liam payne, gen z's internet, and the death of online subcultures

today's fans have been born into an internet that has outgrown the hands of its masters

It’s not even been six months, and nobody even dares to talk about it anymore. Former One Direction member Liam Payne passed away on October 16th, 2024, after falling from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires. Within less than an hour of the news leaking in Argentina, X (formerly Twitter) exploded into a hellfire of trending keywords all synonymous with one key phrase: “LIAM’S DEAD.”

By the next day, my algorithm had filtered Yahya Sinwar’s death, a mass exodus to Bluesky following X’s new block update, and whatever was going on with the election into top priority, leaving a subset of 20-year-olds once again isolated into their own vial of subculture. I’m not trying to argue that these topics are any less important than the death of a celebrity, but, for those of us who have watched the collective mourn in reaction to pivotal deaths in the entertainment industry throughout our entire adolescence, it does feel a little bit unfair.

On March 15th, 2012, Caspar Smith released a Guardian article titledThe bright yellow text-box above the title reminds me “This article is more than 13 years old.” The country’s hottest boyband exists as a press-release relic, whereas not two years earlier, I remember sitting in the bathroom as the tooth-gapped girl with the Bobby Jack shirt asked me if I liked One Direction. “Who?” was my response at the time, but, as a longtime survivor of “need to be different” syndrome, I was naive to assume I could avoid the media explosion much longer.

Reminiscing on the woes of being an eight-year-old aside, the widespread identity acknowledgment of a “Directioner” marked a cultural turnpike for the internet’s youth. The explosion of interest became real news headlines, ones that were exposed to all ages. I apologize, with respect to my elder Millennials, for what I am about to say: New Kids on the Block, Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, etc. had their moment in North America, but their success was measurable in a way that only sounds impressive in a spreadsheet. The music of our current young adults—and the in-betweeners who are getting ready to copy-paste their Reddit manifesto concerning being born in 1996—was culturally impactful in excessive ways that can’t be seen by the Top 100 or Google Analytics.

Entire subcultures emerge from modern artists, transcending distance and time, through a single comment section. Group chats connected kids who were smart enough to bypass a thirteen-year-old age limit from Australia to Florida. These communities would expand into pixel cities of networking, an explosive interaction a working-aged person’s LinkedIn can’t replicate. I can give you all credit for the forums and AOL chats. For us, though, there was an invisible treasure, hidden from hundreds of thousands of teenagers’ parents for nearly a decade.

Aligning your social media identity with the media you consume (a more simple alternative: being in a “fandom”) is a phenomenon that I am vehemently acquainted with. Most of my childhood was spent posting, writing, editing, and living on Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, and Twitter. From the age of eleven, I mimicked other young girls by posting similarly structured Littlest Pet Shop toy enactments, filmed with a poor-quality webcam and eventually updated to a 480p Kodak EasyShare. It was the media available to me at the time: child micro-influencers who produced content for other kids. But that is precisely where we found friendship and community.

When we found accounts a few years later on Instagram or Tumblr that were other kids who shared our passion, it was easy to reach out. We formed groups, miniature cliques of speed-posters who shared similar humor, just like in real life. A constant flow of thought, and reaction. A private compulsion allowed for a select few.

Kaitlyn Tiffany, an internet culture writer at The Atlantic, wrote a fantastic book called Everything I Need I Get from You that explicitly outlines these micro-communities. Tiffany says it best:

“Before most people were using the internet for anything, fans were using it for everything.”

It just so happened that Directioners were one of Gen-Z’s first examples of fandom, right alongside the Superwholockians and blooming Marvel fans. Of course, older generations existed in these spaces too. But instead of becoming an online older sibling to look up to, our Millennial contemporaries quickly became stagnant in their growth, leaning toward a culture of “cringe” conceptual selfhood.

Olia Lialina outlined in her article Vernacular Web that “the WWW of today is a developed and highly regulated space.”

“You wouldn't get on the web just to tell the world, ‘Welcome to my home page.’ The web has diversified, the conditions have changed, and there's no need for this sort of old-fashioned behavior. Your CV is posted on the company website or on a job search portal. Your diary will be organized on a blog and your vacation photos will be published on iPhoto. There's a community for every hobby and question.”

This article was posted in 2008, which is where I see the transition period between what early net artists and cyberculture theorists determine to be the “true Web generations.” Lialina makes it more simple, defining the break as the separation between the “amateur web” and the “vernacular web.”

