“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
JFK’s inaugural address is an iconic rallying cry for civic duty and national pride. Today, young people are still asking what they can do—but the answers they’re finding are increasingly unsettling. The reason? They’re turning to the internet where irony, humor, and absurdity interact with politics in unpredictable ways. What they find reflects the disillusionment and chaos of a generation grappling with existential threats and a broken political system.
To understand how this came to be, and what it says about our culture, we need to take a step back and look at the forces that shaped both politics and humor over the past few decades.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here
Older generations relied on political narratives of hope and progress. The civil rights movement in the mid-20th century reinforced the idea that social activism could affect positive change. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Post-WWII economic and technological progress accompanied this social hope. Dubbed the “golden age of capitalism,” an expanding American middle class rallied behind the nation when we landed on the moon in 1969. The success of the New Deal bolstered trust in the government, with roughly 72% of Americans in the 1970s expressing faith in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the government. Despite notable scandals such as the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, faith in government institutions remained high. Alongside this grew the idea of American liberal hegemony: the belief that the U.S. was uniquely positioned to promote peace and freedom around the world. The Soviet Union’s collapse reinforced the belief that democracy would always triumph over oppression.
It’s only natural then, that those who grew up during the prosperous postwar era, were primed to embrace Reagan’s vision of America as a “shining city on a hill.” We could do nothing wrong, and progress seemed both inevitable and unstoppable. Back then, America’s chest thumping was loud and bold, and came from a place of substance. But over the last two decades, that confidence has become a shell of its former self.
Trust in government today is at an all time low. A study here at Berkeley found that a majority of Gen Z are “fatalistic” about inequality and climate change, believing the government is woefully unable to address them. We lack the hope our grandparents nurtured. Our progress is made on the backs of the environment: industrialization and agriculture drive deforestation, pollution and exploitation. Our unending crises—inequality, polarization, and corruption—have warped MLK’s arc of history.
How have we responded? Well, many of us have turned away from traditional forms of political engagement, lacking faith in its effectiveness. We have turned instead to absurdist humor and shitposting.
Camus, Shitposting, and Disengagement
The philosophy of absurdism was propounded by French philosopher Albert Camus in his 1942 essay, ‘The Myth of Sisyphus.’ He argued that there is an irreconcilable tension in our desire to ask existential questions for which there are no answers; our thirst to know what is unknowable. ‘The absurd’ results from the awareness and experience of living within this contradiction.
What does Camus suggest we do in response?
We could replace traditional sources of meaning with alternate ones or draw personal meaning from family. Camus suggests a more radical response: living indifferent to meaning, and drawing strength from our freedom to live in the present. In his words: “At last man will find the wine of the absurd and the bread of indifference on which he feeds his greatness.”
Gen Z’s response to our political wasteland is quintessentially absurd. Endless shitposting and the ‘brain rot aesthetic’ are Camusian revolts, embracing chaotic, meaningless content to cope with an overwhelming reality. Faced with existential threats, absurdist humor becomes a way to navigate the void.
Brain rot’s rejection of traditional political messaging can be interpreted as a political stance. By choosing to engage in pointless content rather than traditional political discourse, Gen Z rejects the feigned seriousness of our political system. It’s a refusal to participate in the expected ways—a tuning out of conventional discourse—that signals a deep skepticism of politics as a means of change. Posting meaningless content reflects the senseless experience of our politics—noisy but hollow. This subversion is a way of saying, “If the system is absurd, why shouldn’t our reaction to it be equally absurd?”
Gen Z’s absurdist tendencies reflect a choice to laugh at the futility rather than succumb to despair. Well, at least they used to. Something has changed.
Co-opting absurdism: The Right Way
What began as a response to a failing political system has become a means of extreme right-wing indoctrination. The alt-right has co-opted internet humor to radicalize young, impressionable targets.
This co-opting process is insidious: extremist narratives are subtly embedded in memes that initially seem harmless or ambiguous. This allows extremists to reframe hate speech as “jokes” or “irony,” exploiting the plausible deniability humor provides. When criticized, they dismiss it as overreaction and deny any political agenda. This allows them to shield their propaganda from scrutiny and covertly spread harmful messaging. This not only serves as an effective recruiting tool, but also desensitizes viewers to extremist content under the guise of edgy, rebellious humor. Studies show that repeated exposure to “ironic” racist or xenophobic jokes can gradually erode users’ critical awareness and blur the line between satire and sincere belief. This technique has proven particularly effective in online communities populated by teenagers and young adults, who are drawn to humor as a social bonding tool and may lack the media literacy to recognize the underlying ideology. Participation offers a faux sense of rebellion while subtly channeling anger, xenophobia, racism, and anti-semitism.
Social media magnifies this radicalization. Algorithms personalize and prioritize content based on user engagement, creating echo chambers where individuals are repeatedly exposed to similar ideas. When users interact with extremist content, social media platforms often serve them increasingly radical posts.
But there’s more to this than just ideas. People socialized, indoctrinated and radicalized in this way do more than just vote for Trump—they often celebrate and sometimes participate in violence in the real world. Platforms like 4chan and 8kun simultaneously glorify, trivialize, and gamify acts of violence. Within these spaces, users treat violent acts as entertainment, reducing murder and terrorism to memes and in-jokes that diminish the horror of real-world attacks. For instance, after the Christchurch shooter live-streamed his massacre of 51 people in New Zealand, users on 4chan lauded him as a “saint” and spawned a morbid system of hero-worship. The El Paso shooter, who killed 23 people, was hailed a “disciple” of the Christchurch shooter, placing him in a grotesque pantheon of “martyrs”. This language frames violent acts as both a game and a duty; terrorists become icons within a culture that rewards extremism. Scholars studying these platforms have noted that this gamification creates a feedback loop: each attack raises the bar for future attackers, who strive for higher body counts, making mass violence both an aspiration and a sick form of competition.
The school playground at the end of the tunnel
So, what can we do about it?
Well, much like a bad fork, the approach has two prongs. First, schools should teach digital media literacy to equip young people with the skills necessary to navigate online spaces. Research suggests that these critical skills can help adolescents better identify and analyze sources that use irony and humor to promote harmful ideologies. Programs like the UK’s Be Internet Legends or the News Literacy Project offer models for scalable educational tools that cultivate these skills at early ages.
Second, we need to strengthen local communities. Real world social spaces provide young people with meaningful real experiences that can counterbalance the allure of extremist online spaces. When people spend more time in physical, social environments—parks, community centers, and family gatherings—they are socialized in healthier ways. Unlike dehumanizing online rhetoric, in-person connections build real-world empathy.
These solutions won’t eliminate the absurdity of our world, but they will ground young people in a reality that feels less isolating. A reality worth experiencing.
Despite everything, maybe our grandparents were right. There is hope.
Featured Image Source: NBC
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