Gen Z — is your digital ‘legacy’ really worth dying for?

Emma Clarke, The Independent

There are two distinct breeds of influencer these days: those who stay at home, creating videos of their daily routines, weekly cleans or cooking “from scratch”; and those who go out of their way to find danger; risking their lives to put death-defying stunts on the internet. Just last week, during Hurricane Milton, 32-year-old Caroline Calloway shared a defiant message about why she was ignoring the mandatory evacuation in her area — before using the opportunity to promote her book. And Mike Smalls Jr went outside in Tampa to livestream himself on Kick jumping into the water with an inflatable mattress, all while violent winds blew around him. “The wind started picking up and I don’t know how to swim… so I had to grab on to the tree,” he told viewers. But sometimes this desperate search for content goes badly wrong.

The latest of these is a British influencer, who has fallen to his death while attempting to scale one of Spain’s highest bridges — the Castilla-La Mancha Bridge, just west of Madrid — in a social media stunt. The 26-year-old (unnamed) man and a friend, 24, allegedly climbed the 630ft-high structure without any safety gear. It isn’t the first time creating “content” has resulted in a fatality, either. In July this year, Indian influencer Aanvi Kamdar fell down a 300ft gorge after filming near the Kumbhe waterfall in the western state of Maharashtra. And in 2021, Hong Kong influencer Sophia Cheung plummeted to her death while trying to capture footage near a waterfall on the Tsing Dai stream.

Which all begs the question: why? Of course, the most obvious answer might be: money. Creating this sort of content — especially livestreams — can earn social media users hundreds of thousands of pounds — if not more. But, what’s the point of earning loads of cash if you don’t live to enjoy it? To me, the drive for Gen Z to do stunts like these actually seems less about money and more about validation and a disconnect from reality. And to some degree, I get it. It didn’t start with Gen Z, either — but with my generation of millennials. We were the last to grow up without social media. Yes, we had Bebo, MySpace and Facebook, but it was never of the scale that it is now. It wasn’t until my second year of uni that Instagram was launched — and so, too, were influencers. Initially, we’d post pictures of everyday things for our friends (our dinners, cups of coffee, the books we were reading...) — all with vignette borders, of course. It wasn’t really performative. The subject matter was so mundane we never expected to go “viral” or make a career from it.

But then, when posting pictures of ourselves we had taken on a night out, we’d chuck a load of hashtags into the comments section and watch as our “like” count increased. 103 hearts for a blury selfie, even though we don’t know who half these people are? Yes, please. More followers and fire emojis from gushing strangers? Sure. There were always myths going around about how to cheat the system and amplify your likes, too – as well as urban legends about what not to do. “Don’t edit the caption after you’ve posted, because it’ll tank”, people said. “Post at 2am GMT so you reach the US audience”; “never post on a Monday.”

It all started to feel too much for me — especially when my feed became a stream of obscenely wealthy, tanned and toned women (usually with wide-brimmed straw hats on and flowy dresses), as they shared snaps of their boujee holidays. I was a student and could barely afford a Pot Noodle, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me feel inferior at times. Why wasn’t I travelling the world? Why didn’t I have washboard abs?... And that was all before social media really started taking off. People these days don’t really have a fighting chance — and that’s incredibly depressing. It’s also much harder to get that same level of traction on posts nowadays, which is likely why people who have actually made a career out of social media feel the pressure to go to extremes to break through. I do feel sorry for them.

But what I wish they could understand is that these digital interactions and this online persona they’ve created for themselves aren’t real — nor do they reflect their worthiness. They’re conning themselves into thinking they are popular, entertaining and well-liked — all because of strangers’ throwaway remarks or actions. But ultimately, their post is just one of many people have skimmed past that hour, and these interactions don’t really hold any weight. I think of social media as a landfill. There’s an endless churn of images and videos — and they all have the same fate; regardless of that momentary exchange. They all end up forgotten. They’re nothing — they don’t even really exist, in any lasting sense or capacity. You can’t put them in a memory box for your kids to open in the future. You also have to factor in things such as algorithm changes, product updates and big tech bosses. As an influencer, you are always at the whim of their decisions — and so to risk your own life to create content that might not even get the desired effect seems incomprehensible to me. Why are you wasting your one wild and precious life on Mark Zuckerberg?

The solution? Well, just as tech bosses are in charge of surfacing certain types of content, they can control what content is banned and penalised. I believe they need to do more to prevent and discourage dangerous behaviours (and no, TikTok, having a banner saying that people in the video are “professionals” is not enough).