As the lights strobed and the bass reverberated through the interior of a Warsaw nightclub in the early hours of the morning, I saw a slightly terrifying scene unfold in my strained vision: Three bouncers had surrounded a British man and forced him to surrender his phone. He was neither pharmaceutically compromised nor Polish, so my interest was piqued from the beginning of the affair. He couldn’t stop himself from recording the night: a big no in many Central European clubs. He quickly became belligerent and began to yell at the bouncers. I could make out words like “Manchester,” “holiday,” several expletives and “my Instagram story” over the hardstyle industrial EDM. He was promptly put out onto the street. In the moments that followed, I thought he raised a fair objection: In a content-first reality, how could he be sure that he had even been in the club in the first place if he never documented it?
Experiences we understand to be “real” don’t necessitate documentation. But they become more real when we transform them into content by documenting them. We feel an impulse in perpetuity to make every visceral experience more legible to ourselves through content. That’s why the man from England found himself out in the cold in Warsaw as the sun rose. It’s why we record the concerts we attend in their entirety, and why we’ve developed terms like “hard-launch” and “soft-launch” to announce our relationships when we make them “Instagram official.” It’s why we look for how our political positions will resonate in the digital world before we hold them as sincere convictions, and it’s why we curate our online profiles to represent the person we want other people to see, not the person we see in the mirror. Lived experience has become the raw material for what matters most: content.
Typical commentary simply suggesting that “kids are on their phones too much” both assumes the primacy of the physical world and fails to grasp the inversion that has occurred. For a generation raised entirely on online spectacle, the digital world choreographs visceral experience. Critics will say the solution is simple: enforce screen time limits, encourage detoxes and teach media literacy. But you can’t fix what reality means to a generation by telling them to put down their phones.
The internet further alienated us from our labor, then from our daily lives and now our transgressions. Tyler Robinson’s inscriptions on the bullets he allegedly used to murder Charlie Kirk — the ones that were “mostly a big meme” — were the digital aesthetics through which physical violence made sense to him. He hedged against reality with his inscriptions. We do the same in vulnerable moments of bitter candor with skull emojis, and we layer what we say in irony to give ourselves plausible deniability when we’re afraid of our words being received poorly. We hedge against reality almost compulsively, because we’re afraid of what it might reflect back to us, in a kind of Kafka-esque horror that reflects a manic obsession with how we’re perceived.
Campus discourses constructed with these hedges produce little but apathetic insincerity and sensitive chaos. Students relitigate the conflict in Gaza, with its profound historical complexity and horrifying physical reality of bodies, homes and death, cynically, as if it were reducible to symbolic positioning in online discourse. Some dismiss the horrific conditions in the region as mere propaganda, unable to distinguish actual death from fabrication because both exist as pixels in their feeds. Others treat the state of Israel as abstractable, treating the existence of eight million people as either irrelevant or worthless.
The more complex and consequential the reality, the more disturbing it is when its material stakes get flattened into content. The power in terms like genocide and terrorism begins to lie entirely in relation to their perceived virtue, not their true meaning. This is what content-first reality produces: a generation that can discuss death and displacement with the same detachment they bring to any other content they see in their feeds. A generation that, almost by nature, is unequipped to address such a conflict gets presented with the role of litigating it. In the process, we forget its physical horror.
For many, the acidic polarization catalyzed by the Israel-Hamas conflict reveals something we’re all afflicted by but can’t seem to name: a vertigo that permeates our self-understanding. When your existence is fragmented across social media platforms, you’re alienated from the stable inner landscape of the mind, from which true conviction can even emerge. In a content-first reality, practicing sincerity becomes a punishing exercise in futility — a persistent and tiring attempt to invoke some kind of “authentic self” beneath frozen oceans of digital aesthetic.
The internet was supposed to be a transitory place that ran subterranean to our physical realities where we could interact with strangers through primitive chatrooms and explore our secret hobbies. But as it developed, we learned to view our physical realities as subterranean to the internet. The algorithms that govern the digital world demand constant presence.
In 1998, the anime “Serial Experiments Lain” depicted a middle school girl gradually abandoning her physical body for a kind of omnipresent godlike status in “the Wired.” But at least Lain Iwakura had a visceral awareness of the trade she was making: She could feel her body dissolve as she entered the Wired. We were born too late to choose. You cannot unlearn the foundational structure of your being, and you cannot grieve the loss of a world you never inherited.
