Illustration: The Globe and Mail. Source Photo: Getty Images
Radmila Yarovaya is a writer and political researcher whose work explores digital culture, media power and authoritarian governance.
It’s 2012. I’m sitting on the hard floor of my elementary school gym with about 100 other preteens, listening to an “online safety expert” drone on about how we are far too young for social media, should never lie about our age to make accounts, and must – if we absolutely insist – keep everything private lest we fall prey to the innumerable dangers lurking behind every pixel. I’m horrified by the insinuation that anyone would do something so heinously dishonest. Yet that night, despite being a year shy of Facebook’s minimum age (13), I go home and make an account, aging myself up by a few years. My life of online anonymity has inadvertently begun.
A few years later, when I make my first Instagram account, I flip every privacy setting on – a signature of my generation – and use a pseudonymous nickname I then carry across platforms, effectively creating an online persona plausibly divorced from my real self. I am not the only one. To reach a childhood friend, I e-mail someone named “Roger Vacheron,” a name with no relation to her legal identity. I receive TikToks from “Hunter Greenwood,” knowing this is my university friend’s preferred digital self.
Five years after that, I’m sitting in the plush seats of my high-school theatre listening to a very kind woman explain how to curate our online presence to be more attractive to universities. I remember the warnings of my preteen years and find the contrast almost funny.
Is sharing my political views on social media hindering my job search?
Despite being raised online – or perhaps because of it – Generation Z approaches digital life with a surprising degree of caution. Shrouded in pseudonyms, burner e-mail accounts, and finstas (“fake Instagram accounts,” a secondary, more private account used for sharing more candid and personal content with a small group, or else taking on an entirely fictitious persona), we walk the digital world carefully – painfully aware that everything is forever, that employers and strangers are watching, and that anything can be used against you in the court of public life. If the constant connectedness has placed us in the panopticon Michael Foucault warned us about, the more sinister reality is that it’s not just governments watching – it’s corporations vying not only for our attention but our information.
If I had to sum up my attitude toward social media growing up, it would be cautious distrust. From the moment we logged on, adults warned us that we had no idea what future consequences our online actions might bring. A childhood friend of mine – whose inbox is still guarded by the pseudonym “roger.vacheron” – told me she created her first e-mail at age 9 “with the idea that no one could ever find me online.” That instinct wasn’t rare, it was the water we swam in.
What has always struck me is how cavalier older generations can be about their online visibility. The idea for this piece came when my employer included my full name and photo in his public newsletter. I had just finished blocking a persistent admirer who had followed me from Instagram and Facebook into real life, so seeing my face circulated to hundreds of strangers felt less like harmless publicity and more like exposure.
All of this made me wonder what exactly these behaviours say about us, and whether they point to a quiet generational shift. Born into the online world, Gen Z is often assumed to accept it uncritically. But according to Dr. Valerie Steeves, lead researcher for MediaSmarts’s Young Canadians in a Wireless World project, “young people often ask why the adults in their lives – parents, teachers, employers – force them to use tech when they don’t want to. They know they’re in a world where everything they say or do is recorded and can come back to haunt them. They just don’t have many alternatives.”
One of my more Luddite-leaning friends put it differently: “Being visible online is almost a systemic obligation now. You need it for school, for work, for existing.”
Now, unlike in past surveillance regimes, data flows freely between corporations, apps and platforms, each promising “efficiency” and “convenience” while quietly normalizing the idea that everything we do should be tracked.ANTHONY WALLACE/Getty Images
It would of course be erroneous to say that the entire cohort shares these sentiments, many embrace the visibility. But many more of us – even the chronically online – prefer to lurk in the shadows, shielded by fake personas, finstas, and burner e-mail accounts. As another friend, the aforementioned Hunter Greenwood, told me, “I don’t like to participate online because it’s never anonymous. Not really.”
