Why Do Online Zoomers Enjoy Discussing Aesthetics?

Our generation (the sociologists, bereft of creativity as always, designated us "Gen Z". Like Gen Y before us, we rebelled against such a derivative appellation but we did it the only way we knew how: by becoming even more self-referential and riffing on "Boomer" as well!) grew up on the internet (though not quite to the extent of Gen Alpha!) and we have developed a certain vocabulary around shared foundational texts: the viral YouTube video, the Vine, the TikTok, the Meme. Some of our sentences are so overcome with pop-culture references and slang and irony and other social contagions that they can render well-formed English entirely unintelligible to the uninitiated. It has been a fun cultural project/exclusive club to belong to for the last decade and a half, probably like how it felt to be a hippie or something. Now I'm looking forward to becoming the uncool older cousin to Gen Alpha, desperately attempting to stay relevant just as my Millennial forefathers once did, until I eventually give up and retreat into my hugbox of embarrassing nostalgia for pop culture that wasn't even that good but reminds me of my carefree childhood. I'm especially looking forward to when the media companies catch on to the fact that there is a huge market for this nostalgia and we get a 2000s version of Stranger Things where our characters tote conspicuous Nintendo DSes and iPod Nanos and Wars against Terrorism.

The vast majority of my more intimate friendships are with people around my age. I suspect this is true for most people. I also have plenty of opportunities to interact with the older generations and younger generations through family, work, church, hitting them with my bicycle, them hitting me with their car, etc. Zoomers tend to be pretty good at codeswitching (it majorly kills the vibe to have to stop to explain slang) but I sometimes get caught off guard by what exactly counts as a generational gap. You can step on landmine when you say something perfectly normal-sounding and get a "what's that?" in response. One little generational mismatch I've been encountering surprisingly frequently as of late is the entire meta-concept of aesthetics as an interest. Many Zoomers, especially the very online ones, are just obsessed with naming, cataloguing, and adopting aesthetics.

I come to you from my years behind enemy lines to share some amateur sociology trying to understand what's going on.

I: Aesthetic-core

What's the big deal, youth subcultures have been around forever, right? You've got the ancient frat houses like the collegia iuvenum in Rome, the status-moats like the Compagnie della Calza in Venice. You've got the hippies and the goths and the visigoths and the ostrogoths and the punks and the straight edge punks and the postpunks and the cryptopunks. Are zoomers not just doing the thing every generation does around their quarter-life-crisis where they try to make a case to the world that they are the most exceptional and important and traumatized generation to ever live?

Well, we are all of those things, but that's not what I'm saying. There is an important distinction between the contemporary youth cultures of yore and the zoomer fixation on the aesthetics of beforetimes and elsewhere. If you were there at Woodstock, you were there! Zoomers aren't anywhere (except on they phone), and yet we are everywhere. We are sorting through every subculture in any place at any time, some making a TikTok video about it, some writing a wiki article about it, some choosing one or two to make a core part of their personality. We do not engage with aesthetics as mere memes but as egregores, breathing manifestations of our collective will to transform the inauthentic into the genuine.

This is not entirely a revivalist movement like the Neoclassicists or Pre-Raphaelites. For most people it's nothing more than a hungry and curious survey of what was and what is. A very shallow, vibes-based form of anthropology. Just call it what it is: Aesthetics. The analyses you will find delivered through the TikTok rectangle are almost entirely sensory and emotional, and what historical context is packaged with the explanation is usually just meant to evoke yet more slippery vibes rather than invite concrete discussion or criticism.

I'm not having an easy time trying to explain this whole thing, it’s just a gestalt. Plenty of Zoomers (and the aesthetic-enthusiasts count among our ranks a fair share of younger Millennials aka Zillennials) don’t participate in it at all. But I claim the supermajority of those editing something like the aesthetics wiki (yes it’s real!) or those listed on the staff page of the hilariously official-sounding hobbyist project Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute were born in the late 90s or early 2000s.

I mean, just look at them!

