Welcome to ViacomCBS Velocity’s Cultural Intelligence report, “Command Z.” This is a study of Gen Z through the lens of the technology that guides their lives, as well as their understandings of self, community, and futurity. 

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⌘

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The command symbol on Apple keyboards—the looped square—finds its origins in Nordic road signs. In knot theory, it’s referred to as an unknot—it may have the appearance of a knot, but when disentangled returns to the form of a continuous circle. When we disentangle the elements that may seem to complicate Gen Z’s existence—their political affiliations, racial identities, geographies—we see a fuller picture of a generation invested in infinite movement and cyclicality as a concept.

 

⌘ → O

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Command + Z as a function is a keyboard shortcut to help you undo what’s already been done. It allows users to go back in time to previous versions, rectify their wrongs or make adjustments—a prescient function at a time when the American social contract is under renegotiation. It signifies an awareness of what’s possible, an ability to re-educate oneself in service of asserting a new path, and the simultaneity of multiple possibilities in a given space.

 

The ubiquity of technology in our lives is nothing new, especially for this social platform raised generation. But what we learned through this study is that the boundaries between human and technology are starting to blur. Young people are adopting and adapting the culture of technology—it’s linguistics, mechanisms and outcomes—to better understand themselves and imprint the world around them. While we are far from fully bionic futures, tech-savvy is morphing into tech-imprinted. Beyond just a know-how, and to a level of proficiency that at times far surpasses the very institutions they struggle to trust.
 

Understanding Gen Z through a more whole, unknotted lens, we can better adjust our industry to the authentic, lived experience of young people today. As marketers, we are partly to blame for treating Gen Z as a monolith—radical changemakers, activists and truth-seekers armed with socialist-leaning ideology and smartphones at the ready. With thinkpieces and headlines that praise young people as a generation that will save us all, we’ve missed the fact that only 8% of them actually believe that their generation will save the world. It is this vast delta between our projection of youth, and how they actually perceive themselves, that we hope to illuminate a bridge to better understanding. We as marketers can undo the narratives we’ve built and rewrite a more embodied story of Gen Z that is told through their spectrum of values and reconciliation of dualities.

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For this report, we spoke in-depth to twenty 16-24 year olds in Arizona, Southern California, Georgia and Michigan to understand what they learned over this last year that they’ll be taking with them into the future. We intentionally chose markets and voices that reflect diversity in race and ethnicity, geographic communities and political persuasion.

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Informed by their perspectives and the tides of youth culture, we fielded a nationally representative survey to 1,216 participants. We even consulted an astrologer to see if the planets align with our findings.