By MIKE MAGEE

The juxta-positioning of Tuesday’s New York Times headlines was disturbing. The first “Why Does This Bride Look So Mad?”, was followed by “An ‘Unsettling’ Drop in Life Expectancy in Men.”

The “reluctant bride” referred to in the first article is (by now) an estimated 175 years old intended bride was 18 in the painting. The painting itself was the work of artist, Auguste Toulmouche, in 1866. The original title was “The Hesitant Fiancee”. Its current fame has a much shorter timeline – 2 weeks to be exact. That’s when it began to appear on TikTok, hosted as a statement of disgust an outrage by mostly young females in opposition to “sexist scolding.”

The painting displays a soon-to-be bride, attended by three friends, all well appointed in opulent dress, with obvious emotional distress. The bride’s face is frozen somewhere between disgust and outrage. Two supplicants are attempting to calm her, with limited success, by hand-holding and kisses on the forehead. The third is distracted, examine her own image in a mirror.

Temple University Art Professor, Theresa Dolan, offered this description to The New York Times Style and Pop Culture reporter Callie Holtermann: “You don’t often get this in 19th-century painting — this kind of independent streak. She’s actually showing the emotion of not wanting to get married to the person that her obviously wealthy family has picked out. What Toulmouche does so successfully is get into the psyche of the woman.”

Since its recent appearance on social media, modern women have been setting the image to music (“a dramatic section of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem”) and adding their own captions, including: “Literally me when I’m right,” “You’re overreacting,” “You should smile more,” “Ugh, do I really have to go through with this,” “Don’t be mean,” and “Mean wasn’t even in the room with us but I can go get him and bring him in.”

Turning the page, the second article feels somehow connected to the first, and not in a good way. It’s written by the Times Sex, Gender, and Science reporter Azeen Ghorayshi, and begins with, “The gap in life expectancy between men and women in the United States grew to its widest in nearly 30 years, driven mainly by more men dying of Covid and drug overdoses, according to a new study in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.”

The facts are clear: Life expectancy of men at birth is now approximately six years less than women.

This reinforces a several decades old trend, and one that is gaining steam. General life expectancy, independent of gender, has declined from 78.8 years in 2019 to 76.1 in 2022.  Placed in perspective, most developed nations like the UK, Japan, Korea, and Italy are above 80 years. Our women come close to that at 79.1 years, but they are dragged down by men who now register a depressing 73.2 years. That’s a 5.9 year gender gap.

Dr. Brandon Yan was the lead in this Harvard School gf Public Health Study, and his explanation for the results are discomforting. He identifies Covid-19 as one “preventable cause,” and adds that “The opioid epidemic, mental health, and chronic metabolic disease are certainly front and center in the data.”

But taking a systematic long range view, he speaks directly to policy makers with these words:

“We have a health care system that is very advanced in treating illnesses and advanced disease. But for the most part … it is not very good when it comes to preventative care… There’s a substantial socio-cultural norms component to this data as well in terms of the ways that society views masculinity and the way that men ought to behave. That has profound effects on care-seeking behaviors.”

“The way men ought to behave.” Hummm…sounds like a caption for a TikToK painting.

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and a regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex.

BY KIM BELLARD

I came across a phrase the other day that is so evocative, so delicious, that I had to write about it: “lazy girl job,” or, as you might know it. @#lazygirljob.

Now, before anyone gets too offended, it’s not about labeling girls as lazy; it’s not really even about lazy or even only girls.  It’s about wanting jobs with the proverbial work-life balance: jobs that pay decently, don’t require crazy hours, and give employees flexibility to manage the other parts of their lives.  Author Eliza Van Cort told Bryan Robinson, writing in Forbes: “The phrasing ‘lazy girl job’ is less than ideal—prioritizing your mental health and work-life integration is NOT lazy.”

The concept is attributed to Gabrielle Judge, who coined it on TikTok back in May (which is why I didn’t hear about it until recently).  According to her, it means not living paycheck to paycheck or having to work in unsafe conditions. She believes job flexibility doesn’t mean coming in at 10 am instead of 9 am because you have a dentist appointment; it means you have more control over your hours and when you get your work done. If Sheryl Sandberg was all about “leaning in,” Ms. Judge is about leaning out.  

