• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, February 9, 2026

On a winter night at P&T Knitwear in NYC, the room was full in the way that tells you something real is about to happen. Not a polite crowd. Not a conference audience waiting to be impressed. A mix of Gen Z organizers, policy folks, creators, technologists, and older allies who showed up because they are trying to make sense of what power, technology, and democracy look like right now.

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.

Digital organizing works, but it cuts both ways

Sophia Ongele from Gen Z for Change spoke about growing up organizing inside platforms that monetize chaos. She was blunt about the tradeoff. The same tools that allow young people to document abuse, mobilize at speed, and apply public pressure are also the tools used for surveillance, repression, and fragmentation.

Her examples were practical, not theoretical. Using simple digital tools to drive public comment campaigns. Lowering the barrier to participation so people can act fast, together. Not because tech is inherently good, but because people can learn how to use a system against itself.

One line that stuck with me: democracy is not kept alive by the ballot box alone. It lives in small, repeated acts of participation. That includes digital ones, but only if we stay clear-eyed about who owns the infrastructure and who profits from the friction.

Gen Z is not waiting to be invited into power

Council Member Chi Ossé grounded the night in local, tangible wins, and in the reality of what it means to speak the language of the internet without turning politics into content.

He told the story of coming up through organizing, then running for office young, and then using social platforms as tools to drive turnout where it actually matters: obscure hearings, bureaucratic processes, overlooked votes. When he explained how a viral explainer drove a thousand people to show up to a Rent Guidelines Board hearing, the point was simple: power changes when participation changes.

This is what “tech fluency” looks like in politics when it is not performative. Not awkward face-to-camera trend chasing. But meeting people where they already are, in the language they already speak, and connecting attention to turnout.

And then Bradley Tusk brought it back to structure

Bradley Tusk, founder of the Mobile Voting Project, made the most direct argument of the night: If you want different outcomes, you have to change the inputs. He walked through the basic reality that primaries and low-turnout elections hand disproportionate power to ideological extremes and special interests, and that most elected officials respond to that incentive structure.

His core idea is straightforward: If you make participation easier and more accessible, you can change who shows up. And if more people show up, you can loosen the grip that a tiny slice of the electorate and a handful of power brokers hold over the system.

Whether you agree with every detail of mobile voting or not, the frame matters. Democracy is not only about values. It is also about mechanics. And right now, the mechanics are failing.

So where does that leave us?

There was plenty of skepticism in the room about platforms, surveillance, and corporate power. There were hard questions about trust, cynicism, and whether any of this scales. Those doubts are earned. Gen Z has grown up watching institutions promise reform and deliver half-measures.

But what cut through the cynicism was something quieter: momentum. The feeling that small wins matter. That people who have never been inside “the system” are finding ways to push on it anyway. That power is not a single lever but a series of friction points, and young people are learning where to apply pressure.

Democracy is not abstract for the people in that room. It is rent hikes. Surveillance infrastructure. Broker fees. Voting access. Algorithms that decide what you see and what you never even know exists. When you grow up inside those systems, you do not romanticize them. You learn how to work around them, push on them, and sometimes bend them.

That is not optimism as a vibe. That is optimism as a practice.

You can watch the whole evening here.