Every time I open my “For You” feed on Instagram, I’m ushered into a parallel classroom: informal, intimate, and oddly generous. Young girls and boys who look my age and live inside the same algorithmic present lean into their cameras, handing me bite-sized context to systemic injustices, climate disasters, and political upheavals.

One tells me why women stay in abusive relationships long after the myth of “choice” collapses, unpacking trauma bonds and survival instincts with the precision of a psychology lecture delivered from a bedroom floor. Another explains the systematic oppression of women in Afghanistan and how bans on their work, movement, and education have collapsed into sanctioned violence, compressing years of repression into three lucid minutes of a GRWM (get ready with me) reel.

I first learned the language of geopolitics and settler colonialism here as a lived, continuous process instead of an abstract academic concept. Someone casually recommended ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’ by Eve Tuck — a paper that entirely reorganised how I understand land, justice, and the limits of liberal empathy. These, for lack of a better word, ‘Gen Z influencers’ speak as interlocutors, inviting me into analysis rather than performing it at me.

As they translate dense theory, buried histories, and ongoing atrocities into language that is undiluted and travels far, they prove that authority no longer rests with legacy media outlets but in the ability to bridge the personal and the political.

While history has often only recognised generations after they have altered the course of things, 2025 hints at a time when recognition and impact arrived simultaneously.

This year, across continents, youth-led movements shared neither language nor ideology, yet converged in one unmistakable way: acts of resistance. Gen Z presented itself as a digital subculture, and more importantly, a political force willing to rupture the present to reclaim a future systematically denied to it.

In Nepal, the draconian ban on 26 social media platforms was the final miscalculation of a ruling government that underestimated the power of a digitally mobilised generation. Officially framed as a tax-enforcement measure, the ban was understood as an attempt to suffocate dissent, particularly a viral, youth-led “nepo-kid” campaign that exposed the extravagant lives of politicians’ children against the material hardships confronting most young Nepalese: unemployment and forced migration.

Protests soon engulfed Kathmandu, and the parliament building was set ablaze. It was a symbolic indictment of a political class that had insulated itself from accountability. The prime minister’s resignation and the formation of an interim government followed, signalling a generational rupture with the long-held belief that political power in Nepal was beyond challenge.

Madagascar followed a parallel arc. What began as frustration over chronic water and electricity outages quickly became an uprising against corruption and state failure. Organised largely through social media, young protesters mobilised without traditional party leadership. Tensions were further inflamed by President Andry Rajoelina’s

© Dawn Prism