the world in their idealistic image, only for their decade, the 2010s, to appear in hindsight like a Thermidorian graveyard of coopted uprisings and thwarted dreams.
There is no reason to believe that Zoomers will succeed where their predecessors failed. Their documented deficiencies, from ingrained asocial behaviour and threadbare attention spans to plummeting literacy and organisational skills, are only likely to lead to graver defeats and regressions.
Indeed, what we understand to be politics is itself an echo of experiences that were already dated half a century ago: the pattern once set by the Boomers in May 1968 and Woodstock, which similarly created the impression of mass rupture, exemplified politics as pure event and image. The tragedy of our own time is that we have known nothing else. The older notion of politics as process, what Max Weber called the “slow boring” of coalitions and institutions, is the only kind that’s ever produced durable change. It still exists, but as the preserve of incumbent blocs: car dealerships and pharmaceutical corporations, liberal NGOs or free market think tanks. It is not the path encouraged by the memetic spaces where the Zoomer mind lives.
The younger and more plugged-in you are, the farther away you are from that antiquated paradigm. Gen Z’s revolutionary energies, therefore, are likely to be diffused into spectacle and simulacra before any meaningful institutional expression can be found. The Zoomer mind may believe it’s engaged in political acts; it may even precipitate big in-person rallies, the overthrow of a leader, or the radicalisation of a party. But so long as politics is accessed primarily through screens, much like the Millennials, the new generation will find that their “movements” have about as much longevity and impact as a trend on X or TikTok.
And so, is there a way out of the pseudo-political (or “hyperpolitical”) doom loop handed down by the Boomers like an ancient curse? What exactly would a restoration of functional civil life look like, and could atomised Zoomers ever be entrusted with the task of bringing it about? The answers may have to be retrieved from one of the oldest sources of political thought, which should give a sense of just how radical a departure our contemporary status quo has been from the way political life has been conducted practically since the dawn of civilisation.
“The new generation will find that their ‘movements’ have about as much longevity and impact as a trend on X or TikTok.”
In Politics, Aristotle observed that man is a zoon politkon, a “political animal” or, in some translations, “social animal”. He continued: “Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.” For the better part of 2,000 years, the description was apt, capturing both the classical republican ideal of the virtuous citizen as naturally invested in the freedom of his polis, and the modern liberal notion of the rational individual who sought gain through trade and commerce. In both cases, human beings readily formed associations to pursue politics and common ends.
The history of modernity is littered with such associations, from the closed ranks of elites to the popular classes. There were colonial taverns and secret societies that fostered the age of revolution, and the business clubs, farmers’ granges, and trade unions that sustained class politics in the industrial era. The postwar years, too, were infused with a communitarian sheen through bowling leagues, wards, churches, and rotary clubs which now seem almost quaint and mythical to us.
Based in organic physical spaces, these organisations may have offered casual, fraternal atmospheres but were nonetheless governed by rules, codes, hierarchies. In other words, there was: regular proximity between real people in real places which built and preserved trust among political subjects; and an overall structure to give coherence to their individual and collective actions, filtering popular demands upward to the national level. One such group in the late 19th century, the Knights of Labor, was typical: as historian Robert H. Wiebe recounted in The Search for Order, they were “a collection of local associations designed partly to re-create and partly to protect a sense of community among its members”.
But then something happened in the late 20th century, or rather, a series of things combined to make that model of politics increasingly irrelevant. First, there was a change in the dominant values, from an emphasis on the group to the individual: there have always been Byrons and Shelleys and D’Annunzios, but as Tom Wolfe observed in the Seventies, even “the common man was… getting quite interested in this business of ‘realizing his potential as a human being’.”
Arising from conditions of post-scarcity where basic survival needs were met by mass affluence, what might be called “the Boomer conception of liberty” would confound Benjamin Constant’s dichotomy. It expressed neither the ancients’ love of political self-determination nor the moderns’ preoccupation with economic self-interest: instead, it elevated self-expression as the highest imperative. Second, was the saturation of electronic media — social media and AI booms have only been the latest expression of a shift that is at least as old as television.
The digital world gave an outsized sense of “involvement”. Spectacular world events, such as postcolonial liberation struggles, conspiratorial mythologies, culture war crusades, and apocalyptic climate activism took on the form of visceral “happenings” and felt more politically “real” and compelling than whatever was happening in one’s own neighbourhood or town square. It’s not that the underlying issues were unworthy of attention, but they engendered a low-stakes politics, more expressive than institutional. The flamboyant projection of identity mattered far more than the grinding work of coalition-building or structural material reform.
Consciousness was simultaneously individualised and globalised. As traditional mass spaces contracted, the ability to interact with one’s immediate, local institutions began to wither as well, emptying out those middle spheres between the self and society where Burke’s “little platoons” lived. Simple things like showing up to vote, attending meetings, and even just answering the phone have become dreadful, anxiety-inducing feats to many under thirties.
With their basic associative powers severely impaired, the young generations are now apparently so dependent on digital mediation that they can no longer engage in small talk. The famous “Gen Z stare” is an actual sociological symptom; they also have a deep-seated aversion to commitment (personal and institutional), and are thus prone to “ghosting” as a way of life. The same problem applies to their political affiliations. One need only to track the fate of such factions as the “vitalist Right” or the “post-Left” or “Effective Altruism” or “Postrationalism” to see how susceptible these are to debasement and dissipation.
What we see today, Zoomers swinging between cynical nihilism and performative extremism and aestheticism, is the logical endpoint of our decades-long abdication of the real-world focal points of politics. And what makes this turn particularly pernicious is the material context: the anti-politics of self-expression may have been decadent from the start, but at least it made some sense when the Boomers were young and the West still had industrial growth and an upwardly mobile middle class. Zoomer (and Millennial) living standards have been in dramatic decline relative to what their parents had: in other words, post-scarcity is over, inequality is resurgent, and the case for a return to a sober, practical materialist politics has never been more urgent.
But where past generations of displaced farmers or workers were able to wield their associative powers and form alliances as a natural response to economic hardship, the younger generations today have no such option. They are so radically fragmented in their habits and dispositions that they are unable to advance their own self-interest as a bloc, even as they deeper sink into immiseration.
Yet the problem is, of course, not reducible to individual attitudes, but to the whole informational architecture of 21st-century life. Even if Zoomers want to break out of the digital realm and “live in the moment”, any intervention has to be at a large enough scale to truly matter: not gradual shifts in personal consumer choices, but broad countermovements that aim to be every bit as sweeping as the original wave of social distortion wrought by the titans of Big Tech, some of whom make no secret of their disdain for the human race.
The return of politics in the Aristotelian sense can only come through dramatic measures: whether through winding down the attention economy as a viable profit-making model and/or through a moment of major cultural renewal in which face-to-face interactions become the sine qua non of being and belonging in a human society. Efforts like “Delete Day” and “Retro Tech” should only be the start; these have to be able to expand and mature into a comprehensive alternative vision of the good life beyond our present app-induced, anti-social stagnation. For there can be no real politics without sociability, which alone can revive the trust and coherence needed for any new generational regime to take hold. After all, how can one form coalitions with people who can’t coalesce? Fixing this is the prerequisite to everything else.
One strains to even imagine what the Zoomer equivalent to the old “smoke-filled rooms” could look like, or how a serious, nationwide Zoomer interest group could function without devolving into trash and brainrot. But until such a moment comes as young people are able to gather regularly in analogue spaces and feel the heat of each other’s breaths, there can be only the simulacrum of politics, not its substance.
