On youth culture, the fragile threads of belonging, and the art of weaving a common world
Something curious is happening in the streets of France.
Alongside student demonstrations about education, unequal opportunities and an uncertain future, an unlikely cast of characters has begun appearing. Spider-Man, Batman, Darth Vader and other figures borrowed from popular culture mingle with students staging battles d’aura: playful confrontations involving exaggerated poses, dances and gestures familiar from the internet.
The scenes are wonderfully absurd.
A demonstration is usually something we recognise through its slogans, banners and demands. Here, another language enters the picture. Someone performs a gesture, others recognise it, laughter spreads, and for a moment the crowd becomes an audience, a stage and a group of participants all at once.
These performances do not diminish the seriousness of the students' concerns. Nor does every student taking part necessarily share the same reasons for being there. But the ease with which these fragments of digital culture move into the streets is striking.
Something is being shared that requires almost no explanation.
I find these scenes both funny and strangely moving.
Because beneath the absurdity, I wonder whether we are witnessing something about the threads that still connect us, at a time when so much of our shared social fabric feels increasingly fragile.
A language that travels without a passport
One of the peculiarities of internet culture is that it can make complete sense to people who have never met, while remaining almost incomprehensible to those standing beside them.
A costume, a movement of the hands, a particular way of saying two numbers: recognition can happen instantly, without a shared language, neighbourhood or national history.
For young people, these references are not confined to their screens. They travel into school corridors, friendships, public transport and now political demonstrations. They are repeated, adapted and transformed as they move.
What interests me is not simply their popularity, but the ease with which they invite participation.
You do not need to know the person who starts the joke. You only need to recognise it.
That is a surprisingly powerful social mechanism.
And perhaps it explains why these moments seem so alive. They are not organised by a school, a political party or a cultural institution. They arise from a shared familiarity that already exists, waiting for someone to bring it into the room.
Or onto the street.
Six-seven in a Zurich classroom
My son is currently doing his Swiss civil service as an assistant in a primary school in a relatively privileged neighbourhood of Zurich.
The experience has been an education in itself.
He has encountered conflicts between children that can become physical, moments when adults struggle to regain their attention, and the delicate business of establishing boundaries in an environment where children, teachers and parents do not always understand situations in the same way.
These are observations from one school, not a judgement on Swiss education. But they have shown him how demanding the everyday work of holding a classroom together can be.
One day, during a tense moment, he tried something unexpected.
He said six-seven, accompanied by the gesture that children seem to recognise everywhere.
For those unfamiliar with the phenomenon, I could attempt an explanation, although I suspect it would make the whole thing considerably less funny.
The children understood immediately.
One began laughing, then another. The tension loosened enough for him to regain their attention.
It was a small moment. The conflict still needed to be addressed, and humour could not replace the boundaries or care the children required.
But it had opened a door.
I was intrigued by the resemblance to what I had been seeing in France. In both settings, something that might look like meaningless digital noise to an outsider became a moment of connection to those who shared the reference.
My son had not invented the joke or taught it to the children. He had simply noticed a language they already spoke and found a way to enter it.
The strange life of a common culture
There is a paradox here.
The digital platforms through which these references circulate are frequently criticised for isolating people, fragmenting attention and reducing human relationships to measurable engagement.
There are good reasons for those concerns.
Yet the same platforms have also given rise to a cultural repertoire that travels across borders with extraordinary ease.
A child in Zurich and a teenager in France may live in very different circumstances, but both can recognise the same gesture. They may never meet, speak different languages and have little else in common. Still, for an instant, they inhabit a shared cultural space.
This is not entirely new. Popular songs, films, television programmes and sports have long provided common references across social and geographical boundaries.
What feels different is the speed, the scale and the constant reinvention.
A meme can appear, spread across continents, become part of everyday conversation and disappear within weeks. There is rarely a stable institution preserving it, no agreed meaning, no obligation to pass it on.
And yet, while it lasts, it can feel remarkably familiar.
I wonder what kind of common culture is taking shape through this process.
One that can connect people almost instantly, but whose references are continually dissolving.
One that is extraordinarily accessible in some ways, yet capable of excluding anyone who does not know the joke.
One that belongs to millions of people and, in another sense, to nobody in particular.
When the stories that held us together become uncertain
France has a long history of political protest. The streets have repeatedly become places where citizens challenge authority and make collective demands visible.
Students protesting the conditions of their education are participating in that history, even as they bring new cultural references into it.
Their concerns are concrete: missing teachers, inadequate resources, unequal educational conditions and uncertainty about what comes next.
But education also carries a larger promise.
It asks young people to invest years of their lives in preparation for a future they cannot yet see. The promise has never been equally fulfilled, but the belief that education offers a meaningful path into society remains central to how schools operate.
What happens when that path becomes harder to trust?
The question reaches well beyond the classroom. Work, housing, economic security and the expectation that each generation might enjoy greater opportunities than the previous one have all become more uncertain for many people.
The stories that once gave people a sense of direction are not disappearing everywhere or for everyone. But they no longer seem able to hold expectations together as confidently as they once did.
Against this background, I find the appearance of these playful cultural references particularly interesting.
The students are not necessarily using memes to make a statement about the erosion of institutional trust. Some are simply having fun, and that deserves to remain part of the story.
Yet there is something striking about a generation expressing serious frustrations through forms of culture that seem to emerge almost entirely outside the institutions being questioned.
The old structures remain. New ways of recognising one another are developing around and through them.
The two do not always speak the same language.
What holds when the laughter fades?
There is, of course, a limit to what a shared joke can accomplish.
My son's experience in the classroom makes that clear.
The laughter created an opening, but it did not settle the disagreement. The children still needed an adult capable of understanding what had happened, setting boundaries and helping them return to one another.
A school cannot be held together by memes.
Neither can a family, a business or a society.
These depend on slower forms of connection: knowing what others need, being able to disagree without destroying a relationship, sharing responsibilities, trusting that someone will be there when things become difficult.
Those relationships are built through repetition, attention and sometimes uncomfortable conversations.
But the small moments matter too.
A joke that interrupts an argument. Someone noticing that a colleague is overwhelmed. A parent finding a way to reach a child who has stopped listening. A team discovering that the problem was not a lack of commitment, but an expectation nobody had clearly expressed.
None of these moments looks particularly impressive from the outside.
Yet they are often where the fabric of a relationship is repaired.
Perhaps this is something we overlook when we think about institutions and systems. We become absorbed in their visible architecture—rules, processes, roles, programmes—while much of what allows people to live and work together happens in interactions too ordinary to measure.
The formal structures matter. But they cannot do the weaving on their own.
The world inside a tapestry
While thinking about these scenes, I kept returning to the medieval tapestries that can still be seen in France.
In the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, created around the turn of the sixteenth century, the world is astonishingly crowded.
People appear among rabbits, birds, dogs, monkeys, flowers, trees and creatures of the imagination. The smallest details invite attention. Even the background is alive.
Everything occupies a place within the same woven field.
Of course, the society that produced these tapestries was marked by hierarchy, exclusion and violence. We should not confuse the richness of its artistic imagination with a world in which everyone was treated as belonging.
But I find the image itself compelling.
The human figures do not stand in an empty landscape. They are surrounded by other forms of life, connected through an intricate composition in which no single thread could produce the whole.
Looking at these tapestries, I wonder what has happened to our imagination of a common world.
We have become extraordinarily capable of connecting people across vast distances. A joke can travel from one continent to another before breakfast. Millions can recognise the same character or gesture.
Yet we often struggle to sustain the relationships closest to us, or to find a shared understanding of what the institutions around us are for.
Perhaps we have confused the ability to connect with the experience of being woven together.
The distinction matters.
A thread can touch another thread without becoming part of a fabric. A moment of recognition can be real without becoming a lasting relationship.
And still, I would hesitate to dismiss these fleeting connections.
They suggest that the impulse to find one another remains remarkably alive, even when the forms it takes seem ridiculous.
Who is still doing the weaving?
I suspect that if we asked the students taking part in battles d’aura what their performances reveal about the fragmentation of contemporary society, we would receive a puzzled look.
Possibly followed by another dance.
Perhaps that is as it should be.
Not every act of connection needs to carry the weight of a social theory. Sometimes young people are simply playing, and it is only afterwards that someone like me arrives to write an essay about it.
Still, the image stays with me.
A group of students laughing together in a French street. A classroom in Zurich where two absurd numbers briefly interrupt a conflict. Small threads of recognition appearing in places where the larger fabric sometimes feels strained.
I don't think the answer is to ask these moments to become more than they are.
A meme is not a community. A viral dance is not a shared future. And Spider-Man, however versatile, cannot be expected to repair the French education system.
But perhaps these small, improbable threads invite us to pay closer attention to the work of weaving itself.
Who creates the conditions in which people can recognise one another beyond a shared joke? Who makes room for different voices without requiring them to become the same? Who maintains the relationships, responsibilities and places through which a common life can endure?
These are not tasks that can be delegated entirely to institutions, nor solved by the next cultural phenomenon. They unfold in the ways we teach, lead, listen, disagree, care and participate.
The medieval tapestry was not made by a single thread. Nor was it made by simply placing thousands of threads beside one another.
Someone had to weave them.
And perhaps that is the question these strange scenes in France leave me with.
If superhero costumes, battles d’aura and nonsense memes are helping hold together a few loose stitches in our social fabric, what happened to the rest of the tapestry?
And how do we begin rebuilding the connections between us—in our schools, our workplaces, our families and the places where we live?
