English | EN 
“I have 25 minutes and 60 slides,” Sander Duivestein began cheerfully, “so fasten your seatbelts.” What followed was a whirlwind journey through the bizarre, brilliant, and bewildering world of Generation Z and Generation Alpha — the first generations to grow up entirely inside the algorithmic aquarium of the internet.
Last year, he had described them as posthierarchical, post-materialistic, and postrealistic. “Reality,” he said, “has become the new wheel for them — online reality, that is. The digital world is more real than the physical one.” Leadership rotates like a playlist: today you’re the boss, tomorrow you’re the follower. And that’s fine. This year, he took that reflection further. “I’ve never seen a technology that touches everything and changes everything,” he said, pointing to generative AI as the defining accelerant of our time. Social media and smartphones already fractured our attention; AI now remixes that fragmentation into infinite new forms. “Everything,” he said, “has become a remix — and everything gets meme-ified.”
The New Language of the Young
Duivestein revisited a video from last year showing a stream of incomprehensible Gen Z
slang: “No cap… that idea was busting… I’ve got some new drip.” Last year, it was linguistic nonsense. This year, those words have entered the Cambridge Dictionary. “Scibity,” “delulu” — the lexicon of the absurd has gone official. For Duivestein, this signals more than linguistic evolution — it’s the cultural codification of chaos. “We are living in crazy times,” he said, half-laughing, half-warning. “Are we even thinking for ourselves anymore?”
The Oxford Dictionary’s 2024 word of the year — Brainrot — summed it up. “We are addicted to information,” he said. “We scroll, we consume, we remix, and we call it creation.” The audience laughed nervously.
The Internet’s Fictional Celebrities
The examples got stranger, funnier, and darker. There’s Tilly Hollywood — a Dutch actress who doesn’t exist but still appears in tabloids. “People are writing angry letters about her,” Sander smiled, “to a woman who isn’t real.” Then Sonia Monét — an AI-generated fusion of Beyoncé and Adele. “I’ve been listening to her album,” he confessed, “and it’s… beautiful. Somehow it touches me, although she’s fake. But fake doesn’t mean anything anymore.” Indeed, Sonia Monét just signed a $3 million record deal — while Spotify deletes 75 million AI-generated songs every year. “At the same time,” Sander added, “the big record companies are signing licensing deals with the very same AI firms that flood the platforms. Something is shifting.”
When Everything Becomes a Meme
Next came a rapid-fire sequence of internet absurdities: mewing (training your jawline to
look like an AI-generated model), clankers (people who shout at robots), and the meme
coin created after a man shot a health insurance CEO in the U.S. “Within hours,” said Sander, “he was turned into a Robin Hood figure. Tattoos, rap songs, NFTs, all from a tragedy.” Even fast-food chains got caught in the current. When McDonald’s identified the suspect, Burger King allegedly posted: “We don’t snitch.” The crowd erupted in laughter — until Sander added quietly, “Of course, that post was fake too.” It’s a hall of mirrors: fake news generating fake reactions to fake events. “Everything,” he said, “gets meme-ified, and the speed of that transformation is insane.”
Brain Rot as the New Normal
The New York Times recently wrote that we now live in a “brainrot age.” Sander nodded. “We no longer share collective experiences. I know where I was on 9/11. But ask young people what they remember collectively… and you’ll get a TikTok dance.” He showed clips of young Nepalese protesters taking selfies amid burning government buildings, of viral AI news clips, and of absurd internet controversies like the “tennis hat incident,” where a hat gifted by a player was sold online — and the internet declared it racist. “These,” he said, “are our new global moments.”
From AI Dogs to Deepfakes
Then came the AI flood. Videos of dogs heroically saving children — entirely fake, but
watched by millions. Michael Jackson resurrected. Fake news generated in seconds.
AI-fabricated political videos stirring division. Duivestein gestured toward a slide showing
OpenAI’s new data center. “It’s as big as Manhattan,” he said. “We are building cathedrals
for our algorithms.” He showed examples from OpenAI’s new video tool, Sora, and the audience gasped at their realism. “A dog saving a girl — people cried watching it,” he said. “But it never happened.”
How Generations Use AI Differently
Then came a quieter moment. “Let’s talk about how we use AI.” He quoted Sam Altman of
OpenAI: ‘Older people use ChatGPT as a Google replacement. People in their 20s and 30s use it as a life advisor. College students use it as an operating system.’ Duivestein nodded. “If you’re young, AI isn’t a tool — it’s infrastructure. It’s on your phone. You talk to it like a friend, like a therapist.” He admitted he does the same. “I hardly type anymore,” he said. “I talk to ChatGPT. It’s an avatar on my phone.” He predicted that within ten years, AI will not
only assist with research but conduct it — designing materials, policies, even political
debates. “Everything,” he repeated, “is changing.”
Sander and His Digital Doppelgänger
To illustrate, he showed two photos: himself, and a slightly too-perfect version of himself.
“This one,” he smiled, “isn’t me. It’s my official press photo — generated by AI.”, He confessed that he writes his newspaper columns with ChatGPT, even though “technically, I’m not allowed to.” Normally, writing one column takes a day. Now, with AI, “it takes two or three days — but I end up with fifty versions.” The real challenge, he explained, is synthesizing — learning to think critically with the machine, not delegating thought to it. “AI doesn’t make me faster,” he said. “It makes me slower, but it makes me think.” He role-plays with his AI. “I have a virtual version of a friend — I call him ‘Routini’ — trained on all his podcasts and videos. I ask him for feedback. He doesn’t even know he’s virtualized,” Sander joked. The room laughed uneasily. But there was a deeper point. “After three days
working with AI, I feel smarter. Not because it gave me answers, but because it forced me to think better questions.”
Critical Thinking as the New Literacy
That, he said, is the ultimate takeaway. “Most people ask AI one question, get one answer, and move on. But that’s not how intelligence works. You have to ask another question, and another, and another. You must look for friction.” He paused, more serious now. “Friction makes you better. Friction is critical thinking.” He ended where he began — with the young. “I made fun of them today,” he admitted, “their memes, their madness, their delulu slang. But they’re the future employees, the future leaders. They already think differently, work differently, collaborate differently. They’re growing up inside AI.”
So why should senior executives care about internet culture? “Because” Sander said simply, “Generation Z is already in your companies. Generation Alpha will soon follow. They use AI not as a tool but as a co-pilot. If you want to lead them, you have to understand and anticipate their world.” He smiled, looking around the room: “And maybe, just maybe, learn to speak a little scibbidy yourself.”
Get your copy of the Autopilot Yes/No Report.
Please note – This report was created by almost exclusively using available AI-tools except for minor editorial tweaks and some limited lay-out changes.