The recent college graduate sits nervously as questions are posed to him, with only seconds to answer. Ben (not his real name) is one of many young job seekers vying for interviews with national companies in his field, software engineering. He has, of course, sent out many applications to get even to this point, at least 100 so far.
“Describe one challenge you faced and how you surmounted it.” This inquiry, which seems a reasonable enough job-interview question, doesn’t come from a person who has history in Ben’s area, or from an HR professional. In fact, it isn’t delivered by a person at all. Ben is likely being scored by an AI assessment tool. In more than one interview, he receives a prompt, mere seconds to think of an answer and a minute or so to speak—or, as he put it, “to fill up the space”—while recording himself.
After a number of these anxious algo-exchanges, Ben gets to make his case to actual humans, albeit virtually. He has only one interview in person. He goes on to land a job with a financial firm, but he’s still bothered by the automated interactions and how they determined his fate. He found it uncanny, he said, to “speak to a machine” in virtual rooms, with “no body language to go on.” His friends have passed through similar machine gauntlets in their job searches. “Many feel alienated by it, and rightfully so,” said Ben. “It can seem like we as a society now want people to act like computers.”
For Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, digital arbiters are evaluating their worth all day, looming over their studies and jobs, and threatening to sculpt them into something machinelike. And while it promises to make them faster and more efficient, AI may be denying them the kinds of experiences they need to fully thrive as workers—and as humans.
Whether they’re searching for work, trying to hold onto a job as AI changes it, or still in school, Gen Z is facing what we call “anticipatory obsolescence”—the Black Mirror–ish possibility that they may be launching themselves into a future where they are no longer quite necessary, or, at best, are subordinated to an algorithmic authority. “What’s going to happen to a whole generation?” asked Ben.
Three Responses
For months, we’ve spoken to dozens of Gen Zers and identified three overlapping ways they’re responding to the rise of AI. Most are what we call AI Adaptors. They’re using large language models, but selectively, and often more because they have to than because they want to. Many are trying on the technology without really trusting where it’s going. ChatGPT to research a company? OK. Claude for brainstorming? Maybe. Gemini telling them what to do with their lives? No thanks. While they might want to take what makes them faster and more efficient, they balk at surrendering their own thinking and creativity. Their question: How can I use it without it using me?
Like Ben, many are preparing for or working in jobs highly exposed to AI, which includes not only areas like finance or software engineering, but some you might not think of, like nursing, or, ironically, human resources. How, Gen Zers would like somebody to explain, are they supposed to get good at something if AI is there interfering with paths on which beginners learn? What if relying on it is taking away their capacity to learn in the first place? Accordingly, many are trying to “AI proof” themselves by amassing skills that can’t be automated or aiming toward work where human judgment or presence is still required. Others go further, envisioning careers where they hope to master AI or make it safer and more accountable.
As veteran technology theorist and professor Ethan Zuckerman put it, describing most of his college students: “They really don’t think it’s good for society. AI has been thrust upon them, and they don’t know how to cope with the changes—will there be jobs anymore?”
The second group of Gen Zers we’ve talked to, which we call AI Reformers, have decided to funnel their frustration into the fight about what the technology will become and who gets to decide. They’re already engaged with the rules and rollouts of new technology—organizing politically, lobbying or getting into campaigns. They’re people like Nickolas Spiliotopoulos, 22, a recent graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who led his campus’s chapter of PauseAI US, a nonprofit that advocates for halting frontier AI development. Like many young Reformers, he sees himself as more pragmatic than ideological. As someone who studied political science, he speaks with both-sides diplomacy: “I want to be part of the movement that is regulating AI but also to find a middle ground.”
He and other Reformers often work through local chapters of groups pressing lawmakers to rein in large language models and to put AI companies on a tighter chain. Others are fighting to protect humans from displacement or demanding greater transparency and accountability around bossware and surveillance, or pushing back on the data centers proliferating like mushrooms around the country. They want to put the public back at the center of a conversation currently dominated by Silicon Valley oligarchs and their machines.
Other examples of protesters include people like Nathan Kim, a Ph.D. student in his mid-twenties at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, who has been organizing a coalition against his university’s plans to create a computing facility in collaboration with the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He and others like him, from places ranging from Tennessee to New Jersey, have been banding together against massive AI infrastructure projects. These include groups like the Climate Revolution Action Network in New Jersey, which pushed successfully to cancel a planned data center in New Brunswick and is fighting against a roughly 400,000-square-foot proposed CoreWeave facility in Kenilworth.