It would be wrong to suggest that all Gen Zers are privacy-obsessed refuseniks; plenty have joined the ranks of the visibly online and monetizable. But even among the chronically online, there’s a strong preference for semi-anonymity – for lurking rather than performing. One friend admitted that she maintains a separate online identity because “it’s easier to express myself with a fake username. I’m not scared that a future employer will see what I like on Instagram.” She laughed at herself for calling it “irrational,” but the anxiety is real: “It’s not like I’m interacting with anything controversial. It’s just the thought of them seeing what I’m up to on the weekend.”
These forms of selective visibility – the careful curation, the hiding in plain sight – create a strange tension between authenticity and self-protection. How long can we maintain a divide between who we are and who we present? And is this curated distance a coping mechanism, a cultural norm, or a quiet form of resistance?
Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law, argues that this behaviour isn’t irrational at all – it’s adaptive. Canada’s privacy laws, he notes, “predate what they are trying to regulate,” leaving users to fend for themselves. “People turn to mechanisms other than the law,” he told me. “They may use services anonymously, or more commonly, pseudonymously, to create separation between their online persona and their personal reality. They may withhold information they don’t want widely shared, or create multiple personas so that there is less correlation between the totality of their online presence.”
That instinct – to fracture the self into safer pieces – isn’t just about privacy. It’s about control. In a digital ecosystem that demands constant performance, the ability to slip in and out of personas offers something like agency. It lets young people participate without fully surrendering themselves.
And perhaps that is the real generational difference: not a rejection of social media, but a refusal to be fully legible to it.
Surveillance isn’t new, but the scale and intimacy of today’s data collection is unprecedented. Dr. David Lyon, surveillance scholar and former director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University, told me that social media has “magnified the scope and intensity of today’s surveillance in ways that go far beyond” earlier eras of monitoring. In the past, systems like CCTV or workplace tracking were “stand-alone” – intrusive, yes, but limited. Networked technologies, he says, have changed everything. Now, data flows freely between corporations, apps and platforms, each promising “efficiency” and “convenience” while quietly normalizing the idea that everything we do should be tracked.
I don’t like to participate online because it’s never anonymous. Not really.
It’s unsettling to realize how seamlessly this has been woven into daily life. I didn’t think much about data capture until I was shamed by a roommate for casually clicking “accept all cookies” while browsing. It was almost muscle memory – a conditioned reflex. But running analytics for the online publication I cofounded finally made the stakes real: information on time spent scrolling, navigation choices, the country, hour and even the device type from which an article was accessed. And that was just for a magazine with around 50 monthly readers. It’s dizzying to imagine what is collected by platforms with billions of users. I have duly repented and rejected all unnecessary permissions since then.
We’re not oblivious to this. We’ve simply learned to live within it.
Paradoxically, sometimes we even celebrate it. Every December, Spotify Wrapped floods social media – a corporate data harvest regurgitated to an awaiting crowd. Even my most anonymous friends, the ones who operate under layers of pseudonyms and burner e-mail accounts, post their Wrappeds proudly. At work, the youngest staff huddled around phones to compare theirs collectively. It felt joyful, communal – and also a little like an admission that we’ve grown comfortable being monitored, so long as the surveillance comes with pastel graphics and a share button. I blame our conditioning via the personality quizzes of the mid-2000s.
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Still, not all is lost. As Dr. Valerie Steeves noted in our correspondence, many young people are beginning to push back, even subtly. Some retreat into passive participation – doomscrolling silently rather than posting. Others are carving out pockets of disconnection: high-school clubs that create phone-free zones, “disconnect challenges” shared half-ironically on YouTube, efforts to step away from dating apps. The alternatives are limited, but the desire for them is growing.
There is, at the very least, a sense that something isn’t sitting right – and that feeling may be its own form of resistance.
Gen Z’s wariness isn’t apathy or technophobia; it’s an adaptation to conditions we were born into. We learned young that the internet remembers everything, that data is currency, and that visibility can be both power and liability. So we split ourselves, compartmentalize, and retreat into half-presences. Yet the emerging pushback – the phone-free clubs, the hesitancy to post, the quiet desire for an offline life – suggests something important. We are not fully buying the world as it has been handed to us. In our caution, there is critique, and in that critique, perhaps, the faint outline of a different way forward.