I spent some time interning at a magazine last summer, and was tasked with helping to create their new It-List. It would be one of many such lists, like Forbes’ formidable 30 Under 30 roster, that would hit the shelves at the beginning of 2016. Mainstream media’s obsession with youth is nothing new (see Mad About The Boy, an exhibition exploring the historic allure of male youth currently showing at London College of Fashion), and will never grow old, but the focus of this idolatry has, I feel, shifted perceptibly from the young and beautiful to the young and successful. Imputing hundreds of potential names, ages and glittering professional accolades into a spreadsheet, it quickly transpired that the basic formula for making the cut was, essentially, the younger the better: pre-teen artists and activists were the list’s gold dust, and it all got less impressive from there. Reading these lists, I feel, at 21, old. And frankly, a little (a lot) jealous of the tastemakers of tomorrow – I haven’t yet achieved anything extraordinary, and despite always getting good grades and trying wholeheartedly to blunder on down the badly signposted path to success, I am, on the whole, average.
The generation in question though, the ten-somethings who get me wistfully thinking about what I should have been doing after school instead of watching Friends re-runs, contains such notable names as 16 year old Lily-Rose Depp, model, actress (and Jonny Depp’s offspring), 17 year old Jaden and 15 year old Willow Smith who are both making names for themselves as outspoken young musicians and philosophers of life, and 17 year old Amandla Stenberg, who has been fighting for better racial representation in Hollywood. According to MTV, this ‘Generation Z’, distinct from Millenials for never knowing a world without touch screens, will be the ‘founders’ among us. This founding spirit can be seen in the fruits of the young Instagram coterie’s labours – from starting up online movements which have taken up roots across the globe, like 15 year old Mars’ Art Hoe collective platforming creative young POC, to making music and garnering fame from the moment they upload a cover to Soundcloud, like Lorde, who at 19 already has two Grammies.
The democratising plurality of the internet is such that qualifications and experience aren’t worth anything; anyone can start their own international media empire by developing a network of writers online, and garnering an international audience for your artwork through Instagram is as meritocratic a process as I can think of. For example, artists like 19 year old Chloe Sheppard have become successful based on the quality of her photography and the beauty of her vision, rather than going through the motions of formal academic training to legitimise her voice. I wondered that creating such a social-media sensation isn’t a sustainable route to success IRL, however girls like Tavi Gevinston with her Rookie media empire have proved that you should patronise young bloggers at your own behest.
So unlike Bret Easton Ellis’ constant condemnation of ‘Generation Wuss’, or Simon Doonan’s opinions on youth culture as stated recently in Slate (one extract reads ‘the young folks of today are a bunch of insanely overachieving, materialistic, poorly educated, distraction-prone, conformist, mentally turgid losers, whose only discernable skill is the ability to sext pics of their genitals to one another’), I don’t think that today’s teens are inherently much worse, or much better for that matter, than their predecessors. Some things have definitely changed: apparently because of the socio-economic uncertainty of adulthood, teenagers are getting much less fucked up than they used to, with underage drinking and narcotics use much lower than it was a decade ago according to a 2013 Department of Health study. We’re all being called the ‘precariat’ because of the uncertain nature of our futures – destined to live in far-out suburbs working endless unpaid internships and forever chasing the dragon of a fulfilling career.
We have been made to think that, after university, we will all be fighting for the same shitty jobs, forced to compete against each other for the same scarce breadcrumbs of a post-credit-crunch world. Maybe then it is the looming shape of a bleak 20s that is pushing young people to work harder, to carve out a place for themselves in the world if it looks like that space doesn’t yet exist. That Generation Z can found a future not based on crippling student debt and apathetic inertia shouldn’t make me jealous or bitter. There’s enough time for us all.