Finally, there is the least tamed group, the AI Refuseniks. Among them are the pranksters and tricksters actively resisting the AI-ification of everyday life. They include people like the Luddite thinker Damian Thomas, 25, a web developer in Astoria, Queens, who runs the Refusenik platform Unplatform. Its cohort also contains young artists ditching generative tools, along with journalists and other knowledge workers sometimes choosing notebooks over laptops, analog workflows over Google Calendars, and human-centered spaces both online and off. The Refuseniks are deliberately embracing the messy friction AI promises to erase—writing by hand, doing things the traditional way, and making room for slowness and imperfection.
Refuseniks don’t want to optimize away these essential parts of being human, but to throw a protective force field around them.
Easier to imagine than achieve.
A Redundant Generation?
Over the summer, a significant chunk of new job seekers were interviewed through AI-fueled hiring practices, often followed by chilly automated rejections. In the spring, a survey by hiring platform Greenhouse found that over 60 percent of job seekers had encountered an AI interview. Among the companies making these tools is Hirevue, whose prerecorded video interview platform is a favorite of employers. Users on Reddit’s r/recruitinghell have described the one-sided auditions, facilitated by Hirevue and similar companies, as “the most humiliating recruiting experience ive had” and “extremely uncomfortable,” with one weary poster offering a deadpan suggestion to use “a sock puppet or action figure/Barbie in place of you.”
For Gen Zers, job hunting can feel like a game rigged to waste their time, where the prize is a spectral illusion. One survey found that 81 percent of recruiters admit their companies post “ghost jobs”—positions not intended to be filled, but used to signal growth, harvest applicant data, or, even worse, keep current employees on edge. A few defiant Zoomers—a nickname that stuck after they were forced onto the platform during the pandemic—are ghosting back, but employers hold the cards, and some are refusing to hire this generation at all.
The old promise of entry-level work, where you find a position, learn the ropes, and make your way up, was already fading. Gen Xers and millennials can tell you that. But AI is quickening the unraveling, disrupting how young people find jobs—if they find jobs—and also what they confront when they get there. Gen Z is squinting into a fog, unsure of what’s coming, yet certain that disembodied decision-makers will have a say in it.
Technology podcaster and critic Edward Ongweso Jr., who co-hosts This Machine Kills, reminds us that young people have always discovered they have little power over their jobs. But AI, he said, is making the power imbalance harder to ignore, because now “your boss is structuring your workplace in the hopes of replacing you.”
“And we’re the grunt-force out there being asked to build the AI infrastructure,” one Gen Zer told us. “Kind of unsettling.”
Deloitte’s global 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey shows these pressures already impacting how young people work and plan. Nearly three-quarters are already using AI in their work, but almost a third say their organizations aren’t prepared for the changes it will bring, and another third say the AI tools they’re handed aren’t really up to the job. It seems that they’re having to work alongside machines while the parameters of what they’ll be needed for, and how much that work will even be worth, grow ever more obscure. More than half are putting off major life decisions because of financial worries. They’re hit hardest of any generation by rising housing costs, and as far as having kids? Too expensive.
All of these groups are confronted with an economy they can’t afford, a president they don’t approve of, and a political system they trust about as much as a corporate chatbot. In a poll by Axios-Generation Lab, depressively characterized as “Thumbs down on everything,” more than a quarter of 18- to 34-year-olds said they believed they, or someone they know, has already lost a job to AI, and over three-quarters say finding a job themselves would be somewhat or very difficult. The actual AI job apocalypse hasn’t arrived—yet. But the damage to Gen Z is already showing up in who is getting hired: A recent United States Census Bureau study found that employment among 22- to 24-year-olds dropped 12 percent in the most AI-exposed industries over the 10 quarters following ChatGPT’s arrival.
Ongweso noted that companies are certainly acting as if a big transformation is already underway, and even if it doesn’t happen as expected, that doesn’t change the grim reality for people who didn’t get hired or found themselves pushed into careers they didn’t want because of it. Did any young person ever say to herself, Hey, I’d like to spend all day babysitting AI agents! Probably not. And yet often, that’s where the new jobs are.
