This is far from uncommon, for it’s increasingly common for critics to adopt the brace position before daring to dislike something that many people enjoy. Back in May, the Guardian’s Scott Tobias became Twitter’s baddie of the day for battering Shrek on the occasion of its 20^thanniversary: “Shrek is a terrible movie. It’s not funny. It looks awful.” I found the reaction extraordinary. Tobias was called, at best, a cynical, click-hungry contrarian; at worst a twisted, misanthropic snob. “Shrek Fans Diss ‘Joyless Chud’ Guardian Critic Who Called Film ‘Unfunny and Overrated,’” reported The Wrap. His crime, let’s say it again, was hating an old, animated movie about an implausibly Scottish ogre and his donkey friend.

Critics have never been the world’s most beloved people. Almost exactly 100 years ago, the Czech author and sometime critic Karel Čapek wrote about the consequences of a harsh review: “I’m reconciled in advance to the fact that [the author] considers me unfair, cliquey and incompetent. It’s definitely his right. I, too, use this right when an unfair, cliquey and incompetent critic, who gives my book a bad press, hurts me. To cut a long story short, there’s an eternal conflict between artist and critic. ‘Praise me, or I’ll hate you.’”

Nonetheless, there used to be an understanding among readers that any worthwhile critic, whether it be William Hazlitt, Kenneth Tynan or Pauline Kael, would need to hate as well as to love. As the late Clive James (who was skilled on both counts) wrote in a 2013 defence of hatchet jobs: “You can’t eliminate the negative. It accentuates the positive.”

Now critics are often up against readers who resist the very notion of criticism. A few popular lines of attack pop up regularly. There’s faux-objectivity: You said this movie wasn’t funny but I laughed, ergo it is you are factually wrong and unprofessional. Taking offence: How dare you imply that everyone who likes this movie is a tasteless dolt? Assumption of bad faith: You’re only saying this for clicks and notoriety.

Character assassination: You’re a vindictive killjoy who’s no fun at parties. Moral disapproval: Why would you waste your precious time being mean about something when you could be praising something else? Some people mix and match these accusations into strange hybrids like the schoolmarm-turned-troll: Why can’t you be more positive, you dumb piece of shit?

What these responses all have in common is not so much disagreement with the critique but fury that it was written at all. Thumper the rabbit’s famous maxim, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all,” might have been good advice for Bambi but it’s fatal for the appreciation of art. “Criticism is not nice,” writes AO Scott of the New York Times in Better Living Through Criticism. “To criticise is to find fault, to accentuate the negative, to spoil the fun and refuse to spare delicate feelings.”

For an entertaining reminder of a more knockabout era of criticism, I recommend the Ringer’s current podcast series Gene and Roger, presented by Brian Raftery. Between 1986 and 1999, when they hosted the half-hour TV show At the Movies, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were the most (and perhaps only) famous film critics in America, appearing on David Letterman and Saturday Night Live as celebrities in their own right and introducing many viewers to the concept of film criticism itself.

Central to their appeal was the intensity of their opinions, which often clashed. The show turned disagreement into entertainment. While they were both important champions of overlooked or misunderstood movies, one of my favourite comfort reads is Ebert’s 2000 anthology of pans, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie. It is an unfortunate truth that it is much easier to be funny when you’re being mean, but Ebert wasn’t just going for cheap laughs; he knew how wonderful cinema could be and was indignant when millions of dollars were squandered on crud.

Why has negative criticism become so contentious? One factor is the growing vulnerability of both journalists and the artists they cover. When there is less space for book coverage, it makes sense to foreground good work than cackle over the bad, except when a real stinker from a big name hoves into view and critics can take the gloves off with a sigh of relief. Smaller journals can be a little spicier, though: Becca Rothfeld’s masterly evisceration of Sally Rooney’s “riskless and conciliatory” novels in The Point last year was a bracing antidote to Rooneymania.

In the world of music, when most albums don’t make money, it is understandable for critics to pull their punches. The world of album reviewing now is so much more collegiate than the knives-out music-press culture that I grew up on. I’m glad that young critics no longer have to make their names with an act of ritual cruelty towards a soft target, but the really thoughtful takedown is an endangered species without which music journalism is merely PR. Older critics tend to lose their taste for blood while, as Clive James wrote, “among young writers, there seems a shortage of critics unhampered by excessive good manners.”

