Meet the Zoomers driven feral by Reform

‘I’m terrified!’; ‘Me – watching my rights fly away because Reforms (sic) winning’; ‘Reform winning is gunna (sic) literally set us back centuries’; ‘That’s all us gays going to prison’ – these declarations are accompanied by either panicked shouting, streaming tears, or the kind of laughter that you hear in films from somebody breaking down a door with a hatchet. They always film themselves vertically, of course, because nothing says ‘I am processing complex election results’ like a juddering close-up from a chaotic bedroom, making you feel like you’re being begged for urgent aid by an earthquake survivor.

Now, I’m not terrified, either of the results or of this smorgasbord of silly sods. But I am disquieted by their demeanour.

This is performance art for the dopamine slot machine. I found it hard to stay the distance of the full selection, a mere 93 seconds. The sheer feralness of the jerky movements, the wild eyes and fluttering hands triggered something primal deep in my own self – a lizard-brain flinch. An atavistic impulse whispered to me, these creatures have not been properly socialised – back away quickly.

It is very hard to settle on the correct perspective for this phenomenon – of apparently deranged youngsters on the socials. Is this a new development at all, or has the internet just given us a front-row seat to the youthful contingent of belfry-battery?

To answer this, I have tried hard to recall my own young life. In 1986, I was 17, with no access to a portable outrage broadcaster. When I was furious, I sulked in my bedroom, wrote screeds of terrible song lyrics for a pop group that would thankfully never be formed or a letter to the NME (thankfully again, these were never printed). Or I popped out for a walk and kicked an empty Coke can. If the space-age tech of today had existed back then, would I too have filmed myself hyperventilating for the clicks of strangers? I like to think not, but if I’m honest, I can’t be sure.

For those of us Gen Xers who never meet teenagers and who hardly ever interact with young people, it’s particularly difficult to get an accurate picture of the extent of the madness among them, despite the concerning stats on their ‘mental health’. I do remember vowing to myself, back when I was the age of these phone gremlins, that I would try, when I get older, never to regard everybody aged 13 to 25 as an indistinguishable, noisy, brightly coloured mass. Because that was incredibly irritating to me. Back in my day, older people often branded my generation as layabout lunatics frothing about ‘Fatcher’ in student unions. But the vast majority of my confrères and consœurs were just like young adult humans of all ages – earthy, daft and lustful. However, even among the nuts, ferals were very rare. Now they’re the main characters in the freak show.

To get a better view of both the wood and the trees, I put the question to a friend in his early twenties, a calm and literate Gen Z specimen. ‘Yeah, you’re not wrong’, he said. He reminded me that Gen Z has higher depression and anxiety rates, and that ‘more time online equals less real-world practice at, you know, talking to people who disagree with you. And lockdown didn’t help. We have been primed to see threats everywhere.’

But then he added an important caveat:

‘But we are not the first terrified cohort. Your lot thought Thatcher and Reagan were about to push the nuclear button. Go on Bluesky right now – many of your generation, supposedly sensible people like Lib Dem councillors and sci-fi novelists, are seriously fuming that Reform are fascists, that trans people are being literally genocided etc. So it’s the same script now, but with better filters and madder eyes.’

He’s right that the unhinged look isn’t entirely age-gated. Watch Loose Women’s Nadia Sawalha do her bit – the unnerving spectacle of a 61-year-old TV presenter whispering ancient racial conspiracy theories to camera in a baby voice. The bizarre video about Israel posted last year by actress and comedian Dawn French, 67, referring to Hamas’s 7 October massacre of hundreds of Jews as ‘a bad fing’ in a similar childish whisper, was deeply disturbing.

My chum raised another point. ‘Remember’, he told me, ‘you’re seeing videos posted to TikTok’. He pointed out that these videos do not show these people’s ‘true selves’ – they are big emotional reactions for the camera. ‘I think the actual big difference between this generation and previous ones is the horrible American influence of “being in your feelings”; making big emotional displays, the more emotional the better.’

In effect, then, TikTok isn’t capturing your ‘true self’ or your precious identity, it’s capturing your best attempt at viral derangement.

It’s a grim picture. So what the hell happened? Pick your poison – smartphones arrived and personality formation got yeeted away from parents and peers and into the cloud. Economic stagnation turned many Zoomers into claimants, reading lurid tales of evil billionaires. Family structures crumbled, bad political ideas found fertile soil in locked-down brains, and maybe – whisper it – there’s something in the water.

Or, it’s all of the above, marinating together into one great big stew pot of boiling neurosis.

Whatever the cause, the result is that a large (or large-ish) chunk of young people have not been fully socialised. I’ll continue to flinch at them. And you should too – it’s the only sane reaction.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter, author and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who.