As in many such cases, it appears this grassroots culture formed on Tumblr around the early 2010s. You can still see a large amount of dialogue on the subject happening there, both the description of observed aesthetics as well as mood boards representing "my aesthetic". While the discussion is still going strong, with whole blogs dedicated to compiling content around certain aesthetics, I see the nucleus of the discourse shifting away from the more zillennial Tumblr to true dyed-in-the-wool zoomer spaces like TikTok and Instagram. This is the part where I should show you evidence of my claim but I'm not really sure how to collect the data necessary to make a strong case that this is what is happening. So I guess it comes down to how much you trust my subjective assessment of the vibes.

But this is the sorta thing I'm talking about

Instagram pages will often operate like their ancestral Tumblr blogs, focusing on a single aesthetic. Instagram lacks the reposting feature that most other platforms have so there's tons of stealing artists' hard work going on here, sometimes without even a crumb of attribution in return. In the shortform video land of Reels and Shorts and TikToks—you can really consider them all one ultra-platform since anyone serious about getting eyeballs will simultaneously post to all three at the same time, usually without even removing the TikTok watermark—the tastes are more eclectic. Posters won't craft their identity around any single aesthetic, nor even really make the discussion of aesthetics their whole brand. At random they will simply veer into content based around some aesthetic movement, captioning a slideshow of AI-generated images of cottagecore tradwives with something like "wishing this was me rn". This intensive engagement with eras and fashions doesn't even seem to be an entirely conscious exercise. It's almost, I dunno, compulsive...

II: Why are we doing this to ourselves

So now that I have described this generational phenomenon as I've experienced it, if you are to take my word that it isn't the frantic imaginings of a deranged mind, which it may very well be, then it is natural to find yourself wondering: why is it like this?

The short answer is: the internet. It just has to be the case, right? Occam's razor. Our digital nativity is our most defining feature. I've also found there is a very strong correlation between being an aesthetic enthusiast and spending a lot of time in online spaces (hence the qualifier "Online" before "Zoomer" in the title).

Sure, it's the internet. But isn't that a bit of a semantic stopsign? Everyone uses the internet all day. What's so special about us that we get to claim some extra ownership over this thing that we didn't build and have yet to seriously take over? My generation is still mostly kids: highschoolers, college students, interns, career beginners. We don't have a significant share of wealth, political power, or esteem from the other generations. If the path walked by the millennials before us is any indication, we might never get those things. But what we do have—some of us, at least—is an extremely hearty bedrock internet monoculture reinforced through memes. The millennials have this too, to a lesser degree, and the latecomer older generations consume something one might deign to call "memes"—that is, images with text on them—but they are hardly knitting together some coherent cultural story out of it.

The zoomer project has been ongoing for about a decade now, when Dat Boi first rode his auspicious unicycle into a glorious new cultural age. We had grown up in the aughts and early 10s on the edgy and anarchic cultural products of the outcast dregs of polite millennialhood: rage comics, YouTube sketches, the ever-controversial memetic output of 4chan, and the first truly international mega-phenomena like Gangnam Style and the Harlem Shake, so called "viral videos". We—the Zoomers—were not true participants in these events, mere observers. But you must understand what extreme effects this cultural maelstrom had on us, our highly-plastic underdeveloped brains forced to enjoy listening to Friday entirely because it was bad. It seemed like a new viral dance/trend/food was being minted every month, and there was a real sense of togetherness. Or maybe it's just the rose-tint of nostalgia.

We were still dumb kids. We weren't smart enough to create anything, except maybe some unhinged flipnotes on our Nintendo DSi while we found our comedic sea legs. It wasn't until the mid-2010s, around the beginning of the Trump campaign, that we suddenly awoke en masse and flooded the meme scene with fresh, edgy, boundary shattering forms of humor. Seizing the memes of production, as it were. This was the heyday of Vine, when the most popular and cutting edge forms of entertainment were still largely accessible to so-called "normies" across age ranges and demographics. But this would soon come to end as we entered a massive phase-change, beginning with the redefinition what a "meme" even was.

What is a meme anyway

Richard Dawkins wrote a book called The Selfish Gene in 1976. It taught us a new way of thinking about genes: individual evolutionary units each competing for their own survival within an organism. This was a pretty incredible broadening of focus from the classical Darwinian consideration of the organism itself as the atomic unit of evolution. But he also happened to coin a funny little word to describe the analogous of cultural unit of evolution, which he called "meme", after the Greek mimema, meaning "thing imitated". How ideas are formed, spread, and evolve has become its own sub-branch of sociology called "memetics".

