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it may simply be because it’s not our internet anymore. It belongs to zoomers now.

we’ve grown used to an internet whose form and culture was significantly shaped by and molded to our preferences. The American internet of the 2010s was an often stupid and almost always embarrassing internet — but it was a millennial internet. There were no social networks on which we felt uncomfortable; no culture developments we didn’t engender; no image macros we didn’t understand.

There was a time in my life when it was trivial to sign up to a new social network and pick up its patterns and mores on the fly. Now, I feel exhausted by the prospect.

millennials’ screen time has been on a steady decline for years. Only 42 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds say they’re online “almost constantly,” compared to 49 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds. We’re no longer the earliest adopters, even: 18- to 29-year-olds are more likely to have used ChatGPT than 30- to 49-year-olds — though maybe only because we’re no longer being assigned homework.

The heaviest users and most engaged American audience on the internet are no longer millennials but our successors in Generation Z

Frankly, that should be freeing. Being extremely online, on an internet geared to your interests (in the same way that heroin is geared to your brain), is not exactly a quality conducive to personal happiness

I suspect there is another factor driving the alienation and discomfort felt by many of the people who feel as though the internet is dying before our eyes: We’re getting old.

The celebrities are unrecognizable (Kai Cenat???); the slang is impenetrable (gyatt???); the formats are new (GRWM???). Austerely tasteful overhead shots of meticulously arranged food posted on Instagram have been replaced with garishly lit minute-long videos of elaborate restaurant meals posted on TikTok. Glibly chatty blog posts about the news have been replaced with videos of recording sessions for podcasts

the creative expression and exuberant sociality that made the internet so “fun” to me a decade ago are booming among 20- somethings on TikTok, Instagram, Discord, Twitch and even X. “Skibidi Toilet,” “Fanum tax,” “the rizzler”

True, the fun I’m talking about is co-opted and exploited by a small handful of powerful and wealthy platform businesses

When you drill down, what mostly seems to have changed about the web over the last few years isn’t the structural dynamics but the cultural signifiers.

Perhaps what frustrated, alienated and aging internet users like me are experiencing here is not only the fruits of an enjunkified internet but also the loss of the cognitive elasticity, sense of humor and copious amounts of free time necessary to navigate all that confusing junk nimbly and cheerfully.

Zoomer internet is, at least on the surface, quite different than ours.

The more alienating the mass internet is to me, the more likely I will put to good use the hours I previously spent messing around

Or, at least, the more likely it is I will find corners — group chats, message boards and elsewhere — geared to my specific interests rather than the general engagement bait that otherwise dominates.

A number of polls suggest the AfD is now strongest in the Generation Z age bracket. In Thuringia it won 38 per cent of the vote among under-25s.

Nor is it a purely east German curiosity: one recent study of young adults across Germany found that the AfD was the most popular party, with about 22 per cent of the vote.

Plenty of voters remain dissatisfied. In Finsterwalde’s marketplace, where some of the mainstream parties have set up election stands, one 75-year-old woman who declined to give her name said she was outraged that eastern Germans who had paid into the system their whole lives were left with meagre pensions while immigrants received generous benefits from the state.

in the months before the Berlin Wall fell and saw the local unemployment rate rise as high as 25 per cent in the turbulent years that followed.

Today it is down to 8 per cent. The gap in per capita incomes with western Germany has shrunk from about 40 per cent to 10 per cent. On average each Brandenburg resident receives nearly €2,000 a year in fiscal transfers from the western side of the country.

Genilke leafs through a book that shows photographs of Finsterwalde as it was 40 years ago and as it is today: the town has been transmogrified. The roads, the schools and the nurseries have been almost entirely rebuilt. An open-cast coalmine has been converted into the third-largest solar farm in Germany.

This shift is hard to explain, especially as in macroeconomic terms there has never been a better time to be a Brandenburger.

In this town of 15,800 people there are precisely 867 asylum seekers and refugees. While there have been no incidents of violence, there have been isolated cases of theft and it is common to hear low-level grumbling about noisy or disruptive behaviour. “Sometimes you feel like a guest in your own country,” said one voter, who preferred to remain anonymous.

Overall, though, the progress since reunification has been impressive. “Thirty years ago we could never have dreamt we would have come this far,” said Genilke. “There has never been a better time in eastern Germany. Of course we still have problems. There’s no such thing as an ideal society. But we really have achieved a great deal.”

Knut Abraham, 58, a long-serving diplomat who is now the CDU MP for the local constituency, suggests one reason for the disillusionment of the young may be that they did not live through the toughest part of the economic transformation and can see only its shortcomings.

“I also think it has to do with identity,” he said. “The AfD disseminates an easily adaptable and comprehensible sense of national identity. And, of course, it is at the same time a protest and a rebellion against us.”

The culture of memory may be another factor. Socialist East Germany was an “anti-fascist” state by definition and did not encourage its citizens to do much soul-searching about how complicit they and their families had been in the crimes of the Nazi regime.

After the two Germanys were reunified in 1990, the west’s more self-flagellating traditions — the mandatory trips to concentration camps, the solemn schooling in the principles of liberal democracy — were transplanted into the east’s education system.

Gärtner said some of his fellow pupils had semi-openly sniggered during lessons about the Nazi period and one boy in the class below had deliberately shaved his head before a visit to a concentration camp in order to make his allegiance to the hard right visible.

He also described how the AfD had achieved near-total dominance over political discourse on TikTok, a social media platform used by more than 50 per cent of German teenagers. “Slowly you can begin to see the parallels with how Hitler gave the radio to his population back then as the Volksempfänger [people’s receiver],” Gärtner said.