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How digital nativism shapes modern subcultures for Gen Z
Digital nativism has given rise to extra-social cultures, groups of people defined by the fandoms and subcultures to which they belong
- PUBLISHED: Thu 13 Mar 2025, 10:52 PM UPDATED: Mon 2 Jun 2025, 2:28 PM
A few weeks ago, I decried the siloing of culture and subcultures, so isolated and dense that people today exist and communicate on completely different wavelengths to each other, more intersecting like threads on a tapestry than living, working and thriving together as a collective.
Digital nativism has simply given rise to extra-social cultures, groups of people defined by the fandoms and subcultures to which they belong. But this goes deeper than comic book nerds going from punching bags to kings of the Internet and pop culture to the wellness junkies, crypto bros and apathetic keyboard-justice millennials who have governed social media pop culture for so long.
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While the individual centres of these cultures shift, the celebrities, the worship of expertise, and ultimately the crushing or engagement with dissent, leaves most subcultures now far more insular, but also dynamic and unified.
As someone who actively engages with multiple kinds of social media so I can keep up my own cultural critiques and try and grow as a thinker and intellectual, it is hard to explain what I am seeing around the world in so many different groups. The kinds of lies and disinformation that I see grab multiple disparate communities, and there is growing awareness between communities for the sake of or just to promote conflict. This goes deeper than trolling, and not the ‘real’ news of knowing who killed what with what bomb built by which nation in which factory I can point to on Google maps, but a defensiveness about oneself and beliefs. It’s like we’re all turtles, and the majority of people when pressed will withdraw into their shells; not fight or flight, but hide.
The digital world giving us this escape is massive, and I don’t believe anyone has reckoned with how massively this is going to be changing the world. Recent studies have shown that 80-85 per cent of content uploaded to the Internet ever is gone. Corrupted, lost, in a small corner of a server somewhere offloaded, degraded by the elements, and lost forever. For what will soon be a fourth generation of digital inhabitants, social media and the Internet are certainly not forever, and neither can be relied on to hold our memories and information for us.
It is all too subject to change or alteration, and as someone who recently returned to writing notes and first drafts by hand, I can tell you I need it based purely on my lack of dexterity and hand strength, that most people won’t be thinking to start printing off everything they type and post. Data storage has become the next great challenge for tech, and powering all those data banks will be a challenge for a world grappling with energy use and the new norm of constant climate disaster.
To do all that and face all that together, we need to acknowledge how dangerous digital nativism truly is, and how in siloing our cultures online, we leave ourselves open to all sorts of historical repetitions if suddenly the lights go out and billions of people don’t have a way to keep in contact with their people. The answer is small, just embracing existence with people and not things or movements and ideas, but also in building up bonds as a collective, and simply choosing to become islands in a stormy sea.
Now imagine I wrote something inspirational about islands being the peaks of hidden mountains and we’re just living in a time of flood. Actually, that’s pretty good. I should write that down.