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I would suggest, though, that it’s as much a question of self-preservation as good manners, due to social media’s abolition of context. When Siskel and Ebert panned a movie, regular viewers knew that that was not all they did. In fact, the duo might well rave about another film in the same episode. But when a review goes viral now, most of the people reading it (provided that they do actually read beyond the headline) will have no idea who the writer is, so he or she is reduced to the status of an HM Bateman caricature: The Man Who Hates Shrek, The Woman Who Hates Ted Lasso. Scott Tobias, for example, has written dozens of anniversary pieces for the Guardian, the vast majority of which are celebratory. I suspect he would have been delighted if his ode to, say, Alan Pakula’s 1971 thriller Klute had gone viral and Klute had become a trending topic, but of course it didn’t, because nothing fuels virality like outrage. Thus a negative piece is damned as “clickbait” by the angry people who are clicking on it while ignoring all the positive pieces. Whose fault is that?

Social media has also given us the militarisation of fandom. Major artists and franchises attract armies of fans who demonstrate their fealty by mobbing naysayers. There are DC fans who genuinely believe the conspiracy theory that critics are secretly paid to praise Marvel movies and denigrate their DC rivals, but then Marvel fans are no more reasonable. No movie that Martin Scorsese has made in recent years has generated as much attention as his mild dismissal of the MCU two years ago. Fortunately, the world’s most profitable movie franchise has survived his lack of interest.

All of this makes criticism an increasingly hairy business. Woe betide the outlier who costs a film its 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. When the critic Ann Powers published an ambivalent essay about Lana Del Rey in 2019, it was denounced by Del Rey herself to her 9.5 million Twitter followers, thus sending an avalanche of abuse in Powers’ direction. Complaints to employers are common, as are death threats. It’s hard to imagine a review of a major artist as famously scathing as Greil Marcus’ take on Bob Dylan’s 1970 album Self Portrait (first line: “What is this shit?”) in the age of Twitter. You want to take an axe to Korean boy band BTS and their ride-or-die followers? Lock your account first.

The instinct to abuse critics is justified by the idea that it is “punching up” at elitist gatekeepers. But unlike Siskel and Ebert, modern critics are neither famous nor wealthy nor powerful. They may have influence en masse, via review aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic (there is safety in numbers), but the days when one critic could make or break a movie, album or anything else are long gone. Yet fans still see them as dream-crushing monsters from which million-selling musicians and billion-dollar movies must be defended at all costs.

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Perhaps there is so much ambient hostility online that critics are too easily lumped in with the trolls and “haters” who plague your timeline. There are of course some contrarians, bullies and attention-seekers who have built a brand on performative contempt but they are not typical. The author Matt Haig is nonetheless adept at painting his detractors as bitter, shrunken souls whose arguments are therefore invalid. Last weekend, the Thumper of British publishing crystallised the Haigist theory of criticism in a tweet that was ostensibly about Sally Rooney’s sceptics but implicitly about his own: “There is so much jealousy of Sally Rooney. If you don’t like her books, don’t read them. The great thing about books is there are lots. There have literally never been more books. Why spend your time dissing authors other people like when you could be championing ones you do?” It’s all there: the unfounded assumption of jealousy; the nonsensical idea that you can know you don’t like a book before you’ve read it; the suggestion that negative criticism is simply a waste of time. To voice disappointment or antipathy, in Haig’s world, is a moral failing.

Similarly, anyone who resists the gentle charms of Ted Lasso, which received a Peabody Award for “offering the perfect counter to the enduring prevalence of toxic masculinity, both on-screen and off, in a moment when the nation truly needs inspiring models of kindness”, risks being accused of hating kindness itself. The success of the show, so unlike caustic 2000s sitcoms such as Extras or Curb Your Enthusiasm, is itself symptomatic of a general desire for more warmth and less cynicism.

But the Peabody citation acknowledges that the premise “has all the markings of a formulaic cornball dud,” so it is inconceivable that some people, not all of them unfeeling bastards, wouldn’t indeed find it a formulaic cornball dud. It’s particularly tricky right now for black critics who dislike politically well-intentioned work by black creators. After Angelica Jade Bastién caught flak for shredding the generally well-received new Candyman movie, another writer responded: “one of the frustrating things about this era of didactic capitol b Black art is the idea that serious criticism amounts to some kind of disloyalty.”

I suspect that this hypersensitivity to critical voices has been compounded first by the ugly intensity of politics and then by the pandemic. If you think Candyman was made by good people with timely things to say about racism in gentrification, then you might be inclined to forgive its didacticism. And if Ted Lasso or Shrek made your lockdown a little more cheerful, then you might overreact to someone stomping all over them. But I worry that enthusiasm is being mistaken for a moral virtue, and negative criticism for a character flaw: What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just like things?