Ms. Judge explained to NBC News:

Decentering your 9-to-5 from your identity is so important because if you don’t, then you’re kind of putting your eggs all in one basket that you can’t necessarily control. So it’s like, how can we stay neutral to what’s going on in our jobs, still show up and do them, but maybe it’s not 100% of who we are 24/7?

“I’m only accepting the soft life, period,” she says.

Danielle Roberts, another TikToker and who describes herself as an “anti-career” coach, told NBC News: “And rather than calling the people who are divesting from that system lazy, and telling them that they just need to work harder, we need to talk about why it’s a trend in the first place and go one level deeper.”

She went on to explain:

We’ve seen that the 40-hour work week is now outdated. We can produce the same amount of work, if not more work, in a fraction of the time. So wanting to keep those butts in seats, and not just for 40 hours, but for 40-plus hours, is just really a means of control. If you hired them, you should trust your employees to do their job and do it well.

It’s not only the work week that is outdated, but also the concept of loyalty. Ms. Judge told NBC Los Angeles: “The whole lazy girl job thing is a thing because it’s a two-way street. Like of course this is attractive to employees, but there’s a reason why this was caused and that’s because employers in general just can’t hold their weight when it comes to company loyalty like they used to be able to traditionally.”

Hailey Bouche, writing in The EveryGirl, makes an even stronger point:

Things like work-life balance and reasonable pay shouldn’t be considered luxuries. We all deserve jobs that give us access to the benefits, flexibility, and salary that we need to live a fulfilled life—and having or wanting a job that allows us all of those things does not make us lazy.

Amen.

It’s a Gen Z thing, of course, as is/was “quiet quitting.”  The cultural zeitgeist that was already bubbling up around all this got supercharged by the pandemic, when many people were forced to work from home and work suddenly seemed less important.  

But this trend is broader than Gen Z girls or even Gen Z generally. A recent Gallop poll found that 6 in 10 workers admit they aren’t putting in maximum effort, and that their biggest complaint was workplace culture. As The Wall Street Journal headlined it last week: Workers to Employers: We’re Just Not That Into You.

The WSJ article cites a number of workplace trends, such as more employers are offering the option to work remotely, more employees are taking it, employees, employees are taking more vacation and have more options for paid time off. And, perhaps as a result, the Conference Board found that worker satisfaction rose sharply in 2022 and is now at its highest point since 1987. 

Another WSJ article reported that companies that allowed at least one day or remote work per week increased staffing twice as fast as those requiring full-time office requirements.  “One of the more straightforward potential explanations is that people put a really high value on being remote and generally having flexibility, so recruitment is likely quite a bit easier,” Emma Harrington, a University of Virginia economist, told WSJ.

President Biden evidently is missing out on the #lazygirlsjobs trend too, since he’s pushing to get federal workers back in the office by this fall. Other organizations and other CEOs feel the same, wanting things to go back to “normal,” or at least more directly under their control, in the office.  But that genie may be out of the bottle.

@lazygirlsrule

———-

There are plenty of lazy girl jobs in healthcare, or, at least, ones that could be.  “Administrators” – whether they’re billing clerks, claims processors, marketing experts, or managers – far outnumber people actually delivering care in every part of the healthcare system, and there’s no reason many of those jobs couldn’t be made to qualify. 

When it comes to the people delivering our care, though, we want them to be where we want them when we need them, for as long as we need them. Physicians, in particular, are known for working long hours, being responsible for life-and-death decisions, and suffering the stress with comes from all that. Well, no wonder physician burnout is a real problem, as it is for nurses and other front-line healthcare professionals.  

Healthcare professionals haven’t fled their jobs in any great numbers yet, although the warnings are there. Healthcare doesn’t have its Gabrielle Judge yet, there’s no #lazydoctorjob meme (that I am aware of), but the societal trends that caused #lazygirljobs are going to impact healthcare too, and we better figure out what we want that to mean.

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor

BY KIM BELLARD

I’m a sucker for underdog stories.  I love unconventional wisdom overthrowing conventional wisdom. I’m deeply suspicious of Big Tech, Big Oil, and big health.  I know unfettered competition is not always to my benefit but get nervous when I don’t really have many options.  

