Recent generations have been born into technological advancements in human history. It has never been that accelerating in history that technology was advancing. The direct results of the improvement quickly replaced material items surrounding. To confirm, imagine and count the things people had in the US a hundred years ago and now. Smartphones, electric vehicles, personal computers and pizza chains. The evolving market of capitalism gave its fruits to invest in those recently fresh fruits for the fresher ones.
As a result, those material changes both steadily and immediately changed the mindset and behaviours of people. The irony is that people quickly adapted all those technologies while, in their minds, resisting the ethos of those technologies. The cybernetic dream became a nightmare of trolls. Easy transportation became a luxury. In history, there has never been a time when vehicle uses were for just fun. And don't forget the saying, "Just for FUN!". Something of consequence is now served as savage-corrupted hedonism. Technology, once a lance towards the unknown and evolution, became a toy under the tiny hands of many. Some educators now grasp this situation and propose the idea of controlled uses of technology. A ridiculous solution highlighting that information created also became toys under academicians or so-called experts. I will call this mindset toyification.
What is a toy? The answer is worth a piece of its own. There have been many books about it, though. I will discuss this in later work. Please note that toyification didn't start with Gen-Z. Before them, there had been the early adapters. Although they haven't seen the most incredible technological acceleration, they have witnessed the tremendous jerk (Physics) in technological advancement. As a result, this mindset had grown before the emergence of Gen-Z.
With all those technological toys, Gen-Z children were added to the toy inventory of pre-Gen-Z: The mothers and fathers of Gen-Z. This is where the story begins. A toy destined to play with toys and make toys that will also be playing toys.
Gen-Z adapted and quickly grasped the new advanced technologies, nearly like their organs. Boys became lead soldiers, and girls became princess dolls at the hands of their parents. Both by mimicking their parents and having an instinctual inclination towards toys, they made toys of everything even their parents would have ever imagined.
This malevolent toyification process was because of feeling devastatingly insecure in a world which is not a toy or a game. Children escaped to the screens of their anti-ancient tablets made of advanced silicon clay when the real world came to shudder their mindsets. When reality bit, they bandaged their wounds with social media, an experimental medicine which is probably more sanitizing than gamma radiations. Gen-Z were sanitized under the influencers. They gave rise to sanitized influencers, and a growing cycle remains untouched. Individuality became a game of stubbornness that only served to isolation rather than the true virtue of becoming human.
This is the fatal point. When individuality is lost, it is lost through the lack of understanding of becoming an individual, and a person becomes something horrible. The prime man/woman was not that developed, but also they didn't have what they didn't do. In this trapped state, the person has everything which s/he can't construct. The marvels become toys under those cold hands. Bombs, diplomacy, art, economy, robots...
As everything becomes a toy, the so grown person is hesitant to find and engage with other toys. There are many different toys to play with: Other people, their bodies, all those marvelous gadgets and software and so on. S/he knows that if one toy doesn't satisfy them, he can find another quickly. Thus, the toy not being "fun" enough causes it to be thrown away quickly, even without a thought but emotional hunger.
Ideologies fell into their repertoire of toys because of their "perspectives and colors", enabling them to switch an ideology like a plastic rocket from all angles. When they want to love it, they look at it, throw it into the sky imagine themselves as astronauts conquering space. Else, to the trash bin. No ideology is even grasped but played.
Things became away of their virtues with Gen-Z. All the ancient conceptions and understanding are now assimilated into a game-like thinking style with clear borders for people who ever felt the virtue of a thing. Virtues are purposes and functionalities, not toys or engagements. Virtues don't have engagements, nor are they toys for minds to play with. If it can survive under immature and unnecessary interventions, capitalism can remind Gen-Z what living in a world without a game or toy is.
We will see how this act will end. For the time being, I believe it will be both painful and exciting for people looking at their screens and observing Gen-Z. Possibly outside the aquarium of their metaverse.
Initially published for Polyhedron on 7/19/2022 [Cinder]
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