An Entire Generation, Raised by the Algorithm

When German YouTubers stopped being a punchline and started being genuinely feared—feared as in brands started writing serious checks and labels started paying attention—everyone I knew who still wore Air Max past thirty told me I just didn’t understand the format. I didn’t want to understand it. That was my problem.

The sales pitch made a certain kind of sense. Creators like ApeCrime—a German comedy duo whose entire brand was being aggressively, proudly, entertainingly stupid—or Bibi, who built a beauty-and-lifestyle empire out of her bedroom, or Sami Slimani, who arrived at influencer before the word existed as a job title anyone would admit to holding: these people were supposed to be different from television celebrities because they were close. They talked to the camera like they knew you. They filmed themselves on the floor of their apartments. They replied to comments. Authentic.

I thought I’d wait it out. One year, maybe two, and the kids would develop enough critical distance to figure out that fake pranks are fake, that a disclosure hashtag buried in caption text is still an ad, that someone screaming at a camera for twelve minutes isn’t content—it’s a hostage situation with worse lighting. Give them time. They’d grow up. The algorithm would have to serve something better.

Instead, years passed, and the argument started appearing in earnest: YouTube hadn’t failed to grow its audience up—it had actively made a generation dumb, naive, and curiously purposeless. The stealth advertising, the staged conflicts, the relentless optimisation for engagement over anything resembling intellectual challenge: it added up. Not to a generation that grew out of it, but to a generation whose baseline for what media owes them had been quietly, permanently lowered.

I’m still waiting for the charts to look different. Still afraid of the future. And still unsettled by anyone past thirty who finds ApeCrime tight.