So when I read that Google is starting to worry about a threat to its search dominance and that TikTok and other social media giants are scared of a rival start-up, well, count me in. I just wish it was health care goliaths that were worried.

————–

You probably use Google to search online.  “Google” has become a generic term for search, like Xerox was for photocopying.  Depending on the source, it’s share of search is north of 80%, probably closer to 90%, and it’s been that way for a long time. Larry and Sergey built a better mousetrap and the world, indeed, build a path to their door. 

TikTok might change that.

Yes, TikTok again.  Face it, it’s hard to keep a finger on today’s culture without that finger pointing to TikTok. Last month the finger pointed directly to healthcare, this month it is pointing to search, and that’s what has Google nervous. 

“In our studies, something like almost 40 percent of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram,” Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president, said at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech 2022.  

The New York Times proclaimed: For Gen Z, TikTok Is the New Search Engine.  The article discerns a sea change in search:

TikTok’s rise as a discovery tool is part of a broader transformation in digital search. While Google remains the world’s dominant search engine, people are turning to Amazon to search for products, Instagram to stay updated on trends and Snapchat’s Snap Maps to find local businesses. As the digital world continues growing, the universe of ways to find information in it is expanding.

The article describes how search on TikTok is different than on traditional search engines:

Instead of just slogging through walls of text, Gen Z-ers crowdsource recommendations from TikTok videos to pinpoint what they are looking for, watching video after video to cull the content. Then they verify the veracity of a suggestion based on comments posted in response to the videos.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that the videos are factually correct – not that other search engines are either – but Francesca Tripodi, an information and library science professor at the University of North Carolina, warned The Times: “You aren’t really clicking to anything that would lead you out of the app.  That makes it even more challenging to double-check the information you’re getting is correct.”  Lee Rainie of the Pew Research Center added that TikTok “is becoming a one-stop shop for content in a way that it wasn’t in its earlier days.” 

Google should worry.

————-

Lest anyone think the world is just going to become all TikTok all the time, TikTok is scared of a two-year old French start up: BeReal.  BeReal, in case you hadn’t heard of it either, is a photo-sharing app whose key feature is that it randomly prompts users to take and share a photo, within two minutes.  It uses both front and rear camera to show both a selfie and where the user is.  

As BeReal describes it:

Everyday at a different time, everyone is notified simultaneously to capture and share a Photo in 2 Minutes. 

A new and unique way to discover who your friends really are in their daily life. 

BeReal was Apple’s #1 download this summer, and has some 56 million downloads, with the US its biggest market. It even riffed on Facebook’s initial strategy of going after college campuses, through its ambassador program.  

TikTok and other platforms have noticed. “The fear of the incumbents is that this becomes the next TikTok,” said Mark Shmulik, an analyst for Bernstein, told The Washington Post. “So they’ve all scrambled to launch their own version.”

Just last week TikTok announced TikTok Now – “a daily photo and video experience to share your most authentic moments with the people who matter the most” – and Instagram is working on IG Candid Challenges, which The Verge labeled a “murder clone,” since its sole purpose is to replicate BeReal.  Snapchat was quicker off the mark, rolling out its Dual Camera feature last month, “a new way for Snapchatters to capture multiple perspectives at the same time – so everyone can be part of the moment, as it happens.”

It remains to be seen if the goliaths can crush BeReal by simply cloning its features, or if one of them will simply acquire it, as Meta did with one-time rivals Instagram and WhatsApp.  But, as Mr. Shumulik told WaPo, “They’ve certainly caught lightning in a bottle with an idea.”  

As WaPo put it:

BeReal’s success reveals an appetite among social media users for more authentic, intimate forms of expression, and shows that Davids can still shake up a sector dominated by global Goliaths. At the same time, the scramble by those Goliaths to copy core features of an app that doesn’t even have a way to make money yet underscores the uphill battle that upstarts face just to survive.

BeReal claims: “We want an alternative to addictive social networks fueling social comparison and portraying life with the goal of amassing influence.” Perhaps that will be enough.  

____________

Healthcare is full of Goliaths; pick your favorite (or, rather, your most hated): e.g., pharma, med device manufacturers, national health insurers, EHR vendors, for-profit hospital chains or even your local non-profit hospital monopoly/duopoly.  They’re entrenched, they’ve been entrenched for a long time, and their dominance is, if anything, growing.  Health care is big business, and that business is full of big players.  

