Have you noticed the world is getting fast and wavy lately? Rex Woodbury has too. He’s a venture capitalist with a Substack which explains a lot of our hyperspeed progress through the lens of Gen Z. Duncan Greive gets inside his head.

Rex Woodbury is a very modern dude. He’s a venture capitalist with Index Ventures, a European investment firm which has stakes in some of the defining firms of the modern internet. But he’s also a kind of slashie, with 250,000+ followers of his Instagram account (to be fair, he and his partner are objectively super handsome), and the writer of an excellent Substack. It’s called Digital Native, and he refers to it as a “forcing mechanism”, a regular tranche of observations and predictions which flow out of him studying the cultural and social habits of young people, and investing accordingly. Digital Native comes out weekly and has become maybe my favourite media product right now, always packed with insight and shot through with a persistent wonder and optimism about all the ways technology is changing the world.

He’s not uncritically optimistic by any means – he believes in guardrails to cover negative externalities caused by all this rapid change. But the fact that someone who studies the evolving behaviour of our most online generation emerged so hopeful has been what I needed to get through the past year. I had Woodbury on my podcast The Fold this week, which he agreed to do on the express condition that we talk about Gen Z, the group to which he devotes the bulk of his time and attention. On that basis I brought along my good friend Lucy Blakiston, so it wouldn’t be a Gen X and a Millennial talking about Gen Z, but instead we had a real live one with us to test the theses.

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It also helps that Blakiston runs Shit You Should Care About, an Instagram account which has become a hypermodern distributed media company, with podcasts and newsletters serving a devoted global audience numbering in the millions. She naturally embodies so many of the traits Woodbury identifies, and brought her boundless enthusiasm to the chat.

At this point I need to acknowledge that it might scan as weird (at best) for me to be 42 and increasingly obsessed with Gen Z, but I’m far from the only one. You will have noticed how broken the big social apps have become lately – that is 100% Gen Z’s fault, thanks to their mass embrace of TikTok. Facebook and Instagram, losing users and essentially irrelevant to young people these days, have decided that it’s better to risk alienating your old and profitable audience than to lose the pipeline of new users. Gen Z is such a powerful predictor of the future that Mark Zuckerberg feels he has no choice. Many other companies will follow suit, if they haven’t already, because TikTok’s adoption by teens prefigured it fast rippling up into millennials, and everyone (including me!) is terrified of being stranded by an outgoing cultural tide.

“I think we’re at this unique moment in time where the new generation is coming of age,” says Woodbury. “An internet native generation. We’ve had the shock of the pandemic, which is a near-term shock, but also the sort of decades-long tail winds of generational change. So I think it’s a really interesting time to revisit a lot of the norms that we take for granted.”

Woodbury’s all about looking at norms which are ripe for disruption – his job depends on him being right about this stuff, and his writing crackles with knowledge and insight. He recently wrote a two-part series called the 10 characteristics that define Gen Z. I’ve tried to jump off that into what felt like his buzziest insights from our kōrero.

1. Communities are now interest-driven rather than the product of geography.

Meta and Alphabet, the parent companies of Facebook and Google respectively, are “relics of an earlier era of the internet”, says Woodbury. While this will be super confronting to them and their staff, seeing as it was only a few short years ago that they were the hottest new things in media, it’s a simple fact now. They’re relics because they start from where the user is in the world, and Woodbury says that grows less definitional by the day. Facebook was built on “the social graph”, essentially serving you content created or shared by your family, friends and colleagues – those you encountered and spent time with IRL. TikTok exploded that by serving you content from anywhere, about anything and baking extreme global virality into the platform.

Woodbury says that mirrors the extremely online Gen Z reality, in that they are “discovering friendships on Discord servers or subreddits”. I have two Gen Z daughters, and one Gen Alpha, and this absolutely scans – our family dinner is constantly delayed so that an eight-year-old can add a new friend on a Roblox server when she’s hard capped at 200 and has to delete one. This messy, chaotic era of the internet is fast replacing the very orderly one created by the social and search giants, one closely tied to your real identity, meaning you had to act normal around your parents and/or future employers.