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We all know, in our own lives, that everything isn’t for everybody. Any night of the year there are heated disagreements in living rooms and cinema lobbies, and negative reactions are no less worthy of representation in public discourse than positive ones. Disliking certain things is not just normal but essential. Hate is the back of the mirror, without which you would just have a piece of glass. “It can be positive,” Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys wrote in a terrific 1992 polemic on the virtues of hate. “It throws into relief all the things you know you like. It tells you, by elimination, what you’re about… To hate a lot of things is tantamount to really caring about others. If you like everything, you deal with nothing.”

Personally, I find that the act of disagreeing with a sharp takedown sharpens my appreciation of the work in question. If I have to think a bit harder about what I like and why I like it, that’s fine by me, especially when it’s something that has been almost universally acclaimed. I was wowed by Jia Tolentino’s essay collection Trick Mirror but I got a kick out of Lauren Oyler’s brilliant demolition job in the London Review of Books last year, as did Tolentino, who gamely retweeted it. “I’ve been idly waiting since my book came out for a truly scathing review of my bullshit, which seemed inevitable given the rest of my good luck & also like it could be useful,” she wrote. “It finally came: a cleansing, illuminating experience to be read with such open disgust!”

Tolentino’s suggestion that negative criticism is not just valid but useful would have surprised Karel Čapek. In the current climate, it verges on the saintly. It’s not that I long for an epidemic of gleeful brutality but I will always cherish the right of critics to express their hate, hate, hate in the ultimate service of what they love, love, love.

In 1997, just after the youngest millennials were born, Damien Hirst accidentally prophesied how that tension would affect their generation, in the title of his art book: “I WANT TO SPEND THE REST OF MY LIFE, EVERYWHERE, WITH EVERYONE, ONE TO ONE, ALWAYS, FOREVER, NOW.” The online world is destructively dual: it creates a delirious dream of boundlessness, while being an open prison; its subjects can see anything, while under total surveillance. These days, the kids who were toddlers when Hirst was pickling his first shark know this so implicitly that they seldom really think about it.  For them, what they screen off — and what they broadcast — has always been a function of being the first generation to undergo the process of identity formation within the feedback loop of a networked world.

And what that gets up-voted above all else, in that world, is emotional disclosure. It is the “stunning and brave” tale of trauma, spliced with a measure of pithy, pungent political agitprop — the essay that can generalise out from “me me me” to any kind of oppressed “we”. The inherent narcissism of the confessional genre is offset by those “we” aspects of the generalising think-piece, while the most shareable articles on social media have that same combination of relatability and a call to arms. In that context, writers like Jia Tolentino are in poll position to be the Voice.

Back in 2014, Tolentino was an editor at Jezebel, the blog site that pioneered a certain kind of personal-is-political feminism, now everywhere, which involves paying women $50 to share painful experiences in their past. Tolentino’s own work never misses the chance to score some minor culture wars point, always peeling back yet more of the soft viscera of her hurts in exchange for kudos.

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Like many women who grew up in the 90s, Tolentino feels defined by her very online-ness. At the start of her 2019 essay collection, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, she tracks the technological timeline of her life, from hymning the alien fritz of the 48k dial-up modem to raking over her pre-teen diary on her AngelFire website. For her, it was that early experience of online identity construction that represents that generational break-point. “The self is not a fixed, organic thing, but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance,” she says. But: “the internet adds a host of other, nightmarish metaphorical structures: the mirror, the echo, the panopticon.”

Life in the internet’s panopticon means you can never screen-off your personality — never engage in the perfectly normal behaviour of being different people in different social settings. It’s a process Tolentino sees as inherently crazymaking, because it means you’re never “off”, you never get to be in a rumpus room of consequence-free engagement. This over-construction, she concludes with the weary inevitability of an ex-Jezebel writer, is worse for women, who have always been socialised that way. She offers a millennial cliché as a solution: be more you. Lean into your saleable self. Tolentino is very good at doing this; she seems to have a native gift for swimming with the digital tides.

The same cannot be said of Roisin Kiberd, who, with a pedigree at VICE and a thing for techno-dystopian Mark Fischer, is another contender for the Voice. True, her new collection of essays, The Disconnect, opens with a remarkably similar catalogue of digital personhood. And the two are almost the same age; Kiberd references many of the same formative moments in the life of the net as Tolentino. But while Tolentino was expertly curating her brand, Kiberd began to come apart. In early 2016, she tells us, she had a breakdown, swallowed a month’s worth of pills and washed them down with cheap rum — taking care to set her Twitter to private, and write down all her online passwords.

