Gen Z: Redefining Value and What It Means for Our Future

I want you to imagine something for a moment. Picture a musician, pouring their soul into a power ballad. The chords swell, the voice cracks with emotion… and the lyrics are about eliminating Ohio’s property taxes.

It sounds like a punchline, I know. But it’s real. A group of retirees in Ohio, frustrated with rising tax bills, commissioned an entire 20-song, AI-generated album to push their cause. There are protest breakdancers in New Jersey and property tax raffles in Washington. This isn’t just a series of isolated grievances; it’s a system-wide revolt. And while it’s easy to frame this as a simple generational squabble, with headlines proclaiming that Boomers Push to Eliminate Property Taxes Would Hurt Millennials, Gen Z, I think that misses the point entirely.

When I first read about this, I honestly just sat back in my chair, speechless. Not because of the politics, but because of the methodology. An AI protest album? It's the kind of beautiful, bizarre, and deeply human thing you see when an old system starts to break down. This isn’t a war between generations. It’s a system crash. We’re all running on a societal operating system that was designed for a different era, and the blue screen of death is finally upon us.

The Glitch in the Legacy Code

Let’s be clear: property taxes, in theory, are an elegant piece of code. As Jared Walczak of the Tax Foundation notes, they’re simple, efficient, and fund about 70% of all local tax revenue. They pay for the schools that educate our kids, the firefighters who protect our homes, and the roads we all drive on. It’s a foundational part of the American social contract—a wealth transfer where those with assets (primarily older homeowners) fund the services that build the future for those who don’t (primarily younger families).

But that elegant code was written for a world with predictable, linear growth. It was never designed to handle the exponential explosion in property values we’ve seen since 2020—a nearly 27% inflation-adjusted increase. Now, you have retirees on fixed incomes whose net worth is soaring on paper, but their cash flow is squeezed. This is what economists call illiquid wealth—in simpler terms, you can’t use your home equity to buy groceries. So when Brian Massie, the Ohioan behind the AI album, says his group wants to "starve the beast," I don’t hear a villain. I hear a user trying to force-quit a program that’s frozen and eating up all their memory.

The problem is, that program is running the whole city.

The system is creating perverse outcomes everywhere. In California, Proposition 13 has frozen tax rates so low for long-time homeowners that it creates a massive disincentive to ever move, locking up housing stock and pushing the median age of a first-time homebuyer to a record 38 years old. This isn't a failure of morality; it's a failure of design. We’re trying to navigate a 21st-century digital economy with a tax structure built for the analog age, and the generational resentment it’s creating is the catastrophic error message telling us the whole thing is about to corrupt.

A New Generation of Users

Now, think about the users who have grown up with this broken system: Millennials and Gen Z. They aren’t just inheriting a flawed tax code; they’re inheriting a world with entirely different tools and expectations.

Look at the recent youth-led protests in Morocco. Thousands of young people, organized under the banner "Gen Z 212" on platforms like Discord, mobilized across the country to protest government spending priorities. They saw a problem, and they used their native digital tools to coordinate a massive, decentralized response almost overnight. This is a generation that understands networked action. They see a system that isn't serving them, and their instinct is to fork the code, to build a new community, to route around the damage.

They see the social contract with fresh eyes. When 27-year-old entrepreneur Cameron Mulvey says, "Just because you're not using the benefits that your tax pays for… that's how taxes work. That's how taxes are supposed to work," he’s not being naive. He’s restating the fundamental premise of a functioning society—a premise that feels like it’s being unilaterally rewritten. He and his peers are paying Social Security taxes for a benefit they may never see, while watching a generation with unprecedented property wealth argue they shouldn’t have to pay for schools their kids don’t attend. Can you blame them for feeling like the terms of service have been changed without their consent?

The sheer velocity of this disconnect is what’s so staggering—it means we’re not just arguing about tax percentages, we’re arguing from two completely different realities, using two different languages. One side is writing petitions and commissioning AI singers; the other is spinning up Discord servers and mobilizing thousands with a hashtag. This isn’t a debate. It’s a compatibility error. The fight over property taxes is just a symptom of this much larger, much more profound system failure.

It's Time for a System Upgrade

So, what do we do? The experts propose patches. Things like "levy limits" or "property tax circuit breakers." These are intelligent, necessary fixes that can alleviate the immediate pressure. But they are still patches on an obsolete system. They are the software equivalent of blowing into the cartridge of an old Nintendo game, hoping it works for one more level.

This is the kind of breakthrough moment that reminds me why I got into technology in the first place. We are at an inflection point that feels as significant as the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, which provided the trust and transparency needed for the birth of modern capitalism. We now have the tools to redesign the very architecture of our social contract.

Imagine, for a second, what that could look like. What if we used AI not to write protest songs, but to model and propose radically fairer, more dynamic tax systems that adjust in real-time to economic conditions? What if we used blockchain for transparent, publicly-auditable property registries and tax collections? What if we built civic platforms that allowed communities to deliberate and vote on budget priorities directly, creating a genuine sense of shared ownership?

The solutions aren't as simple as "axe the tax," but they are infinitely more inspiring. The real challenge isn't technical; it's a failure of imagination. This generational conflict is a profound waste of energy. It’s a distraction from the real work: building a new operating system for our communities. One that’s fair, transparent, and designed for the complex, interconnected world we actually live in, not the one we left behind. We have the tools. The question is, do we have the vision to use them?