by Jeroen Bouterse
Preparing a worksheet with negative-number calculations where all the digits are sixes and sevens. Telling myself it’s meant to take the fun out of it for them – like a sex ed teacher having their students say ‘penis’ one hundred times before starting the unit. Definitely not the whole story, but plausible: as a middle school math teacher I am more than justified in trying to tame the phenomenon. In fact, I have drawn a firm line; just seeing a 6 anywhere in an exercise is decidedly not an appropriate reason for doing the meme. Really, we need to get on with the lesson now; I will count to five.
The ‘six-seven’ thing is one of those trends that remind adults they have lost connection with what it is like to be a teenager. For me, it is actually a far less baffling one than the draining ‘skibidi’ and ‘what the sigma’ cycles – I quite understand that it is fun to say. No, more than that; it has made something about Generation Alpha positively click into place for me. Let me enlighten you.
But before I do that, let me remind you that as a teacher, I am one of the least suitable people to look at the current cohort of middle-schoolers with any objectivity. Ten years into teaching math, part of my brain is definitely wondering why they still don’t know how to find the lowest common denominator, forgetting that every year, ‘they’ are different children who are simply learning these concepts for the first time. Also, with more teaching experience comes more confidence, so that I now tend to attribute failures in skill transfer less to my own didactic shortcomings and more to whatever is going on with kids these days.
My point is not, however, about what may or may not actually be wrong with this generation – in fact, I intend to end this essay with some starry-eyed optimism; rather, I want to proceed from the observation that this generation is the object of deep cultural worries in a way that we haven’t seen in a while. Those worries are tied to the technological revolutions that have led to kids being perpetually online.
Of course, we are afraid of the ramifications. They don’t play outside anymore; they don’t do the things that we believe have been an essential part of their cognitive development for ages. Instead, they are glued to their smartphones and it is making them anxious, depressed, and confused. Jonathan Haidt, the leading voice of these fears, warns that human beings are omnivores who need a wide variety of social experiences just like they need a wide variety of foods; smartphones, on the other hand, lead children to “spend many hours each day sitting enthralled and motionless (except for one finger) while ignoring everything beyond the screen.”[1] The phone-based childhood is damaging their mental health, their social lives, and their ability to focus.
My point: they know everyone thinks this. They may not have read Jonathan Haidt cover to cover, but they know how they are seen and it resonates with how they see themselves. While many moral scares about today’s youth will bounce off, concerns around the Great Rewiring stick. Adults have a much more immediate awareness of the effects of smartphones and social media, even if they misinterpret them, because they are happening to them too. Not every generation is on the same apps or consuming the same media, but they all feel guilty for overusing them. Cultural fears and teenagers’ own immediate experience match up enough for them to notice.
At a grade 7 spelling bee last week, when a participant failed to spell the word ‘belief’, I overheard one of their peers sigh: “this generation is cooked”. Again, I don’t see such expressions as proof that they are cooked; rather, I am quoting it as evidence that they have at least partly internalized worries about their collective selves. Like nineteenth-century bourgeois families anxiously watching themselves for signs of hereditary ‘degeneracy’, the thing to suspect about yourself these days is that you are suffering from smartphone-induced ‘brain rot’.
Now, ‘brain rot’ is not just a serious or ironic way to describe the effects of certain kinds of media; it is a category of content itself. When I let my tutor group pick a Blooket on a Friday afternoon, they usually ask for it to be about music, sports, or flags; but they have also asked for ‘brain rot’ as a topic. To be honest, I still don’t really understand what is or is not part of it. (For instance, after googling around, I believe I now know there is a ‘6-7’ brain rot character in the Roblox game Steal a Brainrot. But I really don’t understand what I am saying.) Going by context clues, the word simultaneously denotes teenage internet culture and slang, and a certain genre of mindless and inane content.
It seems the 6-7 phenomenon belongs in that context. The meme is meaningless, and what is mostly going on is just children making the noises of a large in-group. I would say that accounts for at least two-thirds of the phenomenon (let’s round that to two significant figures, shall we). To the extent that any particular reference is relevant, it is simply to the original six-seven kid – that is who they are imitating. That remainder seems to me to be saying to no-one in particular: ‘this is us now’. And perhaps: ‘and that’s OK’. I think it’s OK, anyway. We seem to have hit some extreme point of mindless mimicry – and it turns out to be an endearingly innocent and inclusive one. It reminds me most of the (pre-brain rot) dabbing phenomenon. The bar for entry is extremely low; only adults are stupid enough to say it at an inappropriate time. There is barely anything to ‘get’, hardly any general rules about who does or does not get to say the thing. It represents a lowest common denominator.
And as always, the lowest common denominator is not the entire story. In the Sirens’ Call, Chris Hayes makes a comparison between attention and food that plays on humans being omnivores – like Haidt but with a liberal twist. If you ask what humans like to eat, Hayes says, there are two answers. One is the biological universal so easily catered to or exploited by consumer capitalism: salt, fat, sugar, simple carbohydrates. The other is: just about everything – “there are more varieties of delicacy than one could ever imagine”. And so, he goes on, it is with attention: we have built-in systems of “compulsory, preconscious attention” that “provides the lowest common denominator”, a predilection for attentional junk food that large media corporations can use to compel us to stay hooked to our screens.
But, like food, there is a second answer to the question of what humans will pay attention to. Here again, the answer is just about everything! Or at least a shocking, beautiful, sublime variety of activities and entertainment: Kabuki theater, sitcoms, telenovelas, eight-hour evangelical Christian religious services, Wagner’s Ring cycle, fifteen-second Snapchat videos, War and Peace, hour-long sitar solos. (46)
Many in the rich world – though far from all – have learned to navigate the omnipresence of fast food: they have given it a place in their lives without letting their lives be taken over by it. My prediction is that the coming generations – including today’s teenagers – have begun learning to do the same with new media. They have resigned themselves to living in a world where shiny, beeping, diffuse, short, brain-numbing content is there to stay; but they are starting to figure out how to keep it at bay, how to compartmentalize the brain rot – to treat it as one aspect of their environment. They also play online chess, learn to code, and tell each other about the importance of ‘locking in’.
That doesn’t make troves of genuinely worrying global statistics about teenage mental health disappear. Whether there is cause for optimism really depends on where you look. But at the very least, youth culture is not standing still: it is, in its own way, reflective about what former Google ethicist Tristan Harris called the “race to the bottom of the brainstem”;[2] in diffuse and ambivalent ways, it is responding to it. I can’t predict the future, but I’m curious how this dynamic will develop in the next, let’s say five to eight years.
[1] The Anxious Generation, ch. 4. In ch. 3, Haidt tells us that when he asks older generations when they were first allowed to be out independently, they shout ‘6’, ‘7’ or ‘8’; gen Z shouts out larger numbers. I can only guess speculate about generation Alpha.
[2] http://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/96E3A739-DC8D-45F1-87D7-EC70A368371D, reference via Haidt.