A Dubliner, Kiberd had a PR job as the voice of an online cheese brand, then drifted into ill-paid, gig economy work writing about tech and for tech. Meantime, Dublin’s property market trebled in value, meaning that hers is a life of shunting between share-houses, with regular crestfallen returns to the parental nest. Kiberd was supposedly living the dream, a quintessential anywhere, free to jet off at a moment’s notice to live an Emily In Paris-style in a dreamy mittel European city. Yet in truth, all she does is work obsessively, storing up shifts on the treadmill today to make room for some undefined “real life” tomorrow. Anything that could be regarded as progress, the true stuff of life — a decent home, colleagues, regularity, hobbies — hovers just out of reach. Her world has become an infinite scroll, she’s a hare on a wire.

Somewhere, she knows this. But can she stop it? Can she look away? Well, ask yourself: can you?

If Tolentino is The Millennial Voice in 1D — a flatland of on-message self-disclosure — then Kiberd is its 2D upgrade: human, often lyrical, if still prone to cling to the orthodoxies of the consensus culture. But it takes the memoir-as-fiction to really nail the Voice in 3D; for true millennial thought, you need someone who thinks beyond the impact of tech in culture. Who thinks about culture as though it were just another kind of tech.

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Lauren Oyler was once a writer in VICE’s Brooklyn offices. I think I saw her there, in late 2015. Her tribe, Broadly — VICE’s women’s pages — were hived off in a single glass-panelled office, about eight of them around a single board room table. Peering in, the vibe did not seem good in their own personal panopticon. To say Oyler’s fantastic new novel Fake Accounts is thinly-veiled is an insult to the diaphanous. It’s literary cling-film, right down to the Peanut Butter M&M dispenser in that Brooklyn HQ. Oyler’s lead — like her, like Tolentino — also writes articles which are “designed to say X is bad for women”, dredged up by fishing the net for similar articles. Just like her heroine, prior to VICE, Oyler “moved to Berlin” in the golden age of the moving-to-Berlin era, around 2012. According to nothing more reliable than internet forum gossip, “she refused to learn any German and made a huge unnecessary fuss about Berghain”, the celebrated club that’s basically impossible to get into. (Oyler apparently claims her German is fine.)

Oyler’s leading woman is a moth drawn to this Mecca of hip globalised youth culture. Actual Germans with actual lives and cultures move around behind her on wires, Non-Player Characters in her personal video game. She speaks none of the language. She invests nothing. Instead, she spends a lot of time of Twitter, babysits for an American woman and goes on shapeless, meaningless internet dates, dishing up a string of fake personas for a string of nice enough men.

To say that Oyler has captured the Millennial Voice would almost be an understatement. She’s nailed that sense in which the surveillance is as much internal as external. Her narrator is perfectly self-aware, yet gets in tussles with herself about politics. Somewhere, there’s a catechism of things she merely thinks she believes, that she should believe — the same decision paralysis you see everywhere. When another character admits to an obsessive desire to get into baking, you get the sense she’s riven between the notion that baking is fantastically Instagrammable, and an ongoing ascetic quest to purge, to forego the net entirely and get back to real, manual work.

The Millennial’s is a binge-purge universe; a neurotically self-optimising one, always looking for the next tweak, the next FODMAP-free diet, or net-abstaining dopamine fast — which will be the one that will finally snap life itself into focus. Meanwhile, panning back, the truth of the matter that people with two Master’s degrees share shabby houses in cities where they don’t belong, well into their thirties, always on dates, always on Twitter, and thus perfectly, sublimely, free. It’s a culture of never truly gaining anything because you never truly commit to anything.

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Oyler “divides her time” between New York and Berlin now. Kiberd’s Instagram bio says she’s “Irish, mostly in Berlin”. The climax of the latter’s book comes, where else, at the Berghain (though she never actually names the club). There she is reunited with an apparent true love, in a town with “rents a third of Dublin”. At around the same moment in history, back in fiction, Oyler’s narrator was also trotting past the place, making mindless quips.

Berghain is famous for confiscating your phone on arrival. If Berlin is Mecca, then Berghain is the Black Stone of Kaaba, a big silent rock nothing can penetrate. Somewhere in there is a place where, for just one night, you cannot post anything to your socials. It is the Lost World Of Spontaneity. And while the word spontaneity has a reputation for, y’know, carefree stuff, in truth it requires deliberate choice. It requires putting something down, in order to become undivided. A lesson which none of our real or fake memoirists ever fully absorb.

Turns out the voice of the millennial isn’t so much that of the Anywhere as the exhausted Everywhere: a generation who simultaneously wish to have the kudos of the rat race, the hyper-socialisation of the big city, and yet also the simple parsimony, the mental clarity and basic stability, that comes from families and small towns; and the sacrifice inherent in choosing. You cannot live the rest of a life everywhere, with everyone, one to one, always and forever — now can you?