The limitless and instantaneous bandwidth of the internet is a warm soup of memetic agar to these cultural brainworms. We were calling funny pictures that spread like wildfire "memes" in 1993, long before the first zoomer zygote embedded in the first Gen X uterine wall. Since they were supposed to mirror the Dawkinsian meme and by extension the Dawkinsian gene, they had a few criteria:

1. They had broad appeal and reach ("reproducing")
2. They were observed changing iteratively ("evolving")

1 would make "meme" sort of synonymous with "viral" and 2 would make "meme" sort of synonymous with "template". This conception of a meme was thoroughly entrenched by the early 2010s, typified by the content on sites like icanhascheezburger and iFunny. Still, the Zoomer beast had not yet awoken. We were too busy playing Wii Sports and stuff.

I couldn't be everywhere at once, so I don't know where the next phase started. From my perspective, it was the "Dank Memes for Edgy Teens" groups on Facebook in 2015 where the vibe shift began. The Hegelian dialectic in the internet age seems to operate in roughly 4-year increments (suspiciously coinciding with the American presidential election). The antithesis to the sincere, hopeful, optimistic tenor of virality and internet culture that colored the early 2010s was edgy, cynical, weird irony. "Dank memes" was the name of the game.

Joshua Citarella—arguably an authoritative voice on 21st century internet culture at this point—published a deep-dive affectionately referred to as the postleft PDF that explores the aesthetics of the mid-stage of the dank memes trend amongst young leftists. I can't fully endorse it because 1. Josh is an older millennial interloper who is clearly approaching this topic from an outsider perspective and 2. It was authored in 2018 which is a period of culture I was entirely checked out for since I was on a religious mission and unable to freely roam the internet and 3. The memes are super political in nature which some might find distracting. The postleft PDF is also trying way too hard to be hip and funny by 2018 standards and has comedically aged quite poorly. But it contains a pretty accurate retelling of the rise of the dank memes and many illustrative examples (albeit of an extremely distracting political nature, keep in mind that dank memes are about so much more than just our politics), so I highly recommend clicking on that link and at least scrolling through the pictures to get an idea of what I'm talking about. It captures some very important points of zoomer thought, down to how the words "boomer" and "zoomer" describe your cultural posture (I am really on the cusp of being a boomer under this framework with my 9-5 job and wife) rather than your birthyear.

You will notice, if you scroll through the postleft PDF, there are some templates. But there are also a bunch of deepfried spongebob stills with bitter ravings of madmen superimposed in mismatched fonts, and also a doodle Engels did of Max Stirner edited onto Sonic the Hedgehog, and also your pepes and your wojaks and what have you.

This example doesn't perfectly support my next point because "Friendship ended with X now Y is my best friend" is a template, but rest assured that this is mixed with plenty of completely original compositions that have never been seen before or since. I chose this one because it's moderately deepfried and has the Stirner doodle.

These resemble Dawkinsian memes, but recall our two criteria:

1. They had broad appeal and reach ("reproducing" aka "viral")
2. They were observed changing iteratively ("evolving" aka "template")

These images we are calling memes, they are extremely niche leftist injokes, they're not viral at all! Most zoomers have absolutely no idea who Stirner is, or even if they've seen his penciled profile in a meme before they don't understand what he actually represents (Egoism). And most of these images are not templates. We evolved the word meme to mean something entirely different and then got the rest of the world on board. All generations now agree that memes are "funny pictures or videos I saw on the internet" with no requirement for virality or structure. We almost need to invent a new word to mean the old Dawkinsian meaning because there is still a sizeable chunk of memes operating under the old mode of iterating on formulas. If you scroll through knowyourmeme (which I heartily recommend against these days, it's become entirely infested with ads and hornyposting and takes 20 seconds to load a single page) you'll see a mixture of entries on the more traditional template-based memes and the more vague "movement" based memes, like the postleft kids. A lot of these meme explainers are more about which current events/discussion topics zoomers find interesting, what we're making memes about rather than how we're making them.

The answer to "what is a meme" is "depends what year it is". But in the post dank memes era, it's a funny picture or video on the internet. This may have seemed like a unnecessary digression from the main question at hand, but it is quite vital to understanding my answer for why online zoomer aesthetic enthusiasts are so common.

