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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

Now, students will participate in a jigsaw activity. Below are three articles about three different student populations that have been affected by the war in Ukraine. Assign each student, or have them choose, one of the articles to become an “expert” in. Make sure there are about an even number of students reading each article.

5. What are some of the fears or challenges teachers themselves are facing because of the war?6. You’ve read one of three articles about what education is like for a specific group of students. What role is school serving for the group you read about? Is there anything more schools could be doing to support these young people? If so, what and why?

What role can schools serve, even during war? How important do you think education is in a time like this? Do you believe educators should teach about what is happening in Ukraine? How do you think they should handle this sensitive subject?

Many teachers answered our call in mid-March to tell us how they were addressing the war in their classrooms. Here are some responses that show the many ways, large and small, that educators have sought to help their students understand the conflict and its roots, the plight of the Ukrainian people, the role of the United States and more. They have been edited for length and clarity.

I was shocked at how hungrily they soaked up the information, especially once Russia officially invaded Ukraine. These 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds wanted to learn more about what was happening in their world in the “right way” — via vetted news sources, exactly as you mentioned. After each episode, we discussed positives that we heard, we shared “wonders” (the things that we want to find more information on), and we shared one word to summarize the new information.

That day, my students’ remarks on the Russian invasion of Ukraine fit into five categories: empathy for the people of Ukraine, fear of World War III, criticism of Putin, criticism of memes that treat the invasion as a joke, and geopolitical curiosity.

Students then created infographics on Canva to illustrate their learning. Synthesizing that learning into smaller, digestible data bites helped them to make sense of such large, challenging concepts. Here are four examples of their work.

When discussing the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, that consisted of orienting everyone to where this conflict is happening geographically and what cities and countries are involved. We spoke about the history of NATO, key leaders, the concept of trade and supply chains — basically defining the common vocabulary and giving everyone the same tools for discussion.

That’s how I realized that my students needed to talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As a result, I took the following steps the next day, with positive results.

As part of a larger project on the theme of “nostalgia,” students were asked to think of a family recipe that made them nostalgic. But we also talked about the food that brings us comfort no matter where we find ourselves. To help students connect to the Ukrainian people, we talked about the comforts of borscht with information from this article about a chef who is leading a drive to recognize the soup as a Ukrainian cultural heritage.

Teaching about Russia and Ukraine this spring encompassed history, vocabulary, maps, graphs, and photo analysis. We began with a brainstorm about what students had heard about what was happening with Ukraine and Russia. Then students moved on to define terms like Soviet Union, Cold War and NATO, and worked together to combine their definitions into one “best definition.” This vocabulary work set them up to read the Times article about what was happening in Ukraine as Russia invaded, annotating in the

Part of what has made the coverage of the war in Ukraine compelling is my students seeing visual inversions of their own lives. There’s a photo of a grandmother, but she’s holding an assault rifle. There are teenagers, not much older than they are, running drills. There’s a teacher, but instead of trying to manage a class, she’s barely managing to hold it together.

What do you notice about how the person is framed in the photograph?What is the posture? Where is their gaze?Imagine what they might be thinking as they gaze out of the frame.

This is an excellent piece to use when considering primary and secondary audiences, purpose, appeals, and overall effectiveness. It is also a story we can track to see if the speech moves anyone in Congress to change their position on the type of support to provide Ukraine.

Does the American government favor any countries over other countries? What is the policy that guides the American government when dealing with other countries?How does the American government handle disagreements with other countries?Which countries are American allies, or friends?Which are America’s traditional enemies? How is this determined? Does that history matter?

How does President Biden “create the enemy?” Why should America follow this course of action? What is he suggesting will happen if America does not? What does America stand to gain from this plan? Are potential losses discussed?Note patterns in rhetorical appeals, diction, values and themes. What assumptions does President Biden make about the American character or national identity? In what ways do American mythologies seem to bolster a “single story” of foreign policy?

Begins.” Students took notes on the use of ethos, pathos and logos in the construction of the podcast. They also responded to the importance of having free and independent journalists report on the war.

“We Lived Happily During the War,” “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “Dancing.”

E.I.H.R. cultivates partnerships among educators globally to create materials and deliver training based on best practices in Holocaust and human rights education. Together we deliver content and strategies for teaching conflict history and prevention, and sustainable peace. They have been building resources for teachers about Ukraine since Feb. 24, including this webinar on Understanding the Crisis in Ukraine from March 19.

Melissa Carrion, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies the rhetoric of health and medicine, spoke to 50 mothers who had refused one or more vaccines for their children for a study published in 2017.“Across the board, every single one of them gave some variation of the advice that a mother ‘should do her own research,’” she said in a phone interview. “It was this kind of worldview that was less about the result of the research than the individual process of doing it themselves.”

One of the enticing aspects of cryptocurrencies, which pose an alternative to traditional financial institutions, is that expertise is available to anyone who wants to claim it. There are people who’ve gotten rich, people who know a lot about blockchains and people who believe in the liberating power of digital currencies. There is some recent institutional interest. But nobody’s been around very long, which makes the idea of “researching” your way to prosperity feel more credible.