It also isn’t like Tech, much less like social media, where an entrepreneur with a good idea and some cool tech can capture that lightening in a bottle and shoot to dominance quickly. It’s too fragmented, too byzantine, too regulated, skeptics and insiders would both say.  A David would have no chance.  

Well, I’m not giving up hope. I’m looking for the thing that will make current EHRs look like the clunky billing engines they are. I’m looking for the thing that will prove hospitals to be vastly oversized.  I’m looking for the thing that will break the physician monopoly.  I’m looking for the thing that will democratize prescription drugs.  I’m looking for the thing that will rewrite healthcare’s financing.

I’m rooting for the underdog.

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor.

By KIM BELLARD

Not familiar with Schumpeter’s gale?  You may be more familiar with the term “creative destruction.”  Schumpeter’s “gale of creative destruction” is the inevitable “process of industrial mutation that continuously revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”  

We need a Schumpeter’s gale in healthcare.

What made me think of this was the news that Tik Tok became the most popular internet site in the world, surpassing even Google.  It reminded me that things sometimes do change; perhaps there is some hope for healthcare after all.

If you missed the news about Tik Tok – perhaps you were too busy on it or too busy ignoring it – it came last week in Cloudflare’s Radar 2021 Year in Review. Tik Tok was a fairly distant 7^th a year ago, well behind leader Google and #2 Facebook, but shot up in 2021. Tik Tok has gone from being simply silly short videos to a force in social justice, the job market, celebrity status, and mental health.  It plays a role in Gen Z/Gen Y’s lives that Facebook desperately wishes it did.  Facebook’s demographic issues had been well known, but Tik Tok surpassing Google?  

That’s the kind of change I wish we saw tech bringing in healthcare.

The dominance of “Big Tech” – a.k.a., Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook/Meta, and Microsoft – is oft-discussed, and usually lamented, but we have to keep in mind that such dominance is typically transitory.  Twenty years ago Apple was an also-ran, Google was trying to be an also-used, and Facebook had yet to be invented.  Amazon had a market capitalization under $4b. Microsoft was still Bill Gates’ company, not the open-source, cloud-based, subscription-oriented company Satya Nadella pivoted to within the last decade.

In twenty years, maybe within ten years, that list of Big Tech companies will look very different.  Maybe it will be Web3, maybe the metaverse, maybe quantum computing or AI, or even something few of us have even heard of yet, but new waves will come and will bring new tech giants.  That’s why Apple is investing in “face computers,” Facebook is transitioning into Meta, and Google has a “moonshot factory.”  Those efforts and others may help keep them relevant, but the barbarians, so to speak, are still coming. 

Go back twenty years, on the other hand, and the big hospitals/hospital systems are pretty much the same.  Same for payors, pharma, medical device companies.  There have been mergers and consolidations, but the dominant companies then are mostly the dominant companies now – only more so.  That’s not how it is supposed to work.  That’s not how it works in tech.

In last week’s “On Tech Newsletter” in The New York Times, Shira Ovide flatly says “technology won.”  She explains:

Tech is more like a coat of new paint on everything than a definable set of products or industries. Health care is tech. Entertainment is tech. Schools are tech. Money is tech. Transportation is tech. We live through tech.

Technology is also in a liminal phase where the promise of what might be coming next coexists with the complicated reality of what is happening now.

You can certainly make an argument that “health care is tech,” and that much of that transition has happened in the last twenty years.  We have widespread electronic health records, minimally invasive surgeries, new types of cancer treatments, all sorts of 3D printed objects, CRISPR, greatly improved prostheses, VR treatments and training, and, of course, more types of digital health efforts than even today’s venture capitalists can throw money at.  

It’s all very impressive, but you’d get a lot of argument that our nation’s health is better as a result, that our experiences in the healthcare system are better as a result, or that our healthcare is any cheaper as a result.  None seems true. Tech, in healthcare, is a bolt-on; it adds costs, it removes more of the human touch, and it does not fundamentally reshape the healthcare system. 

