The Internet and Its Discontents

Freya India is worried about the girls. Girls®, to be more precise. “We have been transformed from people into products,” the blurb of her book, GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, claims. The “we” she is invoking allegedly includes herself; India, the 26-year-old writer behind the popular Substack newsletter GIRLS and staff writer at Jonathan Haidt’s publication After Babel, began writing what would eventually become this book in 2021 to “figure out why [she] felt so anxious and alone.” Over time, she explains at the start of the book, she came to the conclusion that the internet was the problem, and the incentive structure that young women have online is making them more anxious, more alone, and more disconnected than ever.