This article appears in the June 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
Freya India is worried about the girls. Girls®, to be more precise. “We have been transformed from people into products,” the blurb of her book, GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, claims. The “we” she is invoking allegedly includes herself; India, the 26-year-old writer behind the popular Substack newsletter GIRLS and staff writer at Jonathan Haidt’s publication After Babel, began writing what would eventually become this book in 2021 to “figure out why [she] felt so anxious and alone.” Over time, she explains at the start of the book, she came to the conclusion that the internet was the problem, and the incentive structure that young women have online is making them more anxious, more alone, and more disconnected than ever.
GIRLS®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything
By Freya India
Henry Holt
Anyone who has ever been on the internet over the past ten years is likely to sympathize with this line of thinking. The race-to-the-bottom ad monetization strategy of Meta, Google, and the winners of Silicon Valley’s platform era turned tech founders into the richest people alive. It incentivizes certain types of user behavior that perform well on algorithms to the detriment of fostering human connection. At first glance, India is the latest in a long line of critics bemoaning the encroachment of extractive tech companies into every layer of society.
However, is this what India is really interested in? The book is structured into an introduction, six chapters with pithy names—“Filtered,” “Diagnosed,” “Documented,” “Disconnected,” “Detached,” and “‘Empowered’”—each diagnosing a different issue that girls on the internet face, and a conclusion detailing her prescription for these ills. India has marketed this book as a treatise against Big Tech, presumably because Silicon Valley is a well-documented villain that everyone can agree on.
But her diagnoses of both the problem and the solution have little to do with tech companies. While the book is nominally a work of tech criticism, she has far harsher verdicts on divorce, hookup culture, the retreat of organized religion, and porn. Mark Zuckerberg comes in for less scrutiny for intentionally stoking body dysmorphia among teen girls on Instagram than do the cultural bogeymen of the right. “For decades,” she writes, “the institutions, communities, and customs that once bound people together have been falling away. Religion has more or less disappeared, marriage and family have been mocked, neighborhoods have been uprooted, communities have collapsed.” She does not explain what, if anything, this has to do with “the commodification of everything.”
India has marketed this book as a treatise against Big Tech, but her diagnoses have little to do with tech companies.
There are many instances throughout the book of non sequitur segues to these seemingly off-topic concerns. In addressing the phenomenon of girls and young women sharing their experiences with extreme social anxiety, India notes that “children of divorce are more likely to be anxious, depressed, and antisocial.” She returns to what she sees as the social consequences of divorce many times throughout the book, including supercharging this crisis of mental health. “The idea of having an ‘authentic self’ was also taking hold,” she writes of the 2010s. “Divorce became a way for parents to find their true selves, finally becoming who they were meant to be, free from restraints and obligations.”
India presents no evidence that the young women she is describing come from broken homes, or how that would even influence how girls experience the internet. That might be because the basic narrative makes no sense. Far from increasing, CDC data shows that divorce rates in the U.S. have declined by nearly half since the ’90s. In India’s home country of the U.K., divorce rates have similarly declined over the past few decades.
One notices a note of contempt in how India describes the girls she claims to be worried about, since she chooses to minimize their concerns at every turn. This is especially apparent in her commentary on mental health. Take, for example, her description of an experience she had as a teenager on the internet, watching a popular YouTuber make a personal confession. “Zoella takes a deep breath and finally confesses to millions of subscribers that she suffers from … anxiety,” she writes. “I remember watching when I was thirteen and feeling like I was intruding on something. Zoella opened up about overthinking, panic attacks, and anxiety so overwhelming it sometimes left her unable to get out of bed.”
Should such personal confessions be taken seriously? India has doubts. “As a teenager,” she writes, “I found it easy to ignore the barrage of BetterHelp ads, because although I felt lonely and anxious, I didn’t believe everyone needed professional help. But then, suddenly, we all did.” She continues: “Maybe we don’t have ADHD; maybe the pace of this world is hard to keep up with … Maybe we don’t have social anxiety disorder; maybe we grew up with less face-to-face interaction than any other generation in history.” The possibility that girls have social anxiety disorder because they grew up with insufficient face-to-face interaction doesn’t seem to occur to her.