With all that to contend with, as well as layoffs, punishing inflation that snuffs out any wage gains, high interest rates, and the sky-high cost of just being an adult, it can all feel like Gen Z is being thrust into an epoch that author and AI critic Cory Doctorow calls the “Enshittocene.”
Gen Z favorite Phoebe Bridgers sings of the fatalism young people feel as everything real seems to be receding: “The billboard said, THE END IS NEAR, / I turned around; there was nothing there / Yeah, I guess the end is here.”
A generation eyes its own redundancy.
Adaptation Nation
On a June evening in Midtown Manhattan, a packed room of Adaptors gathers for “AI and the Future of Society,” a conversation hosted by the Aspen Institute’s Samuel Kimbriel with Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark. The vibe is “existential cocktail party.” On stage, the two men volley questions about what makes an ideal society.
During the Q&A, Nina Bodow takes the mic. What is the most sacred human capacity, she asks, that young people should protect from AI? Suddenly, things feel a lot less abstract. Clark’s smooth answer is to guard your attention fiercely. But, of course, AI is extraordinarily good at monopolizing just that: It’s instant, personalized, and much more emotionally validating than your roommate. In short, addictive.
Bodow, now a Yale University junior, doesn’t reject AI. She uses it every day for voice-to-text, organizing notes, and some other time-saving tasks, and as a critical sparring partner. But she won’t let AI draft or outline her work, or turn to it when she is stuck. The emergence of AI has contributed to her focus on studying philosophy, specifically ethics, where she is drawn by precisely what the technology threatens to make harder: thinking for herself. “Philosophy forces you to be autonomous in how you think, what you say, how you process information,” she said. Bodow is already envisioning a career focused on aligning AI with human interests: “The whole point is that AI can’t think about itself,” she said. To her, that still requires a brain. The human variety.
In a labor market eager to automate thought, that might be one of the few things left to put on your résumé.
Adaptors like Bodow grapple with the complicated dynamic they’ve been handed. They’re told to become AI fluent and flooded with ads for boot camps and master classes. But they’re also warned that “AI natives” risk becoming mentally stunted and shallow. At the same time, they don’t believe they can avoid the technology, and they’re fully aware that it’s creeping into every aspect of their lives—algorithmically scanning, ranking, and routing them every minute.
Universities like Harvard and Ohio State have already baked AI into the curriculum, while jobs ranging from Starbucks barista to junior banker have routinely forced young employees to work under it, clean up its mistakes, and somehow use it to do more, faster. Mixed messages fly at young people constantly like digital confetti: Build skills, but don’t become dependent. Use AI, but don’t sound like you’re using it. There are courses for that, too: You can pay to learn how to make a machine’s work sound just like your own voice—assuming you can recall what your own voice sounds like once you’ve “humanized” yourself.
Kayla, 28, is a cardiac nurse at a hospital in a North Carolina city and a reluctant Adaptor. With a few years on the job under her belt, she sees firsthand what AI can do and what it can’t. She is grateful for tools that can scan and summarize patient charts or translate medicalese into plain English, but Kayla is also watching AI chip away at her authority. The technology is supposed to help nurses, but a lot of them are being asked to bow down to algorithmic judgments that sometimes go against common sense and hard-won, on-the-job experience.
One AI program Kayla must use assesses patients’ risk of falling based on factors like gender, height, and lab results. “But sometimes it would miss if a patient has actually fallen before!” she said. When the software gets it wrong, nurses “have to debate AI, try to manipulate the algorithm” into reflecting what they already know. The people who understand the patient best end up as the system’s backup, with their expertise pushed to the sidelines and carrying less weight. Kayla said, exasperated, that “sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day to argue with it.” Sometimes she just gives in.
Kayla is not alone: Medical professionals early in their careers report fears of losing their clinical skills to AI. They’re also at risk of giving up their autonomy, as well as ending up as scanned and surveilled “quantified workers.”
Lucas Olslund, 25, a more enthusiastic Adaptor, contends with different challenges. A computer science major as an undergrad, he works at Fastly, a San Francisco–based cloud service company, as an engineer.
