Zoomer Randomness: Part 1

My mum says she doesn't get zoomer culture. Today I explained how I personally thought Zoomer conversations go. I said it contained an element of randomness. Here's how…

Let's say one zoomer says something to another zoomer. Sometimes, such as in the instance of memes and basic interactions, there will be a default response prepared.

However in longer conversation, given the scatterbrainedness of many zoomers, the composition of the sentence will inevitably have dual meanings. The other zoomer will then subconsciously do the exercise of assigning probabilities to each of the multiple meanings before preparing a response. Upon returning the best responses, which probably also contain multiple meanings, the zoomer who initiated the conversation will then have to repeat the exercise. Both zoomers keep on going until they get bored or uninterested.

One part of me feels that that is how every human conversation regardless of generations go. The difference is the set of default, ‘instantly-answerable’ questions, answers and conversation topics. Regardless of their differences, cross-generational discourse does continue to exist even if it is difficult for both sides to quicky understand each other.

Although randomness might be viewed as a detriment by the generations that precoded the Zoomers, randomness, or to give an alternative flavour, a probabilistic element, is a cornerstone of science and technologies. In the 20th century, statistics became a chief tool in economics, finances, physics and biology of the 20th century. Stock price predictions, quantum computing, drug trials, biological difference quantification - all hinge on some notion of randomness.

In the 21st century, learning models, animal or machine, fundamentally being constructed on random components, outperform deterministic models every single day of the week. Almost every human uses Google assistants and YouTube recommendations, every student and worker uses language learning models like ChatGPT and Deepseek. Randomness, at least understanding and application of particular forms and motions of randomness, can be argued to be crowning intellectual achievements of the humans that came up with them and the humans that continue to use and benefit from them.

I think the Zoomers' particular brand of human randomness is going to be how they survive for the rest of the 21st century.