MTV Tried To Explain Young People To Old People And Failed

No one our age actually looks like this.

To repeat. NO ONE OUR AGE ACTUALLY FUCKING LOOKS LIKE THIS.

But that's not what the good people at mtvinsights.tumblr.com think, it seems. The site is full of incorrect things about our generation but reported as fact, and reads like a pitch-perfect satire of how old people think about young people. But all of the articles are written it seems by MTV employees, meaning that MTV Insights is probably real and it's meant to be taken at 100% face value by old people as an insider's guide to how young people REALLY ARE, Y'ALL.

Let me explain: Young people like to spend money on stupid bullshit, and it's the job of the old people who work in advertising to figure out how to sell us a bunch of stupid bullshit. This is the harsh reality of our generation, as well as pretty much every generation. The problem is that old people don't understand the young people they're trying to sell stupid bullshit to. Places like MTV--that storied, rotting bastion of youth culture rendered irrelevant long ago--like to pretend to know what "the kids" are into these days. Like dubstep! And #hashtags! It seems like the point of this site is that when an advertiser wants to work with MTV, they can send them over to this site (hosted on Tumblr because medium is the message, herbs), to prove that MTV is still "with it" after all these years. Still, nobody actually talks like this:

This is from a 100% earnest post on the site attempting to explain how young people talk. If you spend more than twelve seconds looking at MTV Insights, it's painfully obvious that they have a hilariously low base of knowledge regarding people under the age of 25--the uncanny valley factor of the whole thing is shocking. It's jam-packed with nearly-convincing words/phrases such as "The Occupy Wall Street crew," "EDM," "Slashitude," "document every ;-)" and "remixes of my actual name," to the point where you read it and actually start getting a panic attack that someone could think you're like this (this is also the main critique I would have of Girls if I'd ever actually watched an episode of the thing).

I can only assume shit like this exists as a bizarre meta-joke amongst MTV interns as a way to troll the gigantic corporation that doesn't pay them, or else somebody was bullshitting wild hard in order to impress one of their supervisors. MTV Insights is pretty much definitive proof that MTV is shockingly out of touch. For so long, MTV created youth culture through music videos. Then it started reflect it with ground-breaking shows like Liquid Television, Jackass, Yo! MTV Raps, True Life, and The Real World (they weren't always fucking within the first ten minutes, believe it or not). Now, it seems like they're trying to catch up to it.

In 1992, some hapless New York Times reporter went to Seattle in order to cover the city's then-burgeoning Grunge scene. He marched into Sub Pop's headquarters and more or less demanded that the receptionist explain to them the "secret language of Grunge." So she made a bunch of shit up that the Times then reported as gospel. It went down in history as "Grunge Speak," and it was proof that--as the bard Will Smith once rapped--parents just don't understand. At long last, it seems that our generation has its own Grunge Speak, and we didn't even have to bullshit anybody. We just had to be alive.

@drewmillard