Unlike the actual tech industry, tech in healthcare serves to further cement the position of the incumbents, not displace them. It doesn’t make the healthcare experience new, it just makes it seem “newish.”  TikTok is not going to dethrone Epic or The Mayo Clinic. People in healthcare aren’t too scared of the “what’s next” in tech.

Much has been made of the record-setting 2021 for digital health investments — $28b, which was double 2020 – but when I look at them I still don’t see an Uber or an Amazon, a company that is trying to break an existing industry.  I see a lot of innovators who think they can remedy some pain points, but within the existing system, and I see investors who mostly want their slice of the $4 trillion healthcare sector.  

I want to see tech innovators who look at our healthcare system and think, hmm, there’s too many people and places doing too many things for too much money – and, often, too late, after there is a problem. Who wants to bring the cost structure down, not 5-10% but to 5-10% of our current levels. Who wants health to be an ongoing process managed in our daily lives.  Who wants health tech – and the resulting healthcare — to be ubiquitous, invisible, and largely autonomous. Who doesn’t think we need to rely on millions of highly trained healthcare professionals (and whose training, in fact, becomes one of the cost problems in the healthcare system). 

Tik Tok would understand that. 

With all due respect, I’m not sure that David Feinberg, for example, would. People who have spent their professional lives in the healthcare system can often see how to improve it, but not to fundamentally reshape it, and almost never how to bring creative destruction to it.

I’m not expecting Tik Tok to revolutionize our healthcare system – but ByteDance or WeChat, maybe. An AI company?  Of course. A synthetic biology or nanorobotics company?  For sure.  By contrast, what CVS, Walmart, even Amazon are trying to do in healthcare are interesting, but, honestly, they’re like helping us hear the orchestra on the Titanic better: OK, but that’s not really the problem.  

If we recognize the healthcare system in 2050, if some Schumpeter’s gale hasn’t blown the current version away and replaced it with something truly new, we will have failed.   

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor

By KIM BELLARD

If you, like me, continue to think that TikTok is mostly about dumb stunts (case in point: vandalizing school property in the devious licks challenge; case in point: risking lives and limbs in the milk crate challenge), or, more charitably, as an unexpected platform for social activism (case in point: spamming the Texas abortion reporting site), you probably also missed that TikTok thinks it could take on LinkedIn.  

Welcome to #TikTokresumes.  Welcome to the Gen Z workplace.  If healthcare is having a hard time adapting to Gen Z patients – and it is — then dealing with Gen Z workers is even harder.  

TikTok actually announced the program in early July, but, as a baby boomer, I did not get the memo.  It was a pilot program, only active from July 7 to July 31, and only for a select number of employers, which included Chipotle and Target.  The announcement stated:

TikTok believes there’s an opportunity to bring more value to people’s experience with TikTok by enhancing the utility of the platform as a channel for recruitment. Short, creative videos, combined with TikTok’s easy-to-use, built-in creation tools have organically created new ways to discover talented candidates and career opportunities. 

Interested job-seekers were “encouraged to creatively and authentically showcase their skillsets and experiences.”  Nick Tran, TikTok’s Global Head of Marketing, noted: “#CareerTok is already a thriving subculture on the platform and we can’t wait to see how the community embraces TikTok Resumes and helps to reimagine recruiting and job discovery.”  

Marissa Andrada, chief diversity, inclusion and people officer at Chipotle, told SHRM: “Given the current hiring climate and our strong growth trajectory, it’s essential to find new platforms to directly engage in meaningful career conversations with Gen Z.  TikTok has been ingrained into Chipotle’s DNA for some time, and now we’re evolving our presence to help bring in top talent to our restaurants.”

Chris Russell, managing director of RecTech Media, also told SHRM: “Video is eating the world. It has become so pervasive in our lives that the next generation of job seekers has no qualms about showcasing themselves in a 30-second clip.”

The New York Times observed: “In modern job searches, tidy one-page résumés are increasingly going the way of the fax machine.”  Karyn Spencer, global chief marketing officer at Whalar, added: “Hiring people or sourcing candidates through video just feels like a natural evolution of where we are in a society.  We’re all communicating more and more through video and photos, yet so many résumés our hiring team receives feel like 1985.”  

