Inside the Performance: Gen Z Speaks

Two essays from my students on "youth washing," ethics, demographics, uncertainty, and the future

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Gen Z might transform business ethics. You can read the original article here:

My conclusion?

When governance mechanisms are fundamentally broken, people do not stop caring about justice and fairness. They seek other approaches to prove and secure it. Good-faith promises are going the way of dial-up internet and ESG reports. We aren’t galloping into an ethical void, but rather towards something new entirely.

Of course, on this topic my opinion is only worth so much. So, I asked my students to respond. This week, I am sharing verbatim what two of them had to say. I hope you enjoy reading these essays as much as I did!

The Demographics of Evidence: by Eleni Iacovou

The first thing you learn at an international climate conference, before the acronyms or the badge tiers or which room actually matters, is how to introduce yourself. For youth delegates, the convention is to lead with your age. I’m twenty-two and I work on… I’m nineteen and I study… It signals to the room what category of participant you are and what register of speech is expected from you. Everyone else introduces themselves by institution. The young introduce themselves by birth year.

Professor Taylor’s recent post on the zero-trust economy catches the word performative as it actually circulates in my generation and she reads it as evidence that we want meaningful, authentic action in a world where voluntary commitments and policy statements no longer carry weight. She is right about that. What I would add, from a few years of being introduced by my age at COPs, summits and forums, is a specific flavor of the same performance, performative inclusion. Specifically, of us. Because when we say performative, we are not always saying something is insincere. Sometimes we are saying we are inside the performance. When an institution needs to show it takes the next generation seriously, the simplest available proof is a young person in the photograph.

Consider the architecture. At every COP (UN Conference of Party) and most leadership convenings, there is a designated youth pavilion, youth zone or in the more aspirational venues, a youth assembly. It is a remarkable category if you sit with it for ten seconds. Other demographics do not get pavilions. There is no working-class pavilion at Davos, no first-generation pavilion at the General Assembly. Youth gets a room, which sounds generous until you notice that having a room also means having a perimeter. The pavilion is a container and within it, you are encouraged to speak, network and feel inspired. Beyond it, the actual text of the agreement is being negotiated by people who would not be able to find the youth pavilion on a map.

The pattern that emerges from inside that container is strange enough to deserve careful naming. Spend enough time in these rooms and the same complaints surface from youth delegates across very different countries and contexts: invitations issued late in cycles that are functionally complete, single representatives asked to speak for “the youth of the world” on impossibly short notice, parallel youth statements read aloud after the journalists have packed up their laptops. The literature has begun calling this youthwashing, which is an ugly word for an uglier phenomenon — the institutional benefit of being seen including a demographic, cleanly decoupled from the cost of actually including it.

Once you see the gap between being shown as included and being actually consulted, a contradiction that older generations often find puzzling about GenZs begins to make sense — how we can appear to demand inclusion and resent it in the same breath. The paradox dissolves the moment you stop assuming that visibility and authority travel together. They no longer do and in many institutional settings they may even move inversely: the more visible a cohort becomes, the less actually consulted it tends to be. What looks like a generational mood swing is, on closer inspection, a quite specific request. Not more inclusion of the kind we keep being offered, but the right to decide when we appear, on what terms and to what end.

Tempting, then, to romanticize the young people making that demand. The temptation should be resisted. We are not all secretly brilliant strategists waiting for our chance. Many of us are exhausted, distracted and unable to read a forty-page negotiating text without our attention drifting to whatever notification just buzzed. The research on what algorithmic feeds have done to sustained attention is measurable, replicated and visible to anyone who has tried to read a long document in the past three years. Cynicism and irony are our default registers in part because they require less attentional investment than belief. None of this excuses us from anything. But it is worth noticing that the same generation framed as self-absorbed, screen-obsessed, entitled, whiny, privileged, lazy and too distracted to lead is also framed, on the right occasions and from the right podiums, as the moral conscience of the species. The adjectives move with the needs of the people deploying them, which is how you know they are not really descriptions but rather instruments. They are wielded by the same people on different days for different purposes.

