Historians of the 21st century will have to contend with a brief but emblematic phenomenon: the teenage activist of the 2010s. Major media institutions crowded around them. They published books, headed protests, and featured on 30 Under 30 lists. They popped up out of the blue, promising an eventual, messianic salvation from social and environmental ills. Eventually there were so many that they stopped standing out and became an archetypal class, in common possession of a single origin story. Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai were to the 2010s as Clara Bow was to the flapper-worshipping 1920s.
The teenage messiah figure was almost always a girl. She was progressive, but not threateningly so (Thunberg’s loss of media cache coincides with her frequent participation in pro-Palestine protests). She got invited to the UN and posed with world leaders and Hollywood celebrities; she gave urgent speeches to rooms of adults. Her proximity to disaster gave her no choice but to be an activist, and it was her own choice – a pushy parent would have ruined the optics. Like a Disney child star, she was discarded when no longer cute. Her underage-ness was essential: part of the messaging came from an assumed personal innocence, almost destroyed at the hands of responsible professionals.
She was represented in her time by New York’s four-foot-high Fearless Girl – a power-posing sculpture financed by an asset management company – and by the precocious protagonists of the 2019 film Booksmart, who aspire to public prosecution via the Ivy League and use the word “Malala” to alert each other to emergencies. She probably featured in Rookie Magazine, the influential but now-defunct online feminist publication founded by a 15-year-old Tavi Gevinson. Perhaps the emergence of the teenage messiah had something to do with the concurrent popularity of Manichaean young adult fiction: Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen were both forced into underground resistance movements before they were old enough to purchase alcohol.
In newspaper profiles of teenage messiahs, there’s often a detectable hint of magical thinking. Amanda Gorman was 16 when she founded a children’s literacy charity and 22 when she became the youngest American inaugural poet. An article in the Guardian’s weekend Books section quickly declared her the “voice of a new era.” “Divinity that walks among us in the present day,” wrote the author, “…a new poetic muse – one to inspire the poetry of democracy.” The newspaper reprinted a photo of Gorman taken by an Associated Press photographer. There’s something more-than-faintly Maoist about it: she’s pictured from below, gazing far into an unseen horizon. In the background is a bright blue sky.
The larger benefits of the teenage messiah are clear. Anyone criticising the use of a young person by some political or media establishment may be taken as a critic of the young person themselves. And teenagers are generally blank slates: nobody can search for incriminating tweets or dig up past gaffes. Older politicos may find a vicarious lease of life through their activism and determination – think Gypsy Rose Lee’s mother, watching her strip. The phenomenon seems unfair for its actual subjects, who will hardly be able to live up to these expectations for their entire lives.
Historically, when children become political symbols, it’s because they have no way to speak for themselves. Arthur Labinjo-Hughes gets invoked as an indictment of UK social services; the Syrian infant who washed up on a Turkish coast in 2015 became an emblem of Europe’s migration policy. Sometimes a diary is found and circulated posthumously as evidence of a personal humanitarian quality, as with Anne Frank and the Maoist revolutionary soldier Lei Feng. Go further back and you’ll find 17-year-old Anastasia Romanov, whose remains were never recovered after the execution of her family by Bolsheviks. She popped up frequently in 20th-century mass culture as shorthand for the lost splendour of aristocratic Russia. (Amid the anti-Soviet tension of 1956 there were two Anastasia-themed feature films, one made in America and the other in West Germany).
The self-advocating teenage activist was a historical anomaly – a feature of techno-optimism, an ideology now absent from public discourse. During the 2010s, social media companies worked hard to convince the masses that their products were key to a utopian vision of infinite connection and free education. Thunberg’s mass School Strike for Climate could only have existed in a society that granted online autonomy to the underaged – either because its inhabitants believed what tech bosses were saying, or because they were blind to the possible ills of social networking apps. Where else does a normal teenager get a “platform”?
In one of the biggest cultural shifts of this decade, we’ve become techno-cynics. The internet is now officially bad for children. Techno-cynicism had its earliest child representatives in Brianna Ghey and Molly Russell, whose deaths were linked to the circulation of harmful content online: their parents mounted posthumous campaigns calling to ban social media for the under-16s. There was no real market for Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse – the global Covid lockdowns were an unappetising vision of a life lived fully online.
Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation blames the overreach of social media for a marked decline in teenage mental health since 2015. When the book was released this March, a minor revolt took place. British parents wrote angry op-eds and signed school-wide anti-smartphone pacts. If this trend continues, the next generation may be too busy playing outside to organise en masse.
Google now faces ridicule because of the newest ad for its Gemini chatbot – a father uses AI to draft an oddly professional fan letter from his daughter to her favourite athlete. The young girl in the video is crafted in the Thunberg mould: she’s been inspired and wants to inspire others; she’s starry-eyed with impossibly high institutional aspirations. In 2017, she’d have been every inch the teen messiah. It’s clear to us now that Big Tech isn’t amplifying her voice – it’s pushing her into illiteracy. The same narrative may once have resounded to raise consciousness about humanitarian disaster; now it exists as a dated advertising strategy for an enormous multinational corporation. Finally it’s the tech scions who are out of touch.
[See also: Ending the consultancy cult]
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