• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, 3 hours ago

When you talk to Aidan Kohn-Murphy, you can feel how early he arrived in a space that everyone else is still trying to decode. He's 21, finishing his degree at Harvard, co-running the campus improv troupe, and navigating a creator economy that has gotten noisier and more cynical since he helped build pieces of it.

He started in politics at 16—no vote yet, no driver's license—just a TikTok account called TikTok for Biden that eventually turned into Gen Z for Change and helped pull a whole generation into the 2020 election. Now he's finishing a thesis on institutional power, organizing creators for insurgent candidates, and telling anyone who will listen that a big chunk of the political creator economy is broken.

For marketers and media folks watching Gen Z from the outside, Kohn-Murphy is a useful reality check. He's not a pundit. He's the kid who built the thing you're now paying consultants to explain back to you.

I spoke with Kohn-Murphy this week, and it’s hard to describe the experience without saying that he sees the political landscape with a kind of clarity that older strategists keep missing.

He told me, almost offhandedly, “Everyone in politics is out to get you,” and it wasn’t said with bitterness. It was said like someone stating the weather. Politics is adversarial; being young just raises the stakes.

He was equally matter-of-fact about Biden. He supported him in 2020 because the alternative was Trump. Simple math. No drama. But what came next made less sense to him and the people he organizes.

“By mid-2022,” he told me, “it became clear Biden did not understand he was elected as a one-term transition president.” There was a shift, climate decisions that disappointed young activists, a posture on Gaza that pushed many away, and a TikTok ban framed as safety but felt more like avoidance of real data privacy regulation.

What came through again and again in our conversation is how deeply Gen Z reads sincerity, and how unforgiving they are when they don’t see it. Kohn-Murphy didn’t use marketing language. He talked about authenticity as oxygen, not something you manufacture, something you either have or you don’t. “What audiences demand right now is authenticity,” he said. “Not triangulation into a void of meaning.”

He connects that straight to the rise of Zoran Mamdani. He remembers seeing Mamdani’s launch video within minutes of it going live. “I didn’t know if this guy had any chance,” he said, “but he was onto something.”

That video felt real. And creators who had no financial stake in the outcome started making videos because they cared, not because anyone hired them.

That distinction matters to him. “Paying a creator is never going to yield a video as sincere as when they have a vested interest in the outcome,” he said. In other words: authenticity scales; transactions don’t.

He has a front-row seat to the uglier side of platforms too. Early on, he used the handle “politicaljew,” which made him a target for neo-Nazis and trolls who doxxed him, threatened him, and forced the FBI and police to get involved.

He doesn’t sugarcoat what platforms get wrong about safety. But he also rejects the argument that Gen Z’s politics, especially around Gaza, were shaped by TikTok misinformation. The real story, he told me, was the gap between what young people saw in their feeds and what legacy media showed on cable. “The gap was massive,” he said. “Young people weren’t brainwashed. They watched real people in Gaza show their reality.”

That’s the part that so many older observers miss. This generation is living in two information ecosystems at once, and only one of them is controlled by traditional media. When those two versions of reality diverge, trust doesn’t fracture in both directions equally.

There’s also a growing frustration in the way political money is flooding into the creator world. He sees what’s happening there as a mess: too much money, too little oversight, too many people who don’t understand the ecosystem trying to buy their way into it. He thinks we’re headed toward what he calls “a disclosure crisis,” where political messages masquerading as organic content blow up trust for everyone.

Still, he doesn’t write off the platforms. He thinks they’re dangerous and powerful and poorly regulated – but also unavoidable. “Everything we feared about tech is coming true,” he said. “And we still have to use the tools that exist.” He calls it a dual reality: Fight for regulation, but use the platforms anyway, because young people aren’t getting their news anywhere else.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked him whether, given everything he’s done, there’s a version of the future where he runs for office. He shut that down immediately. He wants to be a public defender, because that’s where he thinks he can do the most good. “Injustice is built into the infrastructure,” he said. “Being a public defender is one way to put your beliefs into practice every day.”

The last thing he said stayed with me. I asked what gives him confidence that his generation is heading in the right direction. He paused for a moment, then said, “Hope is the only thing that can sustain you in this work.” Not optimism, not certainty, hope. The sense that the alternative is simply not acceptable.

When people talk about Gen Z, they often talk about them as a block of voters, a demographic, an audience to capture. That’s not how Kohn-Murphy talks about them. He sees them as a generation that refuses to be managed and expects politics to look and feel human.

As he put it, “It’s about the platform, the message, the messenger, not the party.” That may be the clearest description yet of why everything feels so different now.

You can watch the interview with Kohn-Murphy here.