The rule has always been not to speak ill of the dead, but younger generations, for whatever reason, seem not to hold to this — when it's about celebrities, that is.
A strange and shocking feature of the internet is that it means that real people are not treated as such. Their deaths are made into memes, turned into references, repeated and mocked for the sake of likes and reposts.
This doesn’t extend to the younger generations’ own dead family or relatives, of course, because that’s their “trauma”. And it would never be okay to mock someone’s trauma.
This week, former One Direction star Liam Payne passed away aged 31, shocking the world into silence. When that incredibly brief silence lifted, the majority of people reacted to Payne’s death in a sensitive way, understanding the grief that would be surrounding not just his family and friends but also his fans, who had grown up with Liam in their lives.
However, there is also a shockingly high number of people (and not just in the dark trolling recesses, but everywhere) who are responding with mockery. These people seem to be predominantly Gen Z.
Perhaps some of them are too young to understand what death really means, or perhaps it’s because the internet trades in nastiness, and the meanest person often comes out on top. Whatever the reason, it is in extraordinarily poor taste and has left me feeling completely appalled by my own generation.
To give you a sense of what’s happening online right now: an old tweet written by Payne in the 2010s that reads “I am sooo clumsy” has been retweeted with the caption, “We know” and gained tens of thousands of likes. Another tweet reads “brat summer, Liam Payne fall, ethel cain winter.” It has 15,000 likes. I know how we got here, but I genuinely didn’t think we’d take it this far.
Normally there’s a bit of an unwritten rule amongst Gen Z of who we do and don’t mock. Older royals? Fine. Dictators? Obviously fine — jokes about Saddam Hussein’s corpse still run rampant even to this day. Celebrities? Only fair game if they’ve done something bad enough, e.g OJ Simpson.
The fact that Liam Payne even nears this camp is ridiculous, and proves that the unwritten “moral” code Gen Z once held to stop us from becoming totally contemptible has completely eroded. Perhaps the Jay Slater case, where a young former offender’s missing status was relentlessly ripped and memed in front of the eyes of his family — because he was a bad person, right? He committed a crime? Right guys? He deserved to die? — pushed us beyond the pale.
There are people we don’t mock. Or at least there used to be. Maggie Smith, for instance, didn’t get this treatment. She was an old lady, she was unwell, and she was part of Gen Zs most beloved franchise, Harry Potter.
Comparatively, Liam Payne was a young, white, straight, cisgender man who had recently been accused of harassment by an ex-girlfriend. But he was also unwell — addiction is a disease, something people so often forget — and he was also part of one of Gen Zs most beloved boybands, a franchise in its own right (though perhaps its popularity among solely young women means that it's not a franchise worthy of the same level of respect).
But above all, he was a person. A person with a family who has died tragically young.
The allegations against Liam Payne, that he harassed his ex Maya Henry to the point where she issued a cease and desist legal warning, can be upheld without mocking a man who has just died. But perhaps that’s a level of nuance that Gen Z just can’t fathom. Or maybe it just doesn’t get as many likes.
Ironically, Henry isn’t safe either. The Gen Z tasteless barrage goes both ways, and people have been flooding her mentions and comment sections to tell her this is “all your fault”, without any thought of the irony. The hate cycle continues, like ouroboros thirsting for its own tail.
This year, the online community’s capacity for disrespecting the recently deceased has passed beyond the pale. We need to put a stop to it. People need to remember that he is someone's family member, friend, loved one. Not a meme for your public derision.
