Gen Z Revolution Versus All National Security States

There are signs of a Gen Z-led world transformation, but they’re coming from the Periphery of the world-system, not the imperial Core.

Sometime last month, Nepali youth started circulating memes on TikTok and Instagram of “nepo babies”—a double-barreled critique of the incompetence and corruption of its not-meaningfully-democratic ruling regime. Inequality had been visibly bad for years, and getting worse. Your most likely path to Gucci slides and swimming pools was to be a politician, or the family member of one.

What began as online viral protests against inequality and kleptocracy quickly transformed into Gen Z-led mass protests in real life when the ruling K.P. Oli government introduced a ban on most social media on September 4 (less than two weeks ago).

The government responded to mass protests with still more repression, ordering police to fire on protestors, leading to at least 20 dead and 300 injured by September 8, travesties that were filmed and spread online, along with video of the parliament being set ablaze. The “Nepo babies” meme was replaced with a call-to-action meme: “Burn their mansions.” By September 9, the president had resigned as protests not only grew but morphed into riots and direct action against elites’ property—a direct response to government repression. Much of Nepal’s political class indeed had their mansions burned down.

Although Nepal has not yet stabilized, the people have chosen a successor interim president—Sushila Karki, a former chief justice who resigned in 2017 after facing impeachment for trying to fight regime corruption.¹ Remarkably, she was nominated slapdash via polling on Discord, an online chat platform used mostly by gamers and podcasters.

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The Dialectic of Democracy

Nepal’s ongoing experience with revolutionary change reflects an obvious pattern that is consistent with processes of resistance and contestation in other countries:

• An out-of-touch government making its people more economically insecure—>

• Growing online critiques of governance failure—>

• Ruling-class ignores critiques—>

• Online critiques move to the streets—>

• Police-state censorship online and repression of IRL street protests—>

• Protests become riots or insurgencies in response to police repression.

Call it the dialectic of democracy, though the process rarely reaches its fullest expression.

A version of this process occurred in Syria (culminating in civil war), Myanmar (whose revolution is ongoing), New Caledonia (where the grievances about inequality fused with demands for self-determination), Kenya (where it combined with anti-IMF critiques), Sri Lanka (where it led to regime change), and Indonesia (where large-scale uprisings have raged in recent weeks). I’m sure it’s occurred in many other locales I just don’t know about.

Note that all of these countries are part of the Periphery (or at best Semi-Periphery) of the capitalist world-system. That is, revolutionary change is emanating from the global South, not the wealth-larded global North. And in the cases of both Nepal and Myanmar, the revolutions we’re talking about were explicitly led by Gen Z.

The Capacity to Resist Democracy

In the US and Europe too, Gen Z has been actively demanding change, often at the risk of not just their career prospects but also their personal safety. Gen Z is the demographic that primarily comprises Palestine Action, an organization that has done more to halt Israeli bombing in Gaza than any government. Gen Z led the student encampments demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. And Gen Z has been out in the streets disrupting ICE raids and denouncing military deployments in American cities.

But in the US especially, two major trends suffocate the prospect of progressive transformations of society.

One is that Gen Z boys in the global North have been disproportionately captured by the violent, racist, mysogynistic far right. And this reactionary skew is happening across developed countries:

The other suffocating trend in the West is the overwhelming power of its national security states. Rich governments have proven all too willing to surveil, police, and strangle anyone demanding peace, democracy, or equality. Because Gen Z is leading in the streets, it is disproportionately exposed to the active repression of national security states with near totalitarian powers of surveillance, carcerality, coercion, and force.

If we think of Nepal, Myanmar, and the US as comparative cases, what appears to be emerging is a brute reality: Direct expressions of democracy and demands for change can be too easily snuffed out within a resource-rich oligarchy that is constantly at war. Armed struggle—or even just riotous struggle forcing the state into a policy compromise—feels impossible in the US now. It was not always thus, even in the mid-twentieth century.

And then there’s the internet.

Online platforms were a necessary condition for the horizontal, real-time coordination of direct action in Nepal and Myanmar. Yet, for years, American pundits have urged people to get off social media, foreclosing any possibility of using it for organizing large-scale participatory democracy. Even the Occupy Movement in the US—people think of it as something that happened on the streets of New York—but it was more online than it was IRL, and its IRL direct actions benefited from platforms like Twitter. Basically, even though social media is a toxic place, the Western instinct to treat it as “not real life” really serves the interests of elite, out-of-touch politicians. In many poor countries, social media’s all they got.

In the global North, Gen Z is being repressed by rich police-state governments with tremendous resources and technological primacy. We all know about the trillion-dollar war machine, but the New York Police Department is bigger than most militaries, and now so is ICE. What chance do normal people have against such Orwellian infrastructure?

I’d like to think that Gen Z in America and Europe can usher in a new world, maybe lead us out of this ongoing nightmare. But it looks far more likely that the conditions in the Periphery are more favorable to radical change than the ossified, exceptionalist, violent, and impossibly corrupt governments in the imperial Core.

1. Two notable things about Karki are that her husband is a revolutionary who was part of an armed struggle against Nepal’s former monarchy and she has no ties to US institutions (eg, Ivy League attendance, Soros scholarships, etc). She had anti-kleptocracy, anti-oligarchy street cred, which no doubt helped in the Discord polling.