In the office, he uses AI for coding, planning, and teaching himself things, and likes that it speeds up tedious tasks and helps close the experience gap that comes with being a newer hire, freeing him to take on more responsibility. But he still wishes he had a few AI-less years at the start of his career. When Olslund needs guidance, he finds it easier and faster to ask AI rather than track down a senior colleague—someone who might otherwise become a mentor. That convenience, he thinks, comes with a cost: “It can substitute for human connection for a little bit, but it’s not real, and it will come back to bite us.”
Hiring trends offer a glimpse of what that bite might look like: In early 2026, nearly 70 percent of U.S. software development postings on the job search website Indeed targeted senior engineers. As AI takes over tasks like routine coding, companies seem to want experienced workers who can direct it, catch its mistakes, and exercise judgment. But where do experienced workers come from? Hatched from an egg?
Human mentors can show young workers how to deal with mistakes and navigate office politics, and can introduce them to people who may help their careers. They might not always have been easy to find, especially for women historically shut out from patrilineal networks of power, but what if the “mentor” is an algorithm? Clearly, getting taken to lunch is off the table.
When asked if he worried about losing his job to AI, Olslund smiled: “Oh, I’m probably good for at least two years.” His answer captures how diminished Gen Zers’ expectations have become in the AI epoch, even for those fortunate enough to be relatively well-employed.
The Reformation
The AI Reformers we’ve spoken to have many of the same feelings as the Adaptors, but they are trying to tackle the problem directly at the level of politics and power. Some are college students setting up tables on their college greens, making their case to both AI enthusiasts and those who view it as a useful tool but are ultimately shruggingly indifferent. Others are looking into the larger systems of how AI gets deployed—the labor rules, corporate decisions, and public policies that determine who bears the risks and who gets the benefits.
The mood they reflect was hard to miss in spring 2026, when students at the University of Central Florida and the University of Arizona booed commencement speakers delivering AI-pilled sermons, and again this September in North Carolina, when OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and other tech heavyweights descended on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for the G20 Innovation Ministerial conference to wax bullish about AI’s economic promise. Hundreds of students and community members answered with chants of “Up, up with education, down, down with AI nation,” waving signs targeting everything from job turmoil to data centers to the hated Flock Safety cameras appearing around campus.
Felix De Simone, 25, is the former organizing director of PauseAI US and believes his role was about, as he put it, “educating people about the dire threat of superhuman intelligence and the need for regulation.” PauseAI US is an organization with local chapters that defines itself as opposed to dangerous frontier AI, while also abhorring more extreme forms of resistance, like the firebombing of Sam Altman’s house this year. It wants to stop the headlong rush into AI, not blow up the house.
PauseAI US argues that AI labs are racing to automate economically valuable work and that workers should have a say in how that transformation unfolds. Its agenda, in classic Reformer fashion, includes mandatory safety testing, stronger liabilities for AI companies, and the power to shut down systems posing extreme risks, as well as limits on the computing power used to train advanced models. It also insists on time for reflection on developing superintelligent AI until adequate safeguards are in place and opposes efforts to keep states from regulating AI themselves while the federal government stews.
Many Reformers want to extend labor movement half-successes against AI in, say, the entertainment industry or publishing, or argue to expand the AI Dividend, a basic income framework currently overseen by two nonprofits, that intends to claw back some of the value AI creates before it detaches from human work.
They also want to hold the tech oligarchs to account. As De Simone said, “I am tired of being lied to. You can see these multibillionaire CEOs, developing AI, risking our future…. I didn’t vote for Sam Altman.” Indeed, many Gen Zers are passionately critical of AI CEOs. In CNBC-Generation Lab’s survey of 18- to 34-year-olds, all nine AI executives who were mentioned inspired overwhelming distrust, with Palantir’s wild-eyed, shit-talking Alex Karp leading the pack.
Gen Z AI Reformers can often appear progressive, but the anxiety fueling them is broader than any one political camp. The fall 2025 Harvard Youth Poll found that 66 percent of young Democrats and 59 percent of young Republicans saw AI as a threat to their job prospects. A new generation of politicians seems ready-made to appeal to their anxiety: A recent Washington Post analysis found that both Democratic and Republican candidates in nearly 40 percent of 2026 House, Senate, and gubernatorial races had staked out positions on AI or data centers—some sounding the alarm, others touting their economic potential. They’re aware that new technology has become inseparable from fears about jobs, education, the environment, and democracy itself. But what, exactly, are they prepared to do about it?