“Facebook was born in this era of social media that was much more built around your friends and acquaintances from your geography, your offline connections – my college roommate, my high school friend group,” says Woodbury. “Those were the people that I was linked up with on Facebook. And now what TikTok has done, what Discord has done, what Reddit is built on, is this idea of interest-based social graphs that are borderless in nature.” Which leads quite directly to…

2. Gen Z are creating weird new jobs which sound full sci-fi – but will only proliferate

Woodbury’s employer Index Ventures is an investor in many of the companies he talks about, which is on some level the function of his newsletter but also an apparent conflict of interest in terms of his ability to dispassionately assess them. Fortunately those companies are so enormously influential as to render such concerns moot – the world is manifestly being remade by them. Index has invested in the social community firm Discord, meme stock trading platform Robinhood and gaming powerhouse Roblox, along with a long list of other wildly influential firms like Etsy, Dropbox, Slack and Patreon. And when Woodbury talks about Gen Z jobs, he’s talking more often about work enabled by those companies than at those companies.

“When I think about the creator economy, I think much broader than just the Instagram influencer or a person making TikTok videos,” says Woodbury. “I met a young person the other day who makes a living building sneaker bots. He builds bots that he then sells online and people use them on sneaker marketplaces. So when the next Yeezys are coming out, and they want to buy sneakers, they could use his bot.”

It’s a hard-to-scale edge case, sure, but there are other examples everywhere, including emergent crypto and DAO spaces – both frequently maligned, but also employing thousands of people working on projects (not jobs as we know them). They might never meet IRL and would have no hope of explaining their activity to their parents, but these are real, if virtual, workplaces.

“People are learning to be fluent in the internet to find new careers that didn’t exist 10 years ago, five years ago, even,” says Woodbury. “And I think that’s the future.” He points to the explosive growth of the freelance economy and the rise of remote work (see #5) as further enablers of this megatrend. My guest co-host Blakiston is a quintessential example of this – she’s someone from a tiny New Zealand town who nonetheless felt highly connected to the world. Who learnt to run communities and growth-hack social followers as a teenage Directioner. And who now has created an enormously influential and extremely modern media company using those same skills.

3. The Metaverse is both a contaminated brand and also inevitable 

The idea of multiple interlinked VR worlds was popularised in 2021 – a torrid year for new digital concepts – and now the metaverse is competing with NFTs for the title of the most widely-denigrated fad idea, thanks in no small part to Facebook swiping it for a new name, instantly dooming its cool. But despite his chagrin at Zuckerberg’s co-option of the concept, Woodbury remains a believer. He cites a 2015 quote from Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games, the studio behind the smash gaming environment Fortnite, who memorably said “I’ve never met a sceptic of VR who has tried it.”

Woodbury agrees. “I think that there will be virtual spaces that are immersive, that are an important part of the future of the internet.” He uses the contemporary examples of composable worlds in Minecraft and Roblox – both enormously popular with teens – as evidence that digital environments which allow for play, trade and community are inevitable. He also points to the iconic early-00s gaming platform Neopets as a forerunner for this – an example of his sharp use of analogy and cultural tech history to bridge an audience into these spaces. The metaverse is essentially Neopets but with crypto and NFTs enabling the building out of completely new economic paradigms. (This will be challenging and complicated, but let’s set that aside for now).

He also talks about metaverse cynicism as often coming from people who have quite elite lives, a concept coming to be known as “reality privilege”. Ironically he heard about it from the iconoclastic billionaire investor Marc Andreesen, objectively one of the world’s most privileged humans on earth, but the concept scans regardless.

“It’s this basic idea that it’s easy to wring your hands and say, ‘people spending time in the metaverse, that’s antisocial’, or it’s bad for our physical health. ‘We should be spending time in nature and in the world’. And I think that’s absolutely true. We certainly shouldn’t replace the natural world with technology. But the concept of reality privilege says that you might have a very vibrant life, or live in a very vibrant place – I live in New York City. But not everyone in the world gets to live in the hub of so much art and culture.

