I notice it most at night—the glow of my phone on my face, the tiny green light on my laptop camera, the sense that intimacy has become a dataset. Shoshana Zuboff warned us that our feelings, routines, and relationships were becoming raw material. Being young today means negotiating consent with platforms we never got to vote for.
“I’m Being Watched”: The Emotional Cost of Living in a Surveillance Economy
I grew up online—measuring time in notifications, friendships in DMs, and hope in hashtags. This is a love letter and a caution sign for anyone who believes culture and politics can be remixed by young people pressing “post.”
What it feels like
Some days it feels like we’re sprinting while the ground shifts under our feet. We’re told to be productive, positive, and “brand-safe,” even when the world is burning. But we keep speaking anyway—because silence is heavier than risk.
“Art is a place of resistance.” — bell hooks, Art on My Mind (1995)
How we learned to see
Our political education wasn’t just textbooks. It was Fridays for Future, Instagram infographics, grief that turned into mutual aid. We learned from Arjun Appadurai that culture moves across borders (Modernity at Large, 1996); from Homi K. Bhabha that identity is negotiated in a “third space”; from Sara Ahmed that emotions assemble communities (The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2004). These ideas didn’t live on a shelf—they lived in our timelines.
What pushes back
- Surveillance and data extraction—Shoshana Zuboff calls it “surveillance capitalism.”
- Algorithmic bias—see Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (2018).
- Gatekeeping dressed as “neutrality.”
What we do next
We organize slowly, not just virally. We build campus journals, co-ops, and coalitions. We borrow courage from Frantz Fanon (1961) and clarity from Achille Mbembe (2003). We learn to separate performance from power. We don’t apologize for caring.
This is our reminder: we are allowed to be young and still speak with authority.
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