“The youth of Morocco carries the message of a nation,” reads an open letter from the Gen Z 212 movement to King Mohammed VI of Morocco. “We call for the dissolution of the government for its failure to safeguard the constitutional rights of Moroccans.” The Gen Z 212 movement (after Morocco’s national dialing code, +212) was founded in early September by a group of young Moroccans opposed to the government; currently, it has gathered over two hundred thousand users on the messaging platform Discord, organizing sit-ins and online boycott campaigns.
A few days before the protests in Morocco, Nepalese youth set fire to the Parliament, shortly after the government of Ram Chandra Poudel banned twenty-six social media platforms – including WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X. In a series of videos posted on TikTok, young Nepalese are dancing on the burning ruins of Kathmandu to the sound of the viral song Young Black & Rich by American rapper Melly Mike. “Viral trend done right,” reads the caption of one video, followed by the emoji of a hand with painted fingernails. “Making reels after setting Parliament on fire,” another one reads. In yet another video, the Nepalese finance minister is assaulted by a protester. Similarly, a video montage by Gen Z 212 shows the clashes between Moroccan protesters and the police, set to Kendrick Lamar’s HUMBLE as the soundtrack. The revolution is about to be televised; you picked the right time, but the wrong generation.
What do the youth protests in Morocco from last September have in common with the revolts in Asia, which began in Indonesia in February, followed by Mongolia and, later, Nepal?
After the revolution in Nepal, preceded by years of protests across Asia, in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Mongolia, the Gen Z uprising turned into a global movement. Since Nepal, the uprising of the new generation has now spread to the Philippines, the Maldives, Timor-Leste, Madagascar, and Morocco, all the way up to the Peruvian Andes.
In Peru, Gen Z protests have focused on political corruption and organized crime. Promoted on social media such as TikTok, Instagram, and X, they led to the dismissal of President Dina Boluarte. A little earlier, in Indonesia, the protestors forced the government to rescind a controversial law about digital censorship. In Nepal, the government was dissolved and a new one was proposed after a public vote on Discord. In Madagascar, the head of state Andry Rajoelina was derided on social media after he suggested appointing the new ministers on LinkedIn…

From the Himalayas to the Andes, the latest Gen Z protests in Asia, Africa, and South America share a common language of oppression. The One Piece flag, featuring a skull with a straw hat, has become the symbol of the latest generation’s revolution against government corruption. One Piece, a famous Japanese manga and anime, recently adapted into a Netflix live-action series, tells the story of a group of pirates who fight the injustices of power. As a Filipino protester recently stated in an interview with The Guardian, “Even though we have different languages and cultures, we speak the same language of oppression. We see the flag as a symbol of liberation against oppression.” In Nepal, the One Piece flag was hung at the gates of the government’s main building. The banner was also waved at protests in countries such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Madagascar, and Morocco. In the past, the black flag with the skull and straw hat appeared at marches in solidarity with Palestine and, recently, was even hoisted on the Global Sumud Flotilla on its way to the Gaza Strip.
It is neither the first nor the last time that popular culture has entered the streets. In the anti-extradition demonstrations in Hong Kong, the meme of Pepe the Frog was repurposed as a symbol of freedom and democracy; in Myanmar, the three-fingered greeting inspired by The Hunger Games was used as a sign of protest; elsewhere, Guy Fawkes’ masks from V for Vendetta or clown makeups from Joker have appeared. Even more recently, in Turkey, the image of a protester dressed in a Pikachu costume running from police during the demonstrations has become a viral symbol of resistance. These are not merely political but also aesthetic revolutions. The last generation is giving rise to a new language of protest. Its grammar is very simple: memes and flames.
The aesthetics of the Gen Z uprising have a common feature: they are viral. Within hours, a student in Morocco is watching and sharing a video posted in Nepal with the hashtag #GenZRevolution. A few days earlier, the same thing had happened eight thousand kilometers away, in Peru. If movements like Occupy Wall Street in 2011, the Arab Spring in 2010–2012, or the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in 2014 had a regional character, the protests of Gen Z extend from the Himalayas to the Andes. The revolution is no longer local but global. The internet is no longer just a means of communication: it has become a weapon of planetary dissent.

Generation Z is the first generation thrown into the digital world, no longer the analogue one of the past. Yet, the aesthetics of the revolt – albeit its virulence and immediacy – cannot disrupt the medium that reproduces it. From the video montage of the Gen Z 212 group to the viral videos of Nepalese youth, the revolution is digitized without destabilizing the power of the platforms. Unsurprisingly, the relationship between digital technology and power has been at the forefront of several protests by young people in Asia, Africa, and America: against cyber surveillance in Indonesia, against online censorship in the Philippines, against the ban on social media in Nepal, and, lastly, against the lack of internet access in various countries, including Morocco. Technology, of course, is only a small part of the broader issues underpinning the protests, such as unemployment, corruption, and economic and social inequality.
However, as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci noted in her 2017 book Twitter and Tear Gas, the contradiction is that these movements write history with tools that are not their own. Even those who make history must still accept the platform’s terms and conditions. In this regard, it is enough to take a look at Meta’s role (Facebook and Instagram, especially) in the censorship of digital activism in solidarity with Palestine – through the removal of posts, the suspension of accounts, shadow banning, and so on.
And yet, it is only through the use of digital communication that the revolution has spread from the Himalayas to the Andes and will continue to do so, exporting the protest from online to offline. To quote a track by Kendrick Lamar, “Do you really know how to play the game? Then tighten up!”
Special thanks to @girlaccelerated for the early input for this article.
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This article was originally published in the Italian magazine Machina.
Alessandro Sbordoni (Cagliari, 1995) is the author of  the INC Network Notion Semiotics of the End: On Capitalism and the Apocalypse (2023) and The Shadow of Being: Symbolic / Diabolic (Miskatonic Virtual University Press, 2023). He is an Editor of the British magazine Blue Labyrinths and the Italian magazine Charta Sporca. He works for the Open Access publisher Frontiers.