Memes and Aesthetics

Memes are kind of like aesthetic jazz. A big riff session. Our generation is bouncing funny ideas and variations on how to present them off of each other in a nakedly Dawkinsian process where the creme of the memes rise to the top. As a result, anyone who wants to "get" a meme they aren't in on yet needs to develop a muscle for recognizing aesthetic throughlines and predicting where they can and will go. We're also innovating slang at an unprecedented pace, some of it referential, much of it stolen from AAVE (zoomers really like black culture). There has always been a need for youth to fit in to trends, but the meme-treadmill really poured gas on this fire and made us a hyper-vigilant generation of next-token predictors.

Furthermore, meme culture post dank memes vibe shift has become increasingly siloed and insular. Memes function as community shibboleths, especially politically. This was the bread and butter of 4chan during the first term of Trump, where edgy trolls tried to invent a bunch of meaningless "racist" dogwhistles to mess with mainstream media who took the still infant alt-right dead serious (then the real racists who were equally clueless as their progressive journalist enemies were like "oh i guess this is how we dogwhistle now" and the fake shibboleths were reified, but that's a story for another day). If you consider the accumulation of social capital online to be worth it, then you often end up investing time into molding your tastes and knowledge to fit the set of memes that your chosen communities value. It appears that this process awakens some nascent curiosity within us about how all of this works and then we start spreading memes about aesthetics and oh boy here we go creating yet another egregore.

III: Aesthetics are worth it

I don't think it was virtue that led us to this fate. Nevertheless I do think it is a virtuous outcome. This type of curiosity breeds understanding, acceptance, and appreciation. It can just as easily reinforce tribalism, but that's the default state of humanity. I think the first step to cohabitating with people who are not like us—which is table stakes at this point for living peaceably in a diverse western democracy—is choosing to gawk at the outgroup like an old-timey anthropologist, cultivating a sense of wonder rather than fear or disdain. The gawking should give way to some shallow level of understanding, some mind state that accepts different viewpoints and backgrounds and integrates them into a more fully realized picture of our society. I don't think any political tribe has fully figured this out yet, they just have different definitions of the ingroup and outgroup. But zoomers who manage to avoid getting mind-killed by the political implications of the aesthetics they discuss can truly learn to undo the current regime of daily atomization just a little bit and replace it with mutual respect.

So that's my call to action. If you feel like it, browse through the aesthetic wiki, learn some zoomer terminology, and it might just open your heart. But you may yet be lacking something...

Mental illness

The jury will be out for a looooong time on whether our generation's very special relationship with our own brains is some immutable genetic trend (did some Gen-X food meme like candy cigarettes ruin our parents' epigenetics and screw us over?), our society waking up to mental illnesses and diagnosing them faster and more accurately, or exogenous factors like social media or participation trophies or whatever. But it is crystal clear that an unprecedented amount of us have adhd, depression, anxiety, gender dysphoria, autism, or all of them at the same time. We're also convincing ourselves we have the more exotic ones like manic-depressive disorder or multiple personalities or the super rare type of Tourettes that makes you uncontrollably shout slurs. But those trends are mostly fake social contagions that evaporate with age.

Once again I'm just working off vibes here, but it seems like the mental illnesses are at least partially loadbearing to our love of aesthetics as well. They drive you to spend more time online, which gives you more chances to be exposed to the effects that I've described.

1. Anxiety drives you online because interacting with strangers via text is so much easier than in person.
2. Depression drives you online because you are cooped up in your house
3. ADHD drives you online because it's a bottomless pit of stimulation and novelty
4. Gender Dysphoria drives you online because you can easily modify your presentation and find likeminded people to commiserate with.

But what about autism?

Autism

The online zoomers have reinvented the word "autism" in a similar manner to what we did to "meme". When I was younger it was a mean word kids would sling around at each other (I would never dare, I was deathly afraid of saying anything profanity-adjacent) but now it's like, positive? So many zoomers self-identify as autistic and use the word with wild abandon to describe fixative and scrupulous behaviors, which can carry with them just as many advantages as disadvantages. Autism used to be considered a disability, but in the hyperspeed knowledge economy autism can go from a debuff to a buff (someone with an obsessive nature seems to excel in STEM for instance) and it has grown to become kind of a status symbol.

