they’ll tell you it’s an aesthetic choice, a testament to informality. they’re likely a twentysomething brooklyn resident like myself, bullish on being not the voice of their generation but a voice of a generation, and definitely guilty of posting performative notes-app screenshots and pseudointellectual, stream-of-consciousness “musings” that compare charli xcx to the pope.

what are they really up to, and do they know they’re participating in a long, exclusive, exclusionary tradition? the stylistic choice to write in lowercase is a dead horse that’s been beaten, flogged, and beaten again—what my generation calls ran through. and yet, it’s having a moment. i had to investigate.

it’s a “formal feature of how girls engage online,” says rayne fisher-quann, who’s 25 and lives (where else?) in brooklyn. known to the web for the all-lowercase personal essays she writes for her blog internet princess, fisher-quann insists that the offhandedness of lowercase “neutralizes” the self-importance of writing about oneself. it’s a way, fisher-quann says, “to avoid criticism.”

her feelings trace back to the digital spaces she occupied in her adolescence. “i got a lot of intellectual enrichment and influence from early 2010s feminist tumblr,” fisher-quann tells me. a decade-plus ago, incisive microblogs were on the rise on the platform, alongside the now-canonical page justgirlythings . justgirlythings pioneered the art of superimposing an all-lowercase serif-font sentence on a desaturated image (usually of a young woman wearing an oversized jumper and a messy bun sitting by a fireplace). ” becky campos, the blog’s author, says she wrote justgirlythings “because it almost felt like you were reading more of my diary instead of some polished copy.

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