“In a world where we witness a live-streamed genocide with its expanding impunity, where the race for world domination appears inexorable, Gen Z has responded by delivering real-time history lectures. Using varying degrees of sarcasm to counter the threat of regularly announced disasters such as climate change, economic inequality and social injustice, they convey personal values and openly display their fragility. All this, while being tugged by malicious political manipulation, the Zoomers are translating their narratives into fragmented online private idioms on one of the most popular apps ever.
The current state of affairs reveals a major shift within the domain of human perception and global justice: on the horizon stands the rise of an unsettling unknown dimension, whose physical laws alternate tensions between human rights violations and hololive-style streamers, ethnic cleansing and “I’m just a girl” vibes. The cute-girl-life is squirming around the bowels of genocide.
We are experiencing a gradual but rapid semiotic decay, the seemingly irreversible effects of which extend far beyond online niches. In an era defined by post-truth ideologies, where emotional impact and cognitive biases carry more weight than facts and reality, our pressing political and social questions often prove insufficient and futile in grasping the full scope of such a disfigured transformation. Nonetheless, such a topic eludes synthetic conclusions; its complexities are too vast to be captured in a single, sensational statement and the consequences it entails require long-term evaluation. Through this booklet, I aim to recall a path that has brought us here. Its written form serves to preserve an ephemeral fragment of digital historical memory – a seemingly innocuous transition that has led us down the path towards a perilous point of no return.”