It feels bad because I spend a lot of time in these circles where that word has been reclaimed and gone through a renaissance, and then I accidentally use the term to describe something or someone around the uninitiated and witness pearl-clutching. I have updated the codeswitching algorithms in my brain to make sure this doesn't occur any more, but I sure wish the rest of the world could catch up to talking about autism in this destigmatized and empowering manner because it's an extremely useful way to categorize modern behaviors and it has no perfect replacement.

If we are to consider autism the way an online zoomer would, then categorizing aesthetics is just an obvious behavior we would expect from an autist. I believe an impulse to categorize is considered autistic even among the polite normies.

Epilogue: Some final hedging

I don't really know how to end this. I think I've made all the points I want to. So to finish off I will try to pre-empt any criticisms I expect to receive, and I expect to receive a lot since I'm making some pretty bold claims.

This is a bunch of confusing gobbledegook that doesn't seem real.

It has taken me a lifetime to embed myself into this subculture. The nature of algorithms and subcommunities mean that no internet culture is truly universal, and nothing I'm claiming is meant to be interpreted as a universal or canonical narrative. I think the extent to which what I'm presenting will ring true will be a function of how much you've tread the same paths as me. You can familiarize yourself with zoomer lore with some effort (the YouTube channel Lessons in Meme Culture is a really good resource if you want to keep up with the trends in realtime) but I don't even think it's worth it. I said it in the lede: this dear cultural project of my generation is on its last legs, ready to pass the baton to Gen Alpha who is almost at the same age as we were when we created Dank Memes for Edgy Teens.

I'm a zoomer and you do not speak for me. You do not seem to understand my experience at all.

It's so tiring to have to tack on a bunch of qualifiers every time I reference "zoomers" just so I can exhaustively include and exclude the right subsections of society I'm talking about. It doesn't really matter. The Zoomer Project that I describe was and is real, whether or not you got on board. Just scroll around my wife's Instagram (mine of course has all the feeds blocked) for a couple of minutes and you will see almost every phenomenon I have put into words here.

You don't talk like the irony-poisoned zoomer you claim to be.

That's because I codeswitched to make this essay more broadly palatable (an explainer that is only accessible to people who already know everything it's going to say isn't very useful now is it). Also, I don't want to make the mistake the postleft PDF did and try too hard to adopt meme aesthetics so that this is unpleasant to read back a few years later. Rest easy that when I am in zoomer spaces I speak in all lowercase and use a lot of slang.

I am Gen Alpha and all of this navel-gazing is extremely cringe.

Right. Allow me to indulge in some juvenoia and say that your generation has not impressed me so far in terms of artistic and cultural output. I know most of you are still in like 4th grade or whatever but you should really get on that if you want to begin to match our legendary run of memes. I am pretty sick of the whole Gen Alpha vs Zoomers vs Millennials war we've been doing these past couple years (the Millennials kind of deserve it though, they started it) so I've been trying to convince my fellow zoomers to not pick on you guys. But now an imaginary strawman of my own invention just called me cringe so the kid gloves are coming off. It's wartime.

I am a Millennial and I feel that you ascribe to your generation many memetic creations that rightly belong to us.

The boundary between generations is always very blurry. I consider the true mark of a zoomer to be not remembering 9/11, but there are differing opinions about even this. I alluded to this messy boundary with the term "Zillennial", which I think captures the camaraderie and shared experience between elder zoomers like myself and younger millennials. Older millennials really do not get internet culture in my experience, except inasmuch as it can be blended with more conventional pop culture IPs.

You expect us to just believe what you're saying yet you provide barely any evidence.

Frankly, I don't feel passionately enough about this subject to do the hours of work to gather a bunch of anecdata and examples to try and sway you. I don't really care if you don't believe me, and I also don't really care if what I'm saying is completely off-the-mark and misleading. This is a very low-stakes topic and just kind of fun to think about. I'm sure some social scientist will take a swing at this sometime soon if they haven't already and do a much better job than me. But if you're just curious for more examples, I can at least point you to Camille Cooke, who is making content at the precise intersection of zoomer memery and historical aesthetics that I'm talking about.

I am not a Zoomer and I like talking about aesthetics too!

Cool! Good for you.

You use too many weird words and obtuse references.

Yeah, I'm sorry. It's not on purpose.