Farhan Thawar, vice president of engineering for Shopify, which was one of the pilot TikTok resume companies, believes: “We have this thing where if you can’t explain a technical topic to a 5-year-old, then you probably don’t understand the topic. So having a medium like TikTok is perfect.”

Try explaining why COVID vaccines are safe.

The Wall Street Journal is also watching the trend: “Video résumés are fast becoming the new cover letter for a certain breed of young creatives…For some brands, soliciting video résumés on social media is a way to meet more young, diverse job candidates.”  

As it turns out, even Gen Zers have misgivings about the idea.  A survey by Tallo found them fairly evenly split:

The survey did find, though, that extroverts liked the idea more (65%) than introverts (40%), which probably shouldn’t be surprising.  There was widespread agreement (72%) that a video resume would be more effective for demonstrating creativity/personality, with traditional resumes better for professional summary, experience, and hard skills.   

A bigger concern, though, was the possibility of bias:

Nagaraj Nadendla, SVP of development at Oracle Cloud HCM, raised the same concerns in TechCrunch: 

The very element that gives video resumes their potential also presents the biggest problems. Video inescapably highlights the person behind the skills and achievements. As recruiters form their first opinions about a candidate, they will be confronted with the information they do not usually see until much later in the process, including whether they belong to protected classes because of their race, disability, or gender.

Lest you think this is not important to your organization, that Gen Z’s needs don’t really matter, Morten Peterson, CEO of Worksome, writing in Fast Company, calls Gen Z the “new disruptors,” pointing out: “The overwhelming majority of today’s graduate pool come from Generation Z and will do so for the next decade at least.”  If companies don’t adapt to their needs, he warns, “10 years down the line they will find they have been left behind by competitors far more open to change.”  

And they vote with their feet.  Research from Amdocs found they, along with Millennials, are much more likely than Baby Boomers or even Gen X to have considered leaving their job within the last year:

Every industry is having a hard time recruiting and keeping workers these days, and healthcare is no exception. Between normal burnout, pandemic-related burnout, vaccine mandates, and the lure of jobs that offer more opportunity for remote work, most healthcare organizations are struggling to have enough staff.  When the current Baby Boomer doctors, nurses, technicians, and aides retire, there better be Gen Z replacements ready to step in.

Some healthcare organizations are already starting to use TikTok for marketing,  others are trying to combat misinformation, but most healthcare organizations are probably not just behind the curve when it comes to recruiting workers using TikTok; they may not have yet realized there is a curve.  If, as NYT said, one-page resumes are going the way of the fax machine, well, in healthcare those fax machines haven’t gone very far.  

RecTech Media’s Mr. Russell said it: “video is eating the world.” Healthcare’s world too.  

TikTok resumes may not take off.  Tallo’s survey found it low on the list of sites Gen Zers felt comfortable posting a resume on (perhaps not coincidentally, Tallo’s site was rated the highest, followed by LinkedIn).  Video resumes more generally may not become the norm.  Those bias concerns with video resumes are real and must be appropriately considered.  

But Gen Zers are different, and healthcare organizations, like other organizations, better be thinking about how to best recruit them.  

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor.

By KIM BELLARD

I knew about TikTok, but not “TikTok Teens.”  I was vaguely aware of K-Pop, but I didn’t know its fans had common interests beyond, you know, K-Pop.  I’d been tracking Gen X and Millennials but hadn’t really focused on Gen Z.  It turns out that these overlapping groups are quite socially aware and are starting to make their influence felt.  

I can’t wait for them to pay more attention to health care.  

This is the generation that has grown up during/in the wake of 9/11, the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the 2008 recession, the coronavirus pandemic, and the current recession — not to mention smartphones, social media, online shopping, and streaming.  Greta Thunberg is Gen Z, as is Billie Eilish, each of whom is leading their own social movements.  This generation has a lot to protest about, and a lot of ways to do it.

They were in the news this past weekend due to, of all things, President Trump’s Tulsa rally.  His campaign had boasted about having a million people sign up for the rally, only to find that the arena was less than a third filled.  An outdoor rally for the expected overflow crowd was cancelled.  

