The teens will not save you

According to Teen Vogue and Twitter users with the red rose emoji next to their display name, every single teenager is a social justice activist and they’re all going to change the world. Emma Gonzalez will overthrow Donald Trump and become president, Malala Yousafzai will single-handedly bring about world peace, and the 14-year-old girl who lives next door will organize a march or give a speech that ends racism once and for all. But for every Emma and Malala and David and Zendaya, there are 8 kids all named Tanner in ISS for Sharpie-scrawling PUSSYYYYY! on their friend's locker.

It pains me to reveal that everything you thought you knew about Gen Z is a lie. Forget periods, sex, and graduation — being a dummy is the real hallmark of being a teenager. And it's never been more evident than through the lens of so-called “flop accounts,” a bizarre phenomenon in which teens debate political and social issues with each other on Instagram.

At first, things seem promising. The teens of 2018 appeared to be significantly better-versed in the language of social justice than the teens of yore, who as legend goes, were only interested in sneaking their parents vodka (filling it back up with water, obvs) and sexing each other in parked cars. Words and concepts like “socialization,” “transphobia,” and “structural oppression” that were once reserved for college-level gender studies classes are now commonplace.

LGBTQ people are no longer deemed controversial, and some of the most prominent social media influencers (like 22-year-old Nikita Dragun) are trans. In this respect, I will hand it to Gen Z. Congrats on doing the bare minimum, I guess.

But don’t get your hopes up! In many respects, teens these days are just as fucked-up as they've ever been. There might be no better embodiment of this than the blind hero worship of XXXTentacion — a literal piece of human garbage who beat the crap out of his pregnant girlfriend and tried to kill a gay man because “bro, I was naked and he was just staring at me!” He was the living embodiment of everything wrong with society — toxic masculinity, homophobia, misogyny — and the worst part? Teens. Fucking. Adored. Him.

This sheer ignorance and buffoonery can also be found in the discourse on flop accounts. Teens go to flop accounts to get their news because, uhh, mainstream media is "filtered" and "you can't just read an article and take it as fact." So instead, they get their news from…each other?

Sounds like a great idea! Who needs professional fact checking when you have a fellow 13 year old to explain the economy to you? Here, kids who are still years away from their macroeconomics AP test attempt to debunk the pink tax.

And here, a middle schooler argues that "gender is a biological construct" but then admits that it was "created to separate the world into two groups," showing that they they might know long words like "biological construct" but they have no idea what the fuck they mean.

They’re not woke, no matter what Teen Vogue's editorial board of grown-ass adults tries to tell us. Teens are just the unfortunate pawns of a society hell-bent on perpetuating a shallow narrative of “revolution” and “diversity” in the hopes of selling us mascara and face masks (but 10 percent of proceeds will go to a charitable cause, I promise!). It’s nice to think that teens will save the world — but at the end of the day, we’re all fucked.

@nian_hu