The Kids Are Performing Edgy and Someone Finally Said So
There’s a genre of online publication that emerged around 2013 and has never really gone away: the youth-targeted offshoot of a serious media brand, built on the premise that young people won’t read real journalism but will absolutely read a quiz about which pasta shape matches their personality. In Germany, the flagship example was Bento—Spiegel Online’s attempt to talk to young people in the language it imagined young people spoke. That meant BuzzFeed-style listicles, trauma-dumping opinion pieces, and a relentless performance of edginess from writers who went home to their parents’ apartments in Prenzlauer Berg.
Jan Böhmermann is Germany’s sharpest satirist—known internationally for the Erdoğan poem incident in 2016, when he read a deliberately obscene piece of verse about the Turkish president on national television and nearly caused a diplomatic crisis. His show Neo Magazin Royale occupied similar territory to what The Daily Show used to do in the US, except Böhmermann was meaner and more formally inventive. When he decided to spend twenty minutes dismantling Bento, the result was the kind of criticism that lands because it’s accurate.
The charge was essentially that publications like Bento—and you could extend this to Vice Germany, to a dozen similar ventures—were performing rebellion while being structurally identical to the mainstream they claimed to critique. The apple juice was organic. The WhatsApp group had a clever name. The quiz asked whether you were really as dumb as Bento seemed to think you were, which is the question that should appear at the bottom of every article these sites have ever published.
What made the takedown satisfying wasn’t the cruelty—Böhmermann is always cruel, that’s the instrument—but the precision. He identified something real: the way youth-brand journalism mistakes aesthetic distance for critical thinking, mistakes irony for analysis, mistakes being extremely online for knowing anything. The writers weren’t bad people. They were playing a character called "young journalist" and had never been asked to stop.