The complicating fact is that the institutions doing this very often mean well and that is what makes the dynamic so resistant to correction. The program officer who invited me to speak sincerely believed in the program. The fellowship coordinator who flew six of us to Dubai actually cared about the climate. The problem is that inclusion has been so thoroughly professionalized that it has become a deliverable (a thing an organization can produce, photograph and report on) entirely separable from any transfer of authority. We are, in a literal institutional sense, evidence. The proposition being evidenced is that the organization is responsive. We are what responsiveness looks like in a photograph.

Professor Taylor is right that “performative” has become a sharp word in our mouths. What I would add is that we are fluent in this distinction because we have been trained, by repetition, to read the cues. You can tell almost immediately on entering a room whether you are there to participate or to be cited. The real signal is not in what is said, but in how the schedule is structured. Were we invited before the agenda was set or after? Will our presence change a number on a page or only the photograph on the cover? After a while, you stop needing to ask.

I do not have a clean ending for this and distrust the ones on offer. The familiar consolation that young people deserve “a seat at the table” presumes the table is where decisions happen. After a few years inside these rooms, I have started to doubt this. The phrase that “our voices matter” mistakes audibility for agency. My observation is that visibility and power have come apart in modern institutional life, as a malfunction rather than a design choice. Our cohort happens to be the first to feel that decoupling acutely, because we are the demographic currently overproduced as evidence.

Whatever business ethics looks like in the next decade, it will have to reckon with the difference between being shown and being heard. And with how comfortable institutions have become producing the first while quietly retiring the second.

Living with Profound Uncertainty: by Alice Totaro

As an undergraduate student at NYU currently navigating a sea of uncertainty about my career and future, this article really resonated with me, bringing to light themes that have been shaping my life as of late.

I am constantly told, over and over again, that “everything will work out” for me because I’m smart and ambitious, and I go to a highly ranked university. But it’s honestly really hard to believe that when the people who are giving me that advice are Gen X and Millennials. While I can’t speak to all the differences between our generations, AI presence is one of the biggest ones. We dually use and compete against AI in job applications, and then as this article tells me, we sabotage its implementation in the job we land. It’s disheartening, really, and it feeds into the “zero-trust economy” that you discuss. Our college education and entry-level positions are supposed to grow us into better people for the world who will contribute meaningfully to the economy, but as we work to train tools that could one day replace us, and struggle to pay our rent doing so, that assurance crumbles.

It’s hard to imagine a world where society isn’t supported by systems and institutions, but as trust in them breaks down, it certainly looks like we’re heading toward that future. I see the outcome as complete and total chaos — they taught us in middle school that we would be protected from this thanks to governments and laws. And I agree that there aren’t many great solutions to the accountability issue when it comes to ethical business practices without these systems because when human nature follows Social Darwinism – “survival of the fittest” – that’s when ethics tend to go out the window.

I think the obsession with “real” accountability comes from this new and rapidly changing age that we are growing up and maturing in, which is dominated by fake content. Social media is a political and ideological war zone that pits people against each other as much as it might also bring us closer. It sucks us in and dictates our lives. We see it happening to our peers and feel it happening to ourselves and we desperately want a way out. This is where the idea of the value of human interaction comes in: where humanity and real connection is so rare that it becomes increasingly more valuable. The importance of the personal aspect of job applications I think can definitely be attributed to this. Companies and their recruiters are still looking for real, intelligent, authentic candidates for their open positions that could get lost in the sea of hundreds of other applications that all look the same thanks to AI. The connections and networking actually do mean something for the process — it’s just another exhausting step we have to take to get ahead in this world of elite overproduction.

The feeling described in this article of walking into a dystopian future is real, and it’s scary. For me, it really does feel like no decision I make is the “right” one. While this outlook used to make me really anxious, I try to remind myself that I’m not the only one living in this uncertainty. There are 8 billion people on this planet, and remembering to practice gratitude for the life I have already been given is step one.

Gen Z sabotaging the AI rollout at their corporations is just denial of the future. From where they sit, it’s really hard to see past the fact that they’re training and implementing a tool that could potentially replace them. But, again, it’s important to not forget to look at the big picture too. We need to try as much as we can to be on the same team here, because like I said, we’re all hurtling toward the same black hole of uncertainty. No one really has all the answers, but we can be sure that someone is betting on them.

Despite all this, I think that our morals, and more broadly our appreciation for life, will bring us together in the end. It just comes down to working out the geopolitical tensions and inequality that currently divides a world that needs to come together in order to make the best choices for the planet that we all share.