Over the past few days, the very brave and very blonde Ukrainian MP Kira Rudik has been tweeting various pictures of herself posing with an AK47. She began last Friday:

https://twitter.com/kiraincongress/status/1497264543428448260

What is striking about the photos is not that Rudik posted them: she is a people’s representative in a time of war — it’s exactly the sort of thing she should be posting. What’s so interesting, and smart, is how she did it. Rudik does not pose in a uniform, or even in camouflage fatigues. She does not salute or lift the AK triumphantly; in fact, the way she holds it makes it clear that she’s not used to holding a weapon of any sort. The photo is taken not in a base or even in an office, but clearly in the living room of her home, just by a window that looks out onto a small patio.

The final touch though — and it’s a genius one — is that she doesn’t have shoes on; instead she stands barefoot, her toes painted a delicate pink.

In one sense, this all seems irretrievably amateurish — but that’s the point. Of the many things the internet craves, authenticity is sacrosanct. And this is a model of the genre. The tweet is designed to do two things: first, to show that Ukrainians will stand and fight for their homeland; and second, to humanise those whom we are told will be doing the fighting. And it does this by showing them to be the most ordinary of people; people standing in their bare feet, vulnerable and ordinary — just like civilians across the world. As such, they stand in total contrast to the stormtroopers invading their lands. It’s pink toenails versus mud-encrusted jackboots; smiling mothers versus bearded Chechens — all shorthand for the battle playing out between Ukraine and Russia.

It’s taken us a long time to get here. It was mid-2014, when I was in occupied eastern Ukraine, that I first realised that 21st-century warfare had finally come to the 21st century. Both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars may have been already fought, but they were, in their peak, largely 20th-century conflicts, fought out before the arrival of social media and the advent of the user-generated content Web 2.0.

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Back then, Russia was the only social media player in the conflict. The Ukrainians were outgunned on the ground and online. Back then, in the occupied east people told me that Kyiv was run by Nazis and hated everything Russian. Back then, I watched the Kremlin flood social media and Russian-language TV with endless narratives about Kyiv’s desire to kill Russian speakers. Back then, the Ukrainians offered little by way of response.

But boy have they learned. Yesterday, I spoke to Peter Lerner, former Head of the Israel Defence Force (IDF) social media unit, who headed up its online operations during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge. He was in no doubt as to who is winning this info battle. “The game plan from the beginning has been two languages: English and Ukrainian and to a lesser volume Russian for PsyOps needs,” he told me. “Their comms goal appears to be rallying international and public support. All of their official accounts are synchronised — the same messages, nuanced and amplifying each other. ‘#Ukraine’ has been the number one trending hashtag since Thursday.” He continued: “And beyond the odd sporadic effort, there is very little social media personification beyond the president.”

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has become vital to Ukraine’s war effort on the ground and the star of its online battle. In a powerful 33-second video clip, filmed last week as he stood in a central Kyiv Street flanked by four other politicians, he announced he was not going anywhere. The clip was striking as an address from a state leader. It was unadorned by formality or rhetorical flourish, and it was designed to paint Zelenskyy as two things simultaneously: leader of his nation and (literal) man in the street.

Now contrast these images to those relentlessly broadcast of his enemy, Vladimir Putin, who sits far from the frontline, and therefore from danger, isolated not only from the battlefield but from those around him. Like a proper supervillain he sits alone, insistent on keeping everyone at least ten feet away from him. It’s Ukraine’s very own Jewish James Bond versus an ageing Blofeld with anger management issues and a Botox habit. There’s only ever going to be one winner in the popular imagination — and the court of Twitter.

This is the new grammar of statesmanship for the social media age and it’s about being brief, edgy and demotic. Our public sphere is curated by Big Tech platforms that are algorithmically geared toward virality; and what goes viral are not long speeches about having a dream or fighting people on beaches but short and arresting words and images. Gone are the lofty phrases and verbal curlicues; gone are the digressions on policy. What you say needs to work on a short YouTube or Instagram or Twitter clip — and it will ideally be easily remembered.

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This, then, is the central battle playing out. Lerner is shocked at how bad the Russian response has been. “This is all very strange,” he continues, “just like their perceived lack of battlefield accomplishments.” Lerner wonders if there is a rift in the government between Putin and those around him more reluctant to go to war, pointing to the recent fraught exchange between Putin and his head of intelligence who urges him to give Russia’s “Western partners” one more chance.

In the meantime, Russian State channel RT posts away as if in a different reality. “Video sequence of the development of Russia’s offensive in all directions in accordance with the operation plan,” it tweeted, with footage of armoured vehicles moving bovinely across dirt tracks and over bridges. Of the actual realities of the war on the ground: not a trace.

It may well be, as Lerner speculates, that the Kremlin knows that the world doesn’t accept its case for war and sees little point in trying to push it. If so, the focus will now be on internal comms and shoring up Russian support. But one of the first things Lerner told me years ago when we first met was this: if you leave a void in online information wars, you cede it to the enemy. Russia has done exactly that — and Ukraine is reaping the rewards.

And it’s reaping them globally. I can’t think of a single country in the world with Ukraine’s soft power right now. Even Elon Musk got involved after Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov urged him to support the country with his Starlink services, which not only provide higher internet speeds but, as internet delivered by satellite, would continue to provide coverage even were the Russians to cut off cables in Ukraine. “While you try to colonise Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations,” Fedorov tweeted at Musk. Ten hours later Musk replied. “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine… more terminals en route.”

In the background, the same narratives and counter-narratives that I have been studying for five years continue to dominate. Last week, when hostilities broke out, a video went viral. It carried a purported audio exchange as a Russian boat approached Snake Island on the Ukrainian coast and demanded the soldiers stationed there to surrender. “This is a Russian military warship. I suggest you lay down your weapons and surrender to avoid bloodshed and needless casualties. Otherwise, you will be bombed.” the Russian officer says. A Ukrainian soldier responds: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself.”

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Those were the final words heard from the island. Zelenskyy later announced that the warship had then killed all 13 Ukrainian defenders. The internet trilled with talk of the brave Ukrainian martyrs. Now, however, it appears the soldiers are in fact alive and being held prisoner by the Russians.

Honest mistake or Ukrainian influence operation? If it were the latter, it worked: Snake Island galvanised Ukraine’s online army and cowed Russia’s. Perhaps the truth will come out, but then again maybe it won’t. Either way, it reordered reality online for a while, which was the point. It was another Ukrainian victory.

This is the nature of modern conflict, and it’s the way that all wars will be fought now — on the ground and online. The revolution may not be televised, but it will be meme’d.

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?