Sustainable Media Center
We called the night “Gen Z, Tech, and Democracy,” but the energy in the room was less about labels and more about lived experience. This was not a panel about the future in the abstract. It was people who grew up inside platforms, who organize on them, who get surveilled by them, and who are now trying to bend those same systems toward something healthier.
Three themes kept surfacing.
Gen Z is not one thing
Rachel Janfaza, Founder of The Up and Up, opened with a framework that landed hard in the room. There are, functionally, two Gen Zs. Those who came of age before COVID, and those who were in high school or younger when the pandemic hit. The difference is not subtle. One group experienced adolescence with in-person school, social life, and pre-TikTok norms. The other learned how to grow up through Zoom, lockdowns, algorithmic feeds, and a constant sense that institutions were failing them.
That split helps explain a lot of what we see now: distrust of institutions, rejection of party labels, and what feels like a cultural, not strictly partisan, backlash. When more than half of Gen Z calls themselves independent, that is not “centrism.” It is a signal that the system does not feel credible. Not left, not right. Just not working.
The takeaway for anyone building policy, media, or civic tools is simple and uncomfortable: stop talking about Gen Z like a single audience. The lived experience inside this generation is already fractured by technology and by trauma. If you do not account for that, you are designing for a fantasy.
