Online pressures turn Gen Z girls into shopping machines more like products than people: book

In her debut book, Gen Z author Freya India tells the story of how girls her age were transformed by the modern world into “Girls” — products for consumption shaped by social media, beauty filters, and Big Tech.“Young women in particular are starting to see themselves as something more and more like products rather than people,” India, 26, claimed to The Post.“They’ve grown up seeing themselves as basically nothing but an object in a marketplace, and the goal of their life is to optimize themselves for the market, to package up their experiences, and then to be rated and reviewed by people online.”India’s book, published May 5, explores “all these different areas of girls’ lives: how they look, how they feel, their relationships, how they feel about the future.” She said, “I found that there was so much in modern life that was magnifying those normal anxieties and, more than that, exploiting them for profit.”India points a finger at Big Tech for throwing unhelpful solutions at girls who are going through otherwise normal struggles.

When they feel insecure, she writes, girls “have to handle that in a world of Facetune, AI filters, and feeds of edited Instagram influencers, recommended by algorithms to precisely target their insecurities.”If they feel emotional, “they have to sort through the noise of TikTok therapists, YouTubers pushing BetterHelp discount codes, and ads for medication delivered straight to their door.”When they’re struggling in love, “they must manage that in a world of Tinder and Pornhub, where romance feels dead, where the only guidance they get comes from dating influencers profiting from their fear and confusion, where they are made to feel frigid or needy for wanting more.”According to India, her generation has “no sense of shared values or purpose binding them with others —all that is left is scrolling, working, consuming, and optimizing, alone.”She blames Big Tech for supplying young girls with...