In any case, maybe the influencers are faking it. It is impossible to say how many people on the internet who claim to suffer from clinical anxiety or ADHD actually have it, and India is of course free to make her own decisions about what is best for her own mental health. But it is unclear what qualifies her to make that determination for others. She claims that a major source of anxiety for young women is “outsourcing every decision to ‘experts.’” “We wait for them to show us how to live,” she writes, “to educate us on what we should think; to tell us which version of right or wrong is trending. And the more we turn to them, the less we trust ourselves.” If girls would be wise to distrust the words of mental health experts and instead rely on themselves, then why should they be expected to trust India’s diagnosis of the problem?
Moreover, a fast-paced world that leaves young people behind, or a lack of social interaction for vast numbers of young people, are actual societal problems. India’s proposed solution is to look inward and stop trying to seek help. Young women affected by the externalities of the internet economy should simply choose to opt out—of therapy (“Now we shame people who aren’t in therapy. Those who haven’t signed up are almost stigmatized”), medication (“Many have also been overmedicated, with consequences that could last a lifetime”), even analyzing one’s own mental health (“Taking your emotions too seriously will only make you feel worse”).
Medication comes in for particular criticism. “Back in the 2010s, influencers didn’t start normalizing and promoting psychiatric drugs simply to raise awareness,” she writes. “They are advertisers; they are always selling something. And by the late 2010s, medication companies were looking for sponsorships.” One would assume that this line of critique would lead to a thorough indictment of the influencer economy, or Big Pharma, or the ad revenue model of tech platforms. India is not interested in any of that. In her world, that these structural forces have negative social effects is an unfortunate reality, but not one worth challenging. Instead, she argues that the effects are natural and inevitable. “We are so determined to destigmatize mental health issues that we have started to stigmatize being human, having human reactions to things,” she writes. And this once again conflicts with a previous point—emotional introspection, which she is skeptical of, is surely among the most human behaviors.
India spends a significant portion of the book decrying how girls are pressured into learning about the world entirely through the lens of the internet, adopting progressive stances to satisfy the incentives of algorithms and public opinion. Perhaps she should take her own advice. Throughout the book, she deploys the word “we” often, to implicate herself as one of the young women she’s talking about. But hers is the only personal experience present. Instead, the book’s argument is largely based on a handful of studies taken out of context, influencer videos, and social media posts. The book contains little serious reporting—there are no examples of her talking to young women directly about how they feel, or asking questions of the companies she claims to indict. Much of her methodology involves making sweeping conclusions based on random posts on the internet.
This leads India into some embarrassing missteps. One example is her characterization of the AI wearable brand Friend, an ad for which had gone viral in 2024. She notes that Friend had secured $8.5 million in investor capital, and quotes some of the comments underneath the ad to demonstrate “demand” for the product. This would be a great example of her argument that young women are turning to digital simulations of friendship over real-life connection, if the supposed demand had shown up as big sales. It didn’t. As of October 2025, a full year after the ad India cites was released, Friend had only sold about 1,000 units. The company’s massive ad campaign on the New York City subway was received poorly by New Yorkers, and the ads were routinely defaced by mocking graffiti.
The whole book suffers from a cloudy vagueness. At no point does India outline some serious solutions for the crises she names. How to reduce the divorce rate? She doesn’t say. She reiterates that these problems are not the age-old concerns of young people struggling to find their place in the world. But the prescriptions she does have are ancient clichés. “Aspire to be different!” she writes. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps and stop being mentally ill. No young woman has ever thought of this before.
India claims she wrote GIRLS® for young women, but they are much more raw material for her career projects than active participants in the conversation. Her personal brand is that of a wunderkind thinking seriously about her own generation, but she makes her money writing for a reactionary-friendly newsletter ecosystem and a 62-year-old white male professor at NYU. Instead of speaking directly to her own peers, she is performing concern for a different, older audience.
Ultimately it is a shame, because it is true that young women are uniquely vulnerable to the distorting effects of the internet. Someone who claims to speak on their behalf, to translate their struggles to an older audience, should be more interested in their opinions and welfare. Instead, India is more preoccupied with confirming what older conservatives believe about Gen Z. This is quite a lucrative path to take as a writer. There are endless opportunities in flattering the vanities of people with money and power. But that has nothing to do with girls.
This article appears in Jun 2026 issue.