The politics of AI are peculiar. New York state Assembly member Alex Bores recently made AI regulation a defining issue of his 2026 congressional bid in a high-income Manhattan district, and he nearly pulled off a victory. With slogans like “Together, We Can Beat the Machines,” he cast ordinary New Yorkers against the tech titans, backing AI safeguards on everything from jobs to data centers. But even this apparent backlash came with a catch, because Bores was also a proxy in the AI industry’s own battles. A fat cat pro-industry network backed by OpenAI and other tech investors poured cash into attacking him, while Anthropic-backed groups spent millions supporting him. The result was a strange kind of political choice: Voters were being asked to choose sides in a fight over AI, but the AI industry was bankrolling both sides. To some Gen Zers, that felt like no choice at all. Opponent Micah Lasher, who had the endorsement of outgoing Representative Jerry Nadler, won the seat.
In the first half of 2026, tech and AI companies and their trade groups let loose roughly $41 million buying influence in Washington, with OpenAI and Anthropic sharply increasing their spending as lawmakers eye tougher rules. Gen Zers are keenly aware that their votes—and their imaginations—are something these companies want to win over. But Ethan Zuckerman sees young people in his classes as highly suspicious of a world in which Silicon Valley overlords like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg wield so much influence, and are so deeply interlocked with politics, that ordinary voices are drowned beneath the grinding machinery of power.
Justin Seo, 22, a senior at Swarthmore College, sees AI as part of a larger crisis for Gen Z—an economy in which, he said, those at the top seem largely indifferent to whether anyone else can get ahead. “But the dam is starting to break,” he said. Then, for some, comes the worry: What will the powerful do when it does? “The American elite has really clamped down on protest culture,” another Gen Zer said, pointing to the reaction to the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America and their challenge to the AI industry as evidence that the establishment is “really afraid of people gathering their power together and using it.”
For Gen Zers, who’ll be living the longest with the consequences of this epic technological shift, getting into the political fight is crucial, but so is keeping a raised eyebrow when AI companies or the politicians they fund talk about “abundance,” “staying competitive,” or “responsible regulation.” They have to reckon with corporate America’s shareholder-first model, still stuck in the greed-is-good ethos of the 1980s that sends the gains to executives and big stockholders, leaving workers and the public to tussle over the scraps. And they can’t forget that Silicon Valley has made a dark art of outrunning regulators, exploiting loopholes, and treating the rules as obstacles to be routed around.
That leaves Gen Z with the classic choice of trying to challenge the system from within or deciding it’s not a system worth salvaging. The Reformers want a seat at the table; another group is thinking about just walking away from the table altogether.
Rage Against the Machine
In late June, riffing on the Boomers’ Summer of Love, the AI Refuseniks hosted the “Summer of Ludd,” an eight-day festival held in New York City. Its organizers urged young people to break up with Big Tech and experience public space without their phones as intermediaries. Events included a saddle stitching class; a radio class with transmitters, walkie-talkies, and a game in which participants competed to erase “toxic apps”; and daily meditation. he festival, advertised anywhere but social media, drew Zoomers with flip phones who took classes in “Luddite Rizz”—Gen Z slang for the better type of charisma required to mingle and date without apps.
Critics of the original Luddites have never tired of painting them as backward nutters, doomed in their efforts. But their resistance was hardly futile. In the early nineteenth century, these British textile workers, based originally around Nottingham, fought against the factory system that stripped them of autonomy. They laid the groundwork for the modern labor movement and, eventually, legislation that helped curb some of industrial capitalism’s worst aspects. Later, in the twentieth century, corporations would use the information revolution to claw back much of that power—automating work, monitoring workers, and shuffling production around the globe, steadily handing more power to management and big shareholders.
It’s certainly not hard to imagine corporate America using the AI boom to expand those powers again. But the lesson for today’s Luddites is that so-called technological progress can indeed be contested, slowed, and redirected to serve social goals.
Ludds are turning their rejection of digital technology into a social movement. They hold “Delete Days,” like AA meetings in a church basement, where groups gather to purge commercial apps. They also throw phone-free dance parties. At one event, young Ludds built a cardboard data center on the dance floor and then staged an action around it at the night’s end.
