Set the stage. It’s spring in America. The weather couldn’t be more lovely. Another group of teens prepares to participate in the rite of passage that is high school graduation. The crowd of proud onlookers collectively document nearly every second. The graduation ceremony is also filmed and streamed live on Facebook. QR codes are connected to facial recognition to make sharing easier. The professional pictures are available to purchase and download before we arrive home. We all enter our credit card data and shell out money for pictures of our beautiful children.
Our lazy, gullible, anxious, gender-confused, politically-confused, screenagers.
Is this the most applauded generation? Perhaps. The most managed and monitored? Could be. The most surveilled? Unequivocally. Because, there is a dark secret about the graduation ceremony. The main event wasn’t just the achievements of the graduates. It was also a data harvest to feed the hungry surveillance machine that makes the billionaires rich. These graduates have been comodified since birth, likely making them the generation with the least privacy.
But it’s fine, because they live in the richest country in the world, they’ve been told. A land of opportunity.
Anyone can make it. If they just work hard enough.
These kids have a few other things to worry about though before they close the deal on their American dreams. Unfortunately, as the climate crisis intensifies, and as they become the most indebted generation to enter the workforce, they will also be competing with computers for jobs. Oh, and the government is teetering on the edge of an authoritarian takeover, kidnapping students from colleges for their social media posts, and sending some to foreign prisons. It’s like six dystopic movies in one. It’s truly too absurd to be fiction. But it couldn’t be more real for another set of kids we have belittled, infantalized, and quite frankly, recklessly abandoned, via our ineffectual civic responses to all of these crises.
When we create messages about how we see young people, it informs how they see themselves and how they choose to be. Kids need identities that they can feel proud of so they feel capable of solving the problems that we have created for them. Generational struggle is a rite of passage unto itself, and Gen Z isn’t the first generation to struggle under an inheritance of problems, with a vote of no confidence. The apathetic Gen-Xers, and entitled Milennials, are both worse off than previous generations, but given how much of their lives and identities we have commidified, I fear too much of this generation will become completely consumed without our help.
Featured Image: Step into your place. English propaganda poster by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, London, shows a column of soldiers marching into the distance, while being joined in the foreground by men in a variety of civilian attires (1915). Original public domain image from Wikimedia Commons