Hey there, whippersnapper! Get off my lawn!
Kids these days. It's like all they care about are their TikToks and vapes...
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In fifty years, will anyone remember the horrors of Zoom bombing? Should we build a monument on the National Mall? They even hit Congress.
Fortune described the terror of a Zoom bombing thusly:
On March 30, for instance, uninvited strangers crashed a Zoom meeting on cyberattacks. When the presenter started covering coronavirus disinformation posted to Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter, a Zoom bomber scribbled all over the screen, forcing the meeting to end early.
Yes, a highly recognized, national magazine ran a story about trolls being disruptive in a meeting about internet trolls. This isn’t to say that Zoom Bombing is a good thing—obviously it isn’t. Unfortunately, much of the digital graffiti and language used is hate speech, and somehow Zoom was woefully unprepared to prevent it. Nevertheless, the level of surprise at the phenomenon and lack of preventative preparation is perplexing.
People being cruel and disruptive online sucks, and there have been some real assholes engaged in Zoom bombing. Yet bad behavior on the internet is nothing new. (Seriously, why is anyone surprised by Zoom Bombing? Have you ever read the comments section?) The shock that people experienced when encountering this behavior for the first time, and the fact that they didn’t expect it to begin with, may be an indication of a generational divide in how the pandemic is experienced. Whereas the millions of Boomers, Gen X-ers and Millennials have experienced the shift to a digital life as a shock to the system, Gen Z—those born roughly between 1995 and 2010—is uniquely positioned to thrive in this environment.
Gen Z is the first generation to have grown up with ubiquitous internet, smart phones and social media. A pre-COVID-19 study found that members of the Gen-Z cohort spend 2.5 hours more per day online than Millennials and were more than twice as much to make purchases from a mobile device. Gen Z also spends more time per day on social media and on totally different platforms—think TikTok—than older generations.
In other words, the youngest cohort of adults was already engaged in quarantine survival activities—be that shopping online or socializing via the internet—that older people may still be adjusting too. At the risk of sound like a grumpy old man, if this goes on too much longer, the world’s 19-year-olds will figure out how to corner the market on TP and have more friends too. Young people are also less likely to fall seriously ill, so perhaps it’s all a plot by the world’s teenagers to take over for good.
Today’s Film: Assassination Nation (2018)
Today’s guest post comes from Nia Ashley, an award-winning Brooklyn-based writer, producer and media artist. Her work centers Black, queer, and women-focused narratives. For more info or to get in touch, visit niaashley.com.
Before screenwriter and director Sam Levinson would go on to showcase the traumas, joys, and ecstasies of Gen Z’s high school life in HBO’s Euphoria, he made a controversial splash with Assassination Nation, a social satire where the way teens behave online have deadly consequences IRL. The film centers on the lives of four teenage girls whose most important interactions take place entirely online through a series of texts and posts: Lily (Odessa Young) conducts an online affair with an older man. Her best friend, Bex (Hari Nef in a scene-stealing standout performance) flirts with a boy who won’t make their relationship public because she is trans. Her two sisters Sarah and Em, (Abra and Suki Waterhouse) fill out their friend group with their own brand of teen angst.
The teenagers’ community, and by extension their lives, is thrown into chaos when an unknown hacker threatens to release the private messages of everyone in the town. What starts as a justified comeuppance—the hacker starts with photos of the same-sex proclivities of a homophobic mayor—quickly turns into a free for all after the texts of half the town are released. It takes mere days for the emotional fallout to turn to violence as the men of the town channel their anger towards the women they feel have brought on this fall from grace.
With a premise like that, you’d expect the film to be dark, but Levinson is a skilled magician in taking the worse parts of the human experience and illuminating them to dazzling and engrossing ends. He draws heavily on the kung-fu films of the 1990s for his action sequences and pays homage to the girl power slashers of the early 2000s in his plot twists. Though the characters are often thinly written, relying on the actors’ performances to bring them to life, the visuals and pacing of this film will have you spellbound and cheering like any other great, campy slasher. Levinson is not subtle about the parallels he’s drawing, even setting the film in the town of Salem and crafting a home invasion scene that will make you feel like you’re watching a witch burn at the stake.
Despite itself, the film is a lot of fun, and during a time in which people are donning masks and taking to the streets demanding to be let back IRL, it’s nice to imagine that when it comes down to it some girls with red vinyl coats with baseball bats will be our saviors.
Assassination Nation is streaming on Hulu.
Reading List:
Voice of Their Generation by Andrew Dana Hudson is a science fiction short story over at Lightspeed Magazine about the fictional screenwriters behind Detective Pikachu vs. Predator. Read it.
There was a 90th birthday celebration for Stephen Sondheim the other day, and The Times has the deets on how and why to enjoy it.
Benjamin Reeves is an award-winning screenwriter, journalist and media consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. Follow him on Twitter @bpreeves or write to him at breeves.writer@gmail.com.