Ludd Damian Thomas’s resistance began in middle school, and intensified as he started rejecting the automatic use of social media—the “unwanted abuse” of technology. In the “office hours” for his site Unplatform, he teaches his peers how to organize parties, newsletters, and political events outside of the massive tech platforms. He steers them away from surveillant apps like Partiful and toward options that help build creative and political practices in other digital spaces, or in person. Much of what people use AI for, he argues, could be handled by Wikipedia or other human-curated sources. Instead, he argues, AI offers an “illusion of independence” while actually organizing a kind of control that is “tyrannical.”
Thomas wants his generation to “stop taking for granted the state of things” and reject the idea that tech companies get to decide how society works. He believes technology is often brought in to solve problems that are really failures of human organization. When people haven’t communicated, planned, or built functioning institutions, they reach for a fast technological pseudo-fix.
Seo, the Swarthmore senior, knows the drill. When he and a friend showed up to a Fourth of July gathering in New York for interns that was advertised online, they couldn’t find the event location, and their attempts to reach the organizers were shunted to a useless AI assistant. A bot had been used to handle basic logistics and field questions, “but they just created a wall” at a time when interns desperately want in-person experiences and relationships, as suggested by a recent KPMG Summer Intern Pulse Survey.
Nick Plante, 26, runs NYC Off Tech, which essentially serves as the virtual broadsheet of modern Luddism. He co-runs the cheekily named event series “Let’s Get Off Together,” a nightlife “experiment” where attendees surrender their cell phones at the door and instead connect through DJs, theatrical happenings, and occasional tech-CEO parodies. The events are meant to counter a “dispiriting” moment when the “workforce looks strange and in crisis”—a time when young people are looking for “coherence.”
Plante is tapping into a deep generational longing. A Harvard/Gallup study found “alarmingly high” rates of anxiety and depression among Gen Z adults, over half of whom lack meaning or purpose or both. But it’s not fair to call them apathetic—the survey reveals that most want to do good and help others, to find meaning and connection in a moment when both seem in pretty short supply.
Beneath the flip phones and disdain for toxic apps lies a pretty basic desire to belong. AI threatens to obliterate this as it eats into young people’s experiences and communities. The question is: Can that hunger drive them toward a real, generationwide solidarity?
Regeneration
Gen Z won’t be the only generation transformed by AI. But it crashes into their lives at a uniquely vulnerable moment—just as they’re trying to figure out who they are and what they’re good at, and how to carve out a place for themselves.
When AI scrambles that process, they get handed a tired, individualistic script that tells them: If technology threatens your job, just go get some new skills. If you’re scared of becoming obsolete, you need to adapt faster. The technology isn’t the problem—you are.
But young people are getting wise to the contradictions. For all the talk about how AI will make them better off and more productive, they see themselves being asked to swallow more insecurity and watch the technology crowd out the experiences they need to become productive in the first place.
For earlier generations, work was a crucial metric of measuring whether you were a functional adult in society. You might have taken a job for the paycheck, but you were still allowed to learn while you work, often getting paid while you got the training that would carry you forward. Being inefficient for a while was part of the deal.
AI threatens to break that classic bargain. The result could be a new form of generational inequality, where the learn-by-doing jobs are harder to justify economically, so the youngest are expected to somehow leap fully formed into a labor market not especially interested in forming them.
Video game Generation Zero imagines a world where young people return home to find it overrun by machines. To survive, the player has to figure out what the machines are doing, learn how to use them strategically, and decide when to fight back. There’s no one strategy that will work.
That helps explain why the three groups we encountered, Adaptors, Reformers, and Refuseniks, keep bleeding into one another. The Adaptors want to use AI without it using them. The Reformers want a say in how it is deployed and who benefits from it. The Refuseniks want to hang on to the parts of life that feel threatened when machines mediate everything. But underneath it all is a singular refusal. Nobody wants to become an NPC (nonplayer character) in a future somebody else designed, with equations cooked up in the bowels of some data center calling the shots.
Young people are up against a daunting economic, political, and technological cascade, but if Generation Zero is going to become Generation Hero, they have to fight for a future they actually want.