We’re in a moment of time where the internet is still a new public dimension. In late 2008, Spotify was officially launched for the first time, though it wouldn’t be available in the United States until 2011. In 2024, Spotify is a social media of its own with multifarious identities: a music streaming platform, a synthetic DJ (who was asking for more interruptions in their music?), a chart, a collection of artist profiles, a bank of intimate moments as defined by memories trapped inside each individual’s sentimentally named playlists, a storefront for merchandise, and so on. Spotify’s social media profiles blend into the visual strain, mimicking people as an ad in sheep’s clothing. The data it must take to run the app itself is both inconceivable and insufferable.

The field was equal at one point. Engagement is currency, and that’s nothing new to us by now. But when did it become so easy to ignore?

2008 was also when the masses were introduced to a centralized login ID. The internet became monopolized as quickly as it had been established as necessary for the general household. Websites were starting to merge into others, all under the guise of streamlining user experience. As Sarah Parez of ReadWriteWeb says, “Facebook Connect put the power of the social web into the hands of one company. One private company. Not only that, but a company that's known for rolling out changes without so much as a warning to its users then having to react to the ensuing uproar.”

As these fangirl communities grew older, graduated high school, got their degrees, experienced their early twenties, etc., the new generation didn’t replace their habits of creation and community. Why would they? They were born into a completely different internet, one that has outgrown the hands of its masters.

There was no exposure to these small subcultures because so much of their internet usage was bloated with influencer marketing, product placements, and quirky, personified Twitter accounts like Wendy’s. Plus, there was so much art, writing, roleplay archives, and fandom wikis that it made no sense to create anything else. If we’re going to say that media saturation is bludgeoning the youth’s mental health, then we can’t demand that they go out and create anything. So instead, the empty space has been replaced by the media collective.

There’s a miniature rebellion that you can see surrounding the idea of “overconsumption,” but then, as we approach the holidays, as people have given up after the news of the election, the paid advertisers once again float to the top of the pile.

And the older generations had no choice but to adapt. Older Millennials have been ruling the online marketing sphere since Buzzfeed took off. Gen-X retained their space on Facebook, even after their Gen-Z children migrated to other social media apps, and had a brief stint with Snapchat to cheat on their partners while their kids were buying drugs. Boomers are on there, too, to add to the stream of neighborhood paranoia and tagging people in comment sections (really, it’s because it’s the only way they get to see the grandchildren).

I say these things with a tone that comes off as harsh or self-righteous, but that’s because it’s how that generational divide is delivered to us by the media. You might see me as a culture-obsessed petulant teen. In reality, everyone is everywhere, and there are no sanctioned age-based networks to use as playgrounds online anymore.

This is who I am, along every webway, because authority and individuality have conditioned me to be so. Sure, it’s nice not reliving events such as the general public’s death wish on Justin Bieber just for being popular with teenage and tween girls. Instead, it’s all been replaced by kids arguing with adults three times their age, including well-known public figures, celebrities, and the people behind brand accounts.

It also makes it so older adults on the internet are constantly aware of what young people are doing; there’s no invisible separation between communities anymore because the algorithm can bring you anywhere that you may possibly be cross-marketable. That’s why we’ve got senior-age office coworkers talking about, “I can’t believe Gen-Z is cancelling ankle-socks…” over their microwaved paleo salmon patties.

And all the while, these corporations are drowning in cash, because the Temu advertisements Gen-Z is making fun of are making it over to their parents, and then the Gen-Z kids go home for the holidays, film their parents’ “Temu Victimization,” and give free advertising to all the other algorithm feeders it enrages.

Even fanfiction, a staple emergence from the very surface of fandoms, got marketed into BookTok (“SpicyTok”) videos, projecting glorified sexual violence onto the children just looking for something to read. That’s a conversation for another day, though.

I’ve been exiled from the space of roleplays, from the dramatic headcanons and fan art that bred creativity throughout my youth. I look toward the younger generation, hoping they’ll find it too. Hoping they’ll love each other and bond and make new. Find a magic community where they learn to be social creatures despite the external conditions.

We’re given an illusion of permanence with chat logs and histories because we see them on a daily basis; years later, there’s no digital scrapbook to pull out of the rubble, and no usernames to reach out to when your favorite celebrity dies.

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who wrote this?

l'angelique is an artist, poet, and web page butcher whose work primarily concerns the post-digital cyberculture shift. she has previously been published in ctrl+v journal, and she serves as the design editor for both Feminist Spaces and Venus Hour Literary Magazine. find her anywhere as @beetlepunked