Log off to level up: Meet the King’s College London alumnus taking on Gen Z scroll culture

A King’s College London alumni is taking on Gen Z’s scroll culture.

Freya India, a former politics student at King’s College London, has become an unlikely voice of Gen Z having no TikTok, Instagram or selfies on her phone.

Since quitting social media in 2021, the 26-year-old has built a global readership by arguing that the very platforms that raised her generation are fuelling its anxiety, identity crisis and disconnection from real life.

Growing up in Essex, Freya was handed an iPod touch aged 11, which was intended for music but loaded with social media apps.

In an interview with The Times, she explained: “My parents didn’t really know; they were just told it was another iPod. It’s hard to talk about without shaming a whole generation of parents, but they were thrown into it just as much as we were.”

What followed, she said, was a girlhood shaped by likes, rankings and self surveillance with sleepovers becoming content opportunities and worth being quantified in followers.

Now based in Washington DC, India recently published her book: Girls Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything.

In it, she argues that young women have been turned into brands by curating, marketing and optimising themselves for algorithms. Posting a selfie, she suggests, is not harmless fun, but self commodification.

Her central claim is that Gen Z girls did not grow up online, but instead they grew up on display.

Most Read

Investigating what the Love Is Blind season 10 cast actually do for jobs, according to LinkedIn

Horrid new details about body emerge as pop star is named a ‘target’ in teen’s death

Um, Chris from Love Is Blind is ‘so awful’ he’s being used as a case study in psychology classes

While much debate around screen time has focused on boys and figures like Andrew Tate, India believes girls have faced a quieter crisis which she believes to be as a result of endless comparison, hyper sexualised content, therapy speak diagnoses and targeted advertising.

She explained the effect this has had on her: “It was the only world I’d experienced, but when I was writing these memories down, it felt so dystopian,” India says.

However, logging off and deleting social media changed everything for her. Freya explained that: “When older women tell me their experiences of [growing up], I feel like I missed something more wholesome.”

But refusing to document her life gave her what she calls real confidence, the kind that is not dependent on instant feedback.

Alongside limiting screen-time, India credits Christianity and traditional community structures with grounding her. In a generation often described as the least religious yet, she believes faith offers something algorithms cannot adding that: “What appealed to me [about religion] was something otherworldly that takes you out of your own head.”

Her views are also sceptical of liberal parenting, critical of hook-up culture and wary of over-medicating anxiety which have received both praise and controversy. Unlike many online commentators, India keeps her own private life offline, including her relationship.

For a generation fluent in filters and feeds, her advice is simple: Log off, look up and reclaim a self that is not for sale.

For more of the latest news, guides, gossip, and memes, follow The King’s Tab on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

Featured image via YouTube