They’ve already grown up mistrusting institutions even more than their Gen X elders did, and have been advised to solve every problem on their own. Now they’re being asked to develop a sense of social class while AI is making it harder to get established and to form relationships where co-workers are more than Slack strangers—especially true in AI-exposed white-collar fields, where unionization has historically been weak. Thomas Ferguson, who directs research at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, commented via email that “New Deal union organizing was heavily place and community based, supported by local church groups, blue collar hobby and social clubs, and often friendly local authorities. Most of that structure has faded away, replaced in some cases by nothing at all.” Gen Z is entering the workplace with fewer community and institutional bonds, and fewer opportunities to forge them. Now they’re adding a new phrase to their resistance lexicon: “algorithmic union-busting,” as employers use AI to suss out troublemakers—thinning the ranks of potential organizers before they can actually organize.
And sometimes they wonder, why bother, if AI is just going to wipe us all out anyway?
Gen Zers tell us that older generations simply don’t get what they’re up against. Instead, headlines declare them dumber than their parents, while they’re dismissed as dysphoric doomers, phone zombies, postliterate tablet kids, allergic to work, and brain-rotted burnouts. Their wacky anti-work memes may look like brain rot from the outside, but they can also be read as resistance to a world obsessed with productivity and optimization—and to boomers calling them lazy from the security of million-dollar homes.
Rather than complain about them, or ask them to rise up and smash the existing order on their own, older generations have a job to do, too—to teach them, give them somewhere to start. “Are we going to put it all on young people who have legitimate questions about whether they’re going to feed themselves or stay healthy?” asked professor Zuckerman, a Gen Xer. “As boomers are leaving the stage, I think a lot of this is on my generation—we need to be looking at our children and saying, wow, what are we leaving?”
Metaphorical Filicide
In New York, longtime activists and Adbusters-style artists Reverend Billy Talen and Savitri D., the duo behind the Church of Stop Shopping, are mentoring a new generation of Refuseniks. Their East Village space has become a Luddite clubhouse, reviving a tradition of theatrical resistance that predates the internet takeover. They are thrilled by what they see as a brave continuation of their tradition.
It’s worth noting that a large share of the Refuseniks and Reformers we spoke to were college-educated and middle class. This gives them more freedom than other Americans have in choosing to go offline or to resist AI’s capture.
There’s a precedent here. Some of history’s famous young rebels have come from backgrounds comfortable enough to let them rebel. The 1960s marches and demonstrations were teeming with relatively privileged kids who found an identity in protest before they had one in the workplace. Today, Gen Zers from more affluent backgrounds may have a similar opening. If work can’t tell them who they are, maybe a movement can.
The generation born around the turn of the current century is far from unified as a political constituency. Young voters are more Democratic than older generations, but the 2024 elections illustrated just how politically mercurial they can be, particularly young men. Young Americans disagree sharply about politics, culture, and even what progress means. Still, collective action doesn’t mean everyone has to agree on everything. It can start with something small and local—a school using AI in ways students hate, a data center pissing off everyone from ranchers to city ratepayers, or a workplace where algorithms are making decisions they can’t challenge.
Surprisingly broad coalitions are forming around some of these problems. Across the political spectrum, people are thinking about how ordinary citizens get a share of what they produce. That’s why ideas like sovereign wealth funds and universal basic incomes are showing up across political lines. These proposals start from a useful recognition that the public should benefit from any gains coming from new technology. But neither is going to magically fix a political system awash in big bucks and a corporate governance culture where the art of squeezing money from workers and taxpayers and giving back less has been perfected over decades. And just giving people more money doesn’t necessarily give them more security if the health care system and other bloated institutions are there to take it right back. It doesn’t give them an identity either.
But Gen Zers don’t have to figure out everything right away to get going. A local fight can teach skills they won’t get from AI companions, like how to persuade and negotiate with real people and how to stick together. And sometimes, how to win.
Gen Z can sniff out inauthenticity a mile away. They need older generations to start showing up for them, listening to them, and giving them room to try things, including resistance. What’s at stake is the normalization of a late-capitalist cruelty: asking an entire generation to become fully fledged adults while denying them the experience, agency, and work that make that possible. Call it metaphorical filicide.
Ben, the AI Adaptor who began this story by speaking into a camera for an algorithm, still wonders whether the work he does will exist in a few years. He has also started thinking more seriously about faith, ancestral traditions, and the possibility of building a life around meaning-making rather than more conventional measures of success like earning power and/or being tech-au-courant.
He doesn’t think the answer is to turn back the clock. “I don’t think we can go backwards,” Ben said. That’s true, of course: He and his generation can’t stop the future from arriving. But they can’t give up their voice in defining what it means.
This story was co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