Cryptocurrency trading, in contrast to medicine, might represent DYOR in pure no-expert form. Virtually everyone is operating in a beginners’ bubble, whether they’re worried about it or not, betting with and against one another, in hopes of making money.

ere, so-called research materials are often limited to a white paper, marketing materials and testimonials, the “due diligence” posts of others, the reputations of a currency’s creators and the general sentiment of other possible buyers. Will they buy-in, too? Will we take this coin to the moon?In that way — the momentum of a group — crypto investing isn’t altogether distinct from how people have invested in the stock market for decades. Though here it is tinged with a rebellious, anti-authoritarian streak: We’re outsiders, in this together; we’re doing something sort of ridiculous, but also sort of cool. Though DYOR may be used to foster a sense of community, what it actually describes is participation in a market.

A year ago, Luna boosters (and a few skeptics) in online forums offered the same advice to gathered audiences of potential buyers reading their posts, looking for tips: just DYOR. Thousands invested in both Luna and TerraUSD. The price of Luna climbed from around $5 to over $100. After the crash, at least one Reddit user suggested that the situation highlighted the “limit” of DYOR; the coin’s price had fallen to nearly zero.

TikTok has pushed all this further and faster

for months afterward, the tune was the backdrop of an endless stream of TikTok videos, almost none of which evoked the song’s spirit. But the algorithm liked it, so TikTokers obliged and this went on and on and on.

I have the same reaction when Facebook or Instagram serves me an image from “this day” umpteen years ago: Why do I need to be reminded of the moment I was trying to sell an old bureau?

It’s harder to have new ideas when everything is pulling you back to the past — not in a way that inspires, or draws from a well of keen emotion, but in a way that rewards you for just repeating or reliving it.

“Over 80 technical papers published since January 2022,” LeCun responded. “What about you?”

To which Musk posted: “That’s nothing, you’re going soft. Try harder!

At stake are the hearts and minds of AI experts—academic and otherwise—needed to usher in the technology

“Join xAI,” LeCun wrote, “if you can stand a boss who:– claims that what you are working on will be solved next year (no pressure).– claims that what you are working on will kill everyone and must be stopped or paused (yay, vacation for 6 months!).– claims to want a ‘maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth’ but spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories on his own social platform.”

Some read Musk’s “science” dig as dismissing the role research has played for a generation of AI experts. For years, the Metas and Googles of the world have hired the top minds in AI from universities, indulging their desires to keep a foot in both worlds by allowing them to release their research publicly, while also trying to deploy products. 

For an academic such as LeCun, published research, whether peer-reviewed or not, allowed ideas to flourish and reputations to be built, which in turn helped build stars in the system.

LeCun has been at Meta since 2013 while serving as an NYU professor since 2003. His tweets suggest he subscribes to the philosophy that one’s work needs to be published—put through the rigors of being shown to be correct and reproducible—to really be considered science. 

“If you do research and don’t publish, it’s not Science,” he posted in a lengthy tweet Tuesday rebutting Musk. “If you never published your research but somehow developed it into a product, you might die rich,” he concluded. “But you’ll still be a bit bitter and largely forgotten.” 

After pushback, he later clarified in another post: “What I *AM* saying is that science progresses through the collision of ideas, verification, analysis, reproduction, and improvements. If you don’t publish your research *in some way* your research will likely have no impact.”

The spat inspired debate throughout the scientific community. “What is science?” Nature, a scientific journal, asked in a headline about the dust-up.

Others, such as Palmer Luckey, a former Facebook executive and founder of Anduril Industries, a defense startup, took issue with LeCun’s definition of science. “The extreme arrogance and elitism is what people have a problem with,” he tweeted.

For Musk, who prides himself on his physics-based viewpoint and likes to tout how he once aspired to work at a particle accelerator in pursuit of the universe’s big questions, LeCun’s definition of science might sound too ivory-tower. 

Musk has blamed universities for helping promote what he sees as overly liberal thinking and other symptoms of what he calls the Woke Mind Virus. 

Over the years, an appeal of working for Musk has been the impression that his companies move quickly, filled with engineers attracted to tackling hard problems and seeing their ideas put into practice.

“I’ve teamed up with Elon to see if we can actually apply these new technologies to really make a dent in our understanding of the universe,” Igor Babuschkin, an AI expert who worked at OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, said last year as part of announcing xAI’s mission. 

The creation of xAI quickly sent ripples through the AI labor market, with one rival complaining it was hard to compete for potential candidates attracted to Musk and his reputation for creating value

that was before xAI’s latest round raised billions of dollars, putting its valuation at $24 billion, kicking off a new recruiting drive. 

It was already a seller’s market for AI talent, with estimates that there might be only a couple hundred people out there qualified to deal with certain pressing challenges in the industry and that top candidates can easily earn compensation packages worth $1 million or more

Since the launch, Musk has been quick to criticize competitors for what he perceived as liberal biases in rival AI chatbots. His pitch of xAI being the anti-woke bastion seems to have worked to attract some like-minded engineers.

As for Musk’s final response to LeCun’s defense of research, he posted a meme featuring Pepé Le Pew that read: “my honest reaction.”