Editorial - Gen WTFY: We’re About Creation, not Machination

What is it that makes people so intent on defining a person, an ideal, a generation? If it cannot be defined, be boxed and analysed and subjected to mediocrity through marketing statistics, then it must be stereotyped. Generation Y, a population of 80 million individuals over this planet with access to infinite information and embodying unparalleled diversity, are the most subject to this imposed set of definitions and stereotypes. Yet you might say that the most defining characteristic about 20 and 30 year-olds today is that we operate without any need to define ourselves or our actions, we embrace creativity and the disruptive identity to such an extreme that we are accused of having unrealistic expectations of the world—so WTF and Y are we so subject to stereotypes?

The crux of this issue stems from our relationship to technology, something that seems utterly foreign to those who did not grow up in tandem with our technosocial evolution and have had to adapt rather than integrate. The eldest of our generation were born when the first laptops were available (remember the Compaq Portable PC?) and the youngest we’re stirring in their cribs to tunes stored in iPod Minis.

For Generation Y, technology has always been infinitely accessible and we have molded it to our priorities and our behaviour rather than being subject to it as so many assume. A great standard for a Millennial stereotype is that our digital involvement makes us antisocial, when it is quite the opposite. Ninety-six percent of our generation are represented on social media, and we are a more collaborative, community and communication based generation than can be shown through simple numbers and statistics. Our generation has become defined by the prevalence of technology and our relationship to it, we can be put into boxes because our ‘presence’ online can be broken down and analysed, segmented and made into patterns of behaviour that, in theory, make us easier to sell to. Our generation has been subject to so much analysis it has become an independent economy—the articles, the dedicated websites, the market research reports, the books, the studies, the facts and figures, but no tech driven insight has ever been able to encapsulate us in a manner that makes other generations understand.

This is Y: we are about creation, not machination. There are no plots afoot to fool you or to trick you, Generation Y simply does not do things in the way that has been established, we are currently living in a world that is decided for us, not by us (Brexit anyone?), so we do everything we can to fight off the established expectations. It doesn’t scare us to do things differently, what scares us is the average, the mediocre, walking through life only to work instead of creating a life through our work. If you want to truly understand a generation that is flooding the world with our individuality and spirit faster than any before us, don’t look to your algorithms or assumptions, look to our artists and innovators. Look to the way we look at things: as opportunities for creation, for building community, for living the way we want to—undefinable, ethereal and unique as our own individual identities. Look to the fact that we are always questioning, asking of ourselves—WTFY?

In this issue we focus on the creatives, across our generation and more, who have made their own stamp in the arts and culture scene. We delve into issues of establishment, turning our questioning eye towards the police service, land grabbing and graffiti. Gen WTFY is growing into our urban inheritance, and this is our urban perspective.