Thanks to social media, teens are able to directly interact with their culture - celebrities, movies, brands - in ways never before possible. But is that real empowerment? Or do marketers hold the upper hand? Douglas Rushkoff explores how the teen quest for identity has migrated to the web – and exposes the game of cat-and-mouse that corporations are playing with them.
Direction
Rushkoff's accessible paranoia without conspiracy-theory energy
Editing
Seamless archival footage weaving Fred Durst into serious critique
Writing
Narration that treats teens as subjects, not punchlines
Director
Douglas Rushkoff
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
This predates TikTok's algorithmic dominance by nearly a decade, making its warnings feel almost quaint—yet the teen behavior patterns Rushkoff documents directly enabled what came next.
Rushkoff coined 'Generation Like' to distinguish from Millennials; the term never stuck, but the economic reality he named became the default condition of online existence.
US