“So if you’re somewhere quite isolated from people, or if you’re somewhere where you can’t experience a Broadway show, or can’t go to a theme park or amusement park or the movie theatre, then the vibrancy of your life might be more complete in the metaverse. The experiences that you can have in virtual reality will be much more accessible from an economic perspective and a convenience perspective than experiences that you have in your hometown.”

Add to that the ability to change your appearance, and location being irrelevant, and you see why this is a giddying concept for everyone from the IRD to emerging economies. But based on the past 30 years, pretending technology isn’t going to happen hasn’t worked out all that well as a coping mechanism.

4. Kids used to want to be president, now they want to be Mr Beast – and that’s fine

Woodbury often writes about the shift in trust and gaze from institutions to individuals over the past half-century. Social media has been a huge driver of this, giving everyone online the ability to start their own media brand, built around their own identity. The next generations coming through have a very different set of aspirations from those who came before them.

“If we think of where trust and excitement in America was in the 50s, it was with institutions,” says Woodbury. “So the US government – we went to the moon in the 60s, the most trusted person in America was the president. People wanted to grow up and be astronauts, or senators, presidents. Then it shifted to corporations… But now it’s really focused on individuals. I think this shift of power to individuals is one of the biggest trends of our generation.”

Woodbury says what’s driving it is not just the pull of social media clout, but also the push of institutional failure which has been revealed in recent years. For many, particularly anyone other than straight white cis men, institutions were never that great. But the ‘10s were rough for almost all young people. “I mean, the great recession, the pandemic, some of the government issues that we’ve had in America…” He need not say more.

Woodbury says that’s a large part of the drive toward a greater trust in individuals, who are seen as more authentic and therefore trustworthy. And “that’s powering a lot of the creator economy”, as people strive to follow those parasocial relationships and the implied intimacy of social followers into a career of their own.

It’s very challenging to institutions, sure, and not uncomplicated in terms of the actual economic opportunities lurking behind the gaudy numbers. But YouTuber Mr Beast currently has 23 open positions, suggesting that we’re only just scratching the surface of what this still very new economy will grow into.

5. The office will be remembered as a 20th century phenomenon

I have to confess a boring normie sadness about the diminishing status of the office, even as I type it at home – a place where I find it much easier to write. The Spinoff has had three different offices over the course of its eight years, and both the work and the goofy non-work (which ultimately became some of our signature products) have deeply shaped me. But much of what Woodbury describes above unavoidably leads to a break with traditional notions of work and work environments. While there are still a vast number of tech-enabled jobs which require hard in-person labour, there are also hyper-capitalised firms working to automate everything from cleaning to driving to delivery.

As more and more of these succeed over time, the balance of employment changes. More jobs move into being remote, even anonymous, which significant parts of the crypto economy is already open to. This means the diminishing of office culture, for better or worse. But also the end of the commute – which far fewer will mourn.

“There are many, many studies of commutes being directly linked to unhappiness,” says Woodbury. “I feel kind of bad for people who are just retiring now, who commuted for an hour a day, for 40 or 50 years. When you add it up, that’s three or four years of their life spent commuting.

“I turned to my partner during the pandemic and said, ‘the amount of time that we’ll spend with our future kids just went way up’.”

He also points to days and hours worked being much more driven by the inclinations of workers than the traditional 9-5, and he invests heavily in firms that enable that change. “I think it’s a really interesting shift. We’re lucky to be investors in Figma, in Notion, in Slack and a lot of the iconic collaboration software companies. I think there are going to be many more that become household names.”

Woodbury’s theory of all this is that as much as those my age and older feel like we’re living very fast, the internet’s true impact on us all is just getting started. And while it’s been a rough 10 years, he has a compelling argument that there are legit reasons to believe good things are coming down the pipe.

Follow Duncan Greive’s NZ media podcast The Fold on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.