As it became certain that President Trump’s 2020 kickoff event in Tulsa, Okla., would fall well short of its expected sellout crowd, teenagers around America and K-pop fans took a victory lap. Times reporters pointed to a weeklong viral campaign by TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music (K-pop) groups to sabotage the rally. The online communities claimed to have registered for hundreds of thousands of tickets for the event to flood the Trump campaign with fake data and inflate crowd-size expectations. One part prank, one part protest.

The Trump rally troll helped cement a narrative among a number of online liberals. Just as millennials were clumsily dubbed the avocado-toast-loving, industry-killing generation, the Gen Z stereotype is an equally reductive portrait: a sardonic, nihilist, climate-change-conquering group of social media vigilantes, righteously trolling for social justice (and roasting millennials in the process). Gen Z may just save us all, the theory goes — or at least save us from another four years of Donald Trump.

It’s a comforting thought in these unstable times. But reality is far more complicated. The kids aren’t all right (though many are). The kids are fed up. More specifically, Generation Z is disillusioned by a country and its myriad institutions whose moral arc seems to bend toward corruption and stagnation. They’re also, like any generation, not monolithic. And the way that their justified disillusion will play politically, culturally and socially is unknown.

“I’m afraid we’re always reading too much into every action of this generation,” Michelle Ciccone, a K-12 curriculum specialist in Massachusetts, told me recently. Ms. Ciccone’s job, designing digital teaching materials for a generation that has developed its own deep, nuanced and disparate digital cultures, has disabused her of painting the generation with a broad brush.

On the subject of the Trump rally ticket protest, she was wary of those offering definitive rationales. “I just don’t know how you can be so sure of the motivations of those involved,” she said. “There’s a lot of different reasons people might do that. Boredom, even just simple chaos, is a motivation.”

Indeed, Gen Z activism so far skews both idealist and dystopian. A common thread between that idealism and dystopianism is most likely a deep feeling of alienation, which Joe Bernstein at BuzzFeed News argued last year was one of the definitive effects of technology throughout the 2010s: “Feelings of powerlessness, estrangement, loneliness, and anger created or exacerbated by the information age are so general it can be easy to think they are just a state of nature, like an ache that persists until you forget it’s there.”

He cites the Harris Poll’s long-running alienation index, which asks respondents to agree or disagree with five blunt statements:

What you think doesn’t count very much anymore.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Most people with power try to take advantage of people like yourself.

The people running the country don’t really care what happens to you.

You’re left out of things going on around you.

Rather than some abstract litmus test, these statements are an apt description of much of American life since Gen Z was born. It has been witness to a financial crisis that deferred or destroyed dreams and wealth with little consequence to those who caused it; the whiplash of the Obama and Trump presidencies; political gridlock; an information ecosystem built atop viral advertising platforms that have democratized information, allowing it to be weaponized to the point of blurring reality; seemingly endless digitally documented police violence; and forever wars. They were born into a time of stark and widening inequality, a time when voter suppression is both called out but rarely acted upon.

Alienation is not a feature of Gen Z experience — it is the overarching context. And it is likely to have profound impacts on their politics and all of our lives. Perhaps the largest fissure in the generation’s formative years — the coronavirus pandemic — is still evolving. What, for example, are the results of a year or two of young adulthood lost to social distancing due to a pandemic? Or of graduating into a potential economic depression behind a generation that graduated into a recession?

We understand this uncertainty and realize the stakes are high. Which is probably a reason academics and journalists like me have so closely scrutinized social media platforms and the notion of algorithmic radicalization. It’s not that we think people are easily brainwashed. It’s that like millennials, Gen Z has been thrust into a destabilized era dominated by fractured media distribution systems. And these systems are easily hijacked by opportunists, creating the perfect conditions for insurgent ideas to latch on.

But, as happens with most online communities, there’s a great deal of mythologizing and flattening. Abby Ohlheiser at the MIT Technology Review put it best this weekend in a tweet: “ … older generations of liberals are now talking about teens and Kpop fans in the same way that Trump boomers talk about 4chan: as vigilante forces they love but don’t understand.”

Reality is more complicated. In a recent article Ms. Ohlheiser quotes Keidra Chaney, a culture writer, who notes that white K-pop fans have received the bulk of credit in the press for the fandom’s anti-racist activism, obscuring the contributions and experiences of black fans. Ms. Chaney told Ms. Ohlheiser that it “feels like a punch in the gut — that we are being used for our social currency and then discarded.”

And the causes that Gen Z has rallied around are more widely varied than the recent excitement over the Trump rally ticket protest would suggest. Yes, there’s the youth climate-strike movement and the Parkland kids. In recent weeks, young Americans have poured into the streets to protest racial injustice and police violence against black Americans — 52 percent of all adults who have protested are between the ages of 18 and 29, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey. Across Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and TikTok, the same generation has organized donations and resources for protesters and are calling out their peers for racist behavior.

But members of the same generation are most likely also fueling far-right message board trolls, nihilist “Doomer” groups and extremist online communities with a disdain for political correctness. Their platforms of choice like TikTok still brim with unchecked extremist content and far-right conspiracy theories. These politics may not be evenly distributed but, as a recent Pew Research Center survey suggests, “members of Gen Z look similar to millennials in their political preferences,” which suggests that online extremism associated with millennials is likely to evolve in this successive generation.

And then there’s the unknown: A 2019 Business Insider survey of over 1,800 Gen Zers revealed that a majority did not identify as either conservative or liberal, a result of either indecision or disillusion or both. And yes, there’s speculation about how they’ll vote and in what numbers they’ll turn out. But regardless of their relationship to the ballot box, their politics and messaging abilities will have an outsize impact on culture.

Whatever their politics, they innately understand the dynamics of our information ecosystem and know how to wield attention as both a tool and a weapon. As with the rest of us, many of their most consequential social interactions are governed by algorithms; unlike the rest of us, they appear uