Digital Gentrification

Digital spaces have shaped my real-world experiences. Born in 2000, the Y2K era, I have firsthand experience of the impacts that transformative information technology had on my brain and skills. My generation (Gen Z) sits in a unique position: although technology has been accessible and integral in our personal development in ways previous generations weren't, our most formative years were not dominated by hyper-consumerism and doom scrolling because the tech just wasn't there yet. Gen Z is the coin in mid-toss, the unobserved quantum state that becomes paradoxical once measured. We have skills from the past that seem to be fading quickly in our present. Today research writing, critical thinking, and reading, skills that influence our intellectual agility in online spaces and help us use digital tools to amplify our human skills, but this is rapidly changing.

I didn't have a smartphone until I was 13, which may sound young to a 40 year old, but in 2025, a 5-year-old born in the midst of COVID would be deeply confused or become aggressive without access to a smartphone, iPad, or personal computer. I had projectors in class, written exams, and a fear of my teachers. I had computer class where typing, searching, file management, and safe practices online were taught to a room of students who mostly had zero access to personal technology at home.

There was one girl in my fourth-grade class who was very snobby, but rightly so. She was a child actor. I remember learning about 30 Rock, specifically because she was in one episode. She always acted older, even though she was four feet tall. She was the first girl I remember seeing wear a purse to school instead of a school bag.

One day, her purse started to vibrate and sing. Her phone was ringing. It was some early 2000s, Akon-esque ringtone that blasted across the classroom while we all sat cross-legged on the square, gridded rug. She shot up quickly and ran to her bag to silence her phone. The whole class, including the teacher, was in shock. A phone? We all thought it was crazy; not one person I knew had a phone. I had a Game Boy, but no phone. The freedom to communicate and the privilege of freedom were gained through age and experience, and she was more independent, mature, and experienced than the rest of the class. She walked home from school to her home nearby, would audition for parts, and needed to communicate with her mother; her explanations were far from shared experiences that any of us nine year olds could relate to.

I finally got a phone in middle school, and the main reason was for communication in case of a disaster. Not an iPhone or smartphone, a Samsung Rugby flip phone, a phone without apps and the hardest phone to break. I was so happy. Now I was walking, taking the bus, train, or even biking to my new middle school further away. Suddenly, the phone was like a "skill tree" unlock in my inventory. When I was given my first phone, my mother told me that she remembered when her parent got her a personal landline, which was a huge deal at the time—instead of having to share the home phone, she could now receive private calls directly to her room. As an 11-year-old, I laughed, but now I see how my generation may be the last to experience this kind of restriction and privilege that was previously shared intergenerationally. Now, many parents stick phones in the hands of babies like pacifiers to silence responsibility and create an environment of immediate solutions. At least the worst case scenario for a pacifier is buck teeth, not a lifelong dopamine-dependency to screens.

Whats Changed?

Over the last 15 years, I have watched the city I grew up in change dramatically. Gentrification is the process of public and private property development that uses rezoning and redlining to displace low-income individuals and families through the veil of progress, urban development, and neoliberal safety.

Just like Brooklyn, the internet I grew up with has been gentrified. Chopped and changed, all for better (more intrusive) data collection, addictive user experiences, and predictive advertising. I miss the old Youtube, a digital space that was once ad-free, educational, and hilarious. Even Instagram was once an ad-free platform where my friends and I would post silly snapshots of our lives, share overly written, angst-filled paragraphs full of tears, but once acquired by Meta, previously Facebook, ads became synonymous with the app. X was actually usable; it was also called Twitter. There were less bots, less porn, less gore, and no Grok AI. Twitter shaped our generation's humor and wit. Subliminally forcing our thoughts into quick, digestible quips that turn personal observations into collective, cultural truths. Twitter even redefined how protest movements scale internationally by offering a place where humans can post real-world footage of the horrors not seen across the world.

Today, you can still do all of this on the internet, but not without ads ads ads ads ads ads ads ads, and constantly checking that media you watch isn't some Baudrillard-esque simulacrum of uncanny AI-generated videos.

The internet kinda sucks. Like Majorly.

Holy Advertising

Growing up with a Welsh father, I've seen too many James Bond films. As a little boy, it takes maybe twenty minutes of Bond driving a DB9 for a ten year old to fall in love with Aston Martins. After a decade of watching them together, that line—"a vodka martini, shaken not stirred"—became liturgy. Bond is defined through his luxurious taste and his paradoxical lack of respect for luxury: Aston Martins destroyed, Omega watches turned into explosives, Vesper martinis thrown into the eyes of enemies. When Ian Fleming wrote these details, they were character. When I was finally allowed to watch Casino Royale (2006) with Daniel Craig, I was amazed—it rebuilt the identity of a character I thought I knew.

Then Skyfall came out in 2012, and Bond drank Heineken. Beer. The advertising was suddenly clear. It was rude, in-your-face. Bond felt defiled and suddenly, American.

Gen Z spots product placement like waldo on a blank page; there is no respect for the advertising, especially if it tries to hide. Wayne's World was ahead of its time. The Pepsi scene is famous for its self-aware writing and cultural critique wrapped into a simple joke in which Wayne talks about "Never selling out" to big business while breaking the fourth wall and taking a big ol' sip of Pepsi. The product is advertised without ever saying the word Pepsi. It's excellent writing, and physical comedy displayed through this protestful silence and direct ignorance, Wayne silently says fuck Pepsi, I hate doing this—but it has to be done. This is deeply honest and scarily accurate of our modern experience.

Scroll through TikTok for one minute, and you will see the strangest examples of product placement. Ads have extended to an unknown individual. Micro-celebrity and influencer ship have given everyone access to these kinds of product deals. When the American Dream shifts from a meritocratic rise in class and status through labor to becoming an influencer with 100k+ followers, commodifying one's life and getting paid to promote products from home, advertising suddenly reaches a new level of sublime. I say this because sometimes I mention a product or problem I have, and suddenly, ads for that product or a related product appear on my social media. My anger peaks when these ads bleed into my smart TV, "smart".

We experienced the gentrification of digital spaces firsthand, and much like the physical world, these spaces are rebuilt with the goal of profit. Sadly, I think my entire generation feels this way; our collective disappointment with technology is met with complacency and stagnation. Toes and nose kissing the wall with just enough space between the wall and your mouth for the lips to move and say "lol".

There is a cynicism in Gen Z that is lost in the younger, new generation. Alpha. These children grew up in gentrified digital spaces. iPads at four, unmonitored time spent browsing YouTube, and the hilarious parental confusion I have no sympathy for. Children today face novel issues, such as screen dependency, by the age of 5. You sit at the restaurant and watch tables of parents conversing over silent children, their eyes glued to iPads or phones, a passive degradation. Terrible parenting, yet you can't blame Millennial parents for poor technological oversight of their children. These parents are first-wave lab rats dealing with new kinds of parental dilemmas: give Timmy the iPad and zone out, or take the iPad from Timmy and try to parent him while he has crack-addict-like withdrawals from the iPad I got him for Christmas. When you build your coffin, don't be surprised when the lid doesn't fit. I am eternally grateful that in the most random act of birth and conscience, I was privileged enough to be born with a dad who loves technology.

Liminal Kids

In the late 90's through the early 2000s, my dad owned and ran an internet cafe in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn called Merlin Web. Ahead of its time, customers could come and use desktop PCs for their basic needs, like printing, emailing, or simply surfing the web, on accessible computers. The main focus was on offering web development services to local businesses seeking to modernize in the new internet era with online, digital storefronts. Merlin Web would build these websites, handle the maintenance and upkeep required post-build, and in any moment of free time in between, game. He worked with friends, all tech-savvy programmers and coders in love with the digital world. As much as they worked, I think they probably gamed five times more. I was there a lot.

I grew up consuming sci-fi media and watching him play StarCraft, Lord of the Rings Online, anything Valve-related either at Merlin Web, or at home. Me peeking over his shoulder, watching his intense focus. I felt like I was learning from a master. It wasn't long until I myself was playing with him and his buddies through late hours on weekends, playing what seemed like infinite Minecraft with my friends, on a server hosted, moderated, and regulated by dad, or reversing roles with my dad over my shoulder, coaching me through puzzle games like Portal after dinner, rugby matches, and chores. Never giving me the answers, but helping me stay calm and hungry for the challenge, rather than frustrated by the deaths and disappointments. I grew up around people who contributed to making the internet what it is today, always asking questions about the internet before I was born, trying to learn more about the complexities hidden behind the screen. His love for, and relationship to, technology was massive; it meant that when Mom begged me to get off my DS because I was playing too much Pokémon Diamond, he was able to mediate with the compromise of: "let him save at the next checkpoint and he will get off," and I did. It's that understanding and experience that helps parents give kids the respect needed to grow out of childhood while reinforcing parental rules and good habits that help teach self-control. Most importantly, my dad shaped me into a skeptic; he believes in questioning, often explaining (without using this term) how the internet is a dual-use technology.

Data privacy has been a topic that has been in my brain since, forever. My dad has always been an advocate for digital rights, data ownership, transparent development, and to this day contributes to the Fediverse. From an early age, he made it clear that there are responsible and irresponsible ways to use the internet. I was taught early how to manage cookies and do my best to stay in control of my online presence, but there is only so much he (I) could do: to sign up for The Facebook in 2010, users were required to be aged thirteen+ to sign up, but with absolutely zero way to enforce this rule, minors (like myself) flooded the platform with fake birthdays and fake names. I could definitely hear the confusion and disappointment in his voice when he called asking me about a Facebook profile using my face in the profile picture, but named Ieuan Ng (my name is Ieuan king). What do I mean by disappointment? If I had made a Facebook account, and successfully kept it hidden until I was 13 (he had access to my emails, history, blah blah blah), I honestly think that his programmer brain would have been proud if I had kept it secret successfully, so the missing "Ki" from "King," and a profile picture that was clearly my face encouraged disappointment. But this is how it goes 99% of the time.

Unlike my dad, I had access to social media and mature videos on the internet at the age of 10, not 27. Beheading videos on LiveLeak, horrific gore on r/gore and 4Chan, we were desensitized early, but we weren't iPad babies. Like my dad, we witnessed and helped create the social media platforms that today, dominate our lives. Through fifteen years of iterations, failed UI designs and features, or data-privacy lawsuits. It should be clear to everyone why Gen Z kids are black-pilled skeptics who meme about 9/11 and feel paradoxically complacent and unable to cause change when sedation and accessible modern horrors become daily rituals packed into the act of doom scrolling.

Digital spaces have shaped the way that I, and many other Gen Z children, developed socially, academically, and personally, but unlike the generation below me, Gen Alpha, we remember that liminal space between integration and inception. When the wired was polylithic, fluid, and user-focused. I am eternally grateful to have grown up in this timeline, but what happens when recent history becomes a nostalgic fantasy? Generation Alpha represents a paradigm shift in childhood and adolescence, moving from unstructured, creative development—to—stimulating, structured development through digital activities.

Less time outside, less time together, kids born in generation alpha dont play together as much, and i'm trying so hard to not sound boomer (old, for you boomers), but our experiences as Gen Z kids have much more in common with our parents. As an American born in 1967, my mom grew up with TV in the house, she had a record collection, and eventually a personal landline. This is essentially my childhood experience just with better video games, and not because the technology didn't exist. It did. My parents just understood how to regulate, monitor, and advise me through these phases of my life because I wasn't freaking out in public when I didn't have an iPad, or struggling to make friends and play outside. My parents could barely contain me from leaving the house at any moment possible to go play in the park with my friends. Even when we had phones, the best use case was talking with my friends, setting up hanging out, then hanging out and doing stuff not related to the phone. Like pranking people on the streets, goofing around in the park being reckless teenage boys, we even made a game called sewage ball that is a mix between european handball and basketball because we spent so much unstructured time together.

Building A Future We Remember—Not The One We Want.

We saw the warnings. We loved the warnings. Then we built them anyway. My dad raised me on Philip K. Dick—movies, books, video games, anything that explored what technology might do to us. I grew up loving Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report the list is long, but I will always remember how deeply impactful WALL-E was for my dad. We watched in theatre together, and still, WALL-E pops into my brain often, like a sad memory of future I shouldn't remember.

WALL-E is a children's sci-fi movie set in a future where humans have become obese, sedentary, and dependent on technology in a world ravaged by pollution and greed. When me and my dad left the theatre, it was clear that he was moved by the film. I remember how he described WALL-E as ahead of its time and mature for a kids' film. He was right; it took years, but subliminally, WALL-E showed me, and a generation of children raised online, what the outcomes of consumerism, digital dependency, and techno-feudalism could do to our precious home. Earth.

When I think back to all those amazing films my dad showed me, a paradox is very quickly revealed: When the future is depicted through media, the viewer subliminally creates future expectations, and the scope of possibility narrows. My dad's generation (Gen X) helped build the modern internet and lost control quickly, suddenly what was the wild west became the most effective demography tool and predictive purchasing platform. They didn't avoid their favorite sci-fi dystopias, they unintentionally built the futures that were offered as warnings and misinterpreted as entertaining.

We aren't waiting for the dystopia: Modern technology is dystopian but uncannily familiar. It pains me to rewatch a Gattaca, Blade Runner, or Minority Report when predictive policing, gene editing, and AI humanoid-robots are all ethical tech-dilemmas happening in our lives today, and somehow it feels like some confusing, consumer-core, reverse mandela effect where we literally remember futures from the past.

Even with movies like Idiocracy, which paints a similarly dark future where humans have lost intellectual skills due to technological-dependence, or The Matrix a movie that redefined how we visualize these themes in futuristic ways like "bullet time", but when stripped to the core, all these movies warn us about the relationship that humans have to both technology and digital space—yet I have to grow up in a millenial-built, Gen X-funded hell where the internet operates as this brown entity of dual-use tech that is both amazing and dangerous. The entrepreneur-millennials doubled down on this future, they pacify humans with technological binkies, uncontrolled access to social platforms, and build datamines for predictive purchasing models.

I bet the Zuck, Altman, Musk, and the whole lot of them share love for my favorite films/TV shows like the Matrix, Blade Runner, Battlestar Galactica and so on—but to me these movies are horrors. Warnings, not fantasies.

This take isn't original, I know. But how many people will have to vocalize these worries before we recalibrate our development philosophies around change, not progress. Will it take 7000 crispr-made babies before we realize that gene editing goes hand-in-hand with eugenics (Gattaca)? The same goes for Neural Link (EyePhone, Futurama), Generative AI romantic partners (Her), and humanoid robots for hard-to-do physical tasks (Moon).

A Whole Lot Of Nothing.

NEO is one of many newly announced autonomous robots built for home chores like vacuuming, dusting, putting away the dishes, opening the door, really just anything cleaning related. NEO may be extremely helpful for individuals who struggle with physical disabilities or mobility issues, 1X clearly believes that NEO will help the elderly. Sure.

But how does NEO work? Is it truly autonomous?

Of course, 1X makes it is insanely difficult to understand, luckily I do. Although written everywhere possible on their website, the "autonomy" the NEO is capable of, is purely theoretical, and most likely is straight buns (not good!). 1X does an excellent job of using positive language for questionable tech, a classic move. For example: 1X's NEO can be set to "Expert Mode" where "NEO works autonomously by default. For any chore it doesn't know, you can schedule a 1X Expert to guide it, helping NEO learn while getting the job done." (1x.tech) Schedule an expert? What is an expert?

An Expert is a human. Not an expert human, or an expert in any specific task. This expertise pertains to the intrinsic human qualities that robots like NEO lack. 1X plans to have tons of "experts" (underpaid humans) guiding and training these anthropomorphized robots for an eventual autonomy. This is called puppeteering, the training method where humans use their physical, real-world body to train physically, real-world-capable robots. While this may sound effective, I believe this may be one of the scariest techno-feudal ideas I have heard. 1X is silently proposing a business model where wealthy individuals purchase robots that they can order around 24/7 to do basic chores around the house. Now this would be all good and fun if these robots were not being controlled by humans, most likely international, underpaid, and turned into faceless slaves.

Joanna J. Bryson's piece, Robots Should Be Slaves (2009) brilliantly explains how and why robots should be tools not friends. I don't think Bryson was prepared for a future where the robots built for slavery are also controlled by humans out-of-reach. This framework avoids what Bryson warns us about in 2009.

Today we live in this reality, humans complaining that GPT 5.1 was less agreeable and more robotic. Less human. Like the techno-pacifiers millennials stuff into the fingered mouths of children, generative chatbots are eroding human-skills rather than amplify them—and this is deeply confusing. When we grow up suffocated in fantastical warnings and red flags, shouldn't these futures be avoided? I hope WALL-E scared Gen Z kids like it scared me. Humans should avoid being stuck in this collective-psychosis where we build a future we remember instead of the one we want.