It didn’t take long for the TikTok Teens/K-Pop fans to boast on social media about their covert — to us older folks — campaign to register for the rally as a way to gum up the campaign efforts.  Steve Schmidt, an anti-Trump Republican strategist, tweeted: “The teens of America have struck a savage blow against @realDonaldTrump.”

One social media influencer explained to The New York Times: 

It spread mostly through Alt TikTok — we kept it on the quiet side where people do pranks and a lot of activism.  K-pop Twitter and Alt TikTok have a good alliance where they spread information amongst each other very quickly. They all know the algorithms and how they can boost videos to get where they want.

Most doubt that these efforts had much to do with the low attendance — it can be more likely attributed to concerns over COVID-19 and/or the concurrent Juneteenth celebrations/Black Lives Matter protests — but they were responsible for cluttering up the Trump campaign’s efforts to collect supporter/donor information from the registration.  As a subversive guerilla marketing campaign, it was brilliant — and effective.  

It was not their first such involvement.  One of the surprises with the BLM protests have been the number young people in attendance, of all races.  Jose Antonio Vargas, an immigration advocate,  described the coalition of young white, black, Latino, and Asian protesters as “a new kind of majority…We have arrived at a real cultural shift.”  

Pew Research Center recently profiled Gen Z, finding them more ethnically and racially diverse, more education, more tech savvy, and, politically, “progressive and pro-government.”  They are not, as you might have guessed, likely to be Trump supporters.  Axios predicted: “Generation Z is coming of political age…Gen Z is likely to continue engaging even after the [BLM] protests end because of the power of smartphones and social media.”   

Earlier this month, in The Atlantic, Kaitlyn Tiffany profiled how K-Pop fans (or “kpop stans”) had broadened their social media efforts to support social movements, such as BLM.  She described their strategy:

They would not use any of their normal promotional hashtags to boost their favorite music, instead keeping themselves and the platform focused on the message of Black Lives Matter. They would repurpose accounts that normally track chart positions and celebrity Instagram posts to instead disseminate information about how to support the protests. They would clog up every police department’s digital efforts. They would flood racist hashtags like #whitelivesmatter and #alllivesmatter with more concert footage to render them useless.

Reuters described TikTok’s involvement in the BLM protests as its “Arab Spring” moment, comparing it to Twitter’s importance in those events.  “Because the BLM movement has been present in society for such a long time, my generation has been able to use TikTok to spread awareness through the lens of a young person’s mindset,” one teen said.  One BLM organizer pointed out: “The younger crowd does not want to be on Facebook and they are not on Facebook. They are on SnapChat and TikTok.”  

Political strategist Tim Fullerton told The Washington Post: 

The bigger story, long-term, is that it’s really impressive to see young people using TikTok as an organizing tool. And I do think that we’re going to see a lot of that in the lead-up to November. That’s a difficult audience to reach, so it could be a powerful tool.  They’re using their voice in a new and different way and engaging people.  They clearly did something that hadn’t been done before.

All that is great, but it doesn’t mean Gen Z is also leading the charge on healthcare, even during the pandemic.  They’re no more likely to wear masks than other age groups, and are less likely to get vaccinated for it once one is available.   In many states experiencing a resurgence of COVID-19 cases, young people are increasingly being the ones infected.  

NPR reported: “some public health experts said the increase is because some younger adults may perceive they are less at risk than their parents or grandparents and are more likely to venture back into society as it reopens.”  That attitude is part of the reason that young people may be unwittingly spreading the disease, according to results from Japan.  

Dr. Thomas Tsai, a professor at Harvard’s School of Public Health, warns:

We need to change our whole thinking about COVID-19 during this stage of the pandemic.  It’s difficult to contain the virus physically because you have younger individuals, who may be pre-symptomatic or mildly symptomatic, who are going about their normal lives and reengaging with society.”

Epidemiologist Dr. Judith Malmgren told NPR that reaching Gen Z is different: “They are not reading print media. You need to be on social media. You need to use short sentences. You need to use very direct messaging.”  Another epidemiologist, Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, added: “I think young people can potentially have a very, very valuable role if we can harness their energy and attention.”

If.

This is the generation that is going to inherit our apathy towards climate change and huge budget deficits.  It shouldn’t have to inherit our dysfunctional healthcare system as well.  If they are looking for big, important social challenges, well, Defund Health Care!

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor.