I was born a little after the year 2000, placing me squarely into Gen Z (I refuse to say “zoomer”). Despite this, most of the people I spend time with and most of the media I consume cause me to be perceived more like a millennial, at least by some people. This association has always kept me close to groups formed around 2000s nostalgia, and I’m not alone; it’s a trend for Gen Z to feel great nostalgia for the 2000s, especially those who are online all the time. Most of this “nostalgia” is for a time they don’t actually remember, and this has highlighted a few interesting traits of the generation for me.
The biggest sentiment I see echoed by Gen Z who are obsessed with “y2k” (or what they think is y2k, which in practice is anything tech-related from 1995-2012) is that the web, and software in general, is lacking customization. Above all else, this is the attribute of older times that is heralded as what’s missing from today’s software.
There is some truth to the notion that modern software lacks customization. Mainstream sites that were extremely customizable such as MySpace died, and surviving sites that used to provide similar levels of customization, such as YouTube, are much more streamlined and homogeneous. Most people who talk about this loss in user-customization don’t seem to understand the many reasons that caused this shift to happen, but they are indeed correct that it did happen.
This article isn’t here to complain about the state of software and the web, there are plenty of people with long-winded essays wielding easy-to-digest protest words like “enshittification” and “capitalism” to make you feel justified in your dissatisfaction. I, instead, want to try and explain my perspective on the how and why of Gen Z’s obsession with customization.
Why customize?
At risk of sounding contrarian, I have to point out that the overall shift online toward homogeneous layouts and designs is driven by efficiency. There are plenty of studies done and statistics supporting common design practices in software that many find boring and lacking creativity. If the level of customization people enjoyed in the 2000s was as intuitive as modern interfaces, they wouldn’t have gone away. Still, there’s clearly a demand for customization.
The first time I fully understood the role of customization in human psychology was when someone explained it as the human equivalent to a dog pissing to mark its territory. It was a funny analogy, but it clearly illustrated the underlying point: humans decorate their rooms, profiles, and whatever else they have access to because it shows that they own it. Not only that, but it also marks group membership. Why do different social movements and groups adopt specific aesthetics? Why do people get into a twist about dog whistles in design? It all comes down to tribal affiliation.
With an understanding that one of customization’s most important functions is marking tribal affiliation, we can start to understand why people desire it. For the average person, it’s more about tribalism than it is about individuality.
Gen Z’s relationship with profile customization
Gen Z seems to be laser-focused on online profile customization, way more than millennials. On its face, this could be explained by Gen Z simply using the Internet more. While that’s probably true, I believe there’s a deeper reason behind it. The most over-hyped cyber ideal that tech retards like to push is “the metaverse.” The thing is, if you remove the 3D component, the metaverse is already real. The amount of people who spend all their time online, piloting a virtual avatar in the form of a Discord pseudonym or Roblox character is ever-growing, and represents a huge demographic.
The profiles these Gen Z users inhabit for 12 hours a day are as deeply a part of them as their clothing and hairstyle. From their perspective, profile customization is as integral to their existence as real-world fashion. A lack of profile customization to Gen Z feels as restrictive as a corporate dress code.
One of the “benefits” of existing as an avatar online is that you can change things that are otherwise innate to you, like your sex and your physical appearance. This urge to customize oneself in ways that overcome physical limitations, previously restricted to mentally ill Tumblr users, is now so common that even LinkedIn gives you a free input text field for gender where you can type anything. As times goes on and more and more people exist predominantly as an online avatar, this self-customizing behavior will become increasingly accepted and enforced by culture.
Where self-customization becomes a problem
I would like to turn a blind eye and not care about this kind of thing. In a bubble, trading in your real-life identity for an online persona of your choosing causes no harm to others. Unfortunately, this all changes when you have to go to the store. All of a sudden, people are seeing the real-life version of you, completely unrelated to your crafted persona you chose online. Some people are able to compartmentalize their lives in such a way that this doesn’t cause them psychological harm, but from my experience, most can’t separate those two lives for themselves.
Cognitive dissonance is really hard to deal with. All parts of the human body, including the brain, aim for homeostasis. Mentally, this manifests as a need for consistency in beliefs and perception. For those that spend most of their time as someone completely unrelated to who they are physically (such even if it’s just a different personality and backstory), the real world becomes a threat to their psychological well-being. This is how bizarre things, like furries snapping if people don’t consider them to be their fursona in real life, happen. Furries are an obvious example, but this can manifest in more benign ways, too. My real concern is the codification of “personal realities” based on online personas into social norms. Gen Z is currently the biggest driver of this shift, and it doesn’t look like it’s slowing down anytime soon.
I write about escapism and the mindsets that drive people to lock themselves away behind the Internet.
So… what is your point? All you did was conflate profile customization and physical customization, imply that myspace died because it had more customization, said something about cognitive dissonance, and then promptly dipped. The article as it stands is written as an unfinished “X is good, but is it really though?” statement. I get that you have some level of self-awareness and don’t want to fall into the unoriginal mire of “Internet bad get off phone go outside” writing, but still you should have an explicit point.
To the point on people complaining about websites looking boring: I’m sure people just want the option to be able to customize a profile in fun ways rather than force everyone to be a hyper-individual with his own neocities color-vomit homepage.
Thanks for the comment. The point of this article is pointing out the self-customization mindset that drives people to consider their online personas to be their real personas and how the more of that there is, the more of it will be made into the social contract.
This really should have been 3 articles, with one going deeper into the main point, and the other two going into the tribal nature of style and the whole real-life avatar thing.
This also reminds me of another arcticle called “How people in their 20’s channel their mental illness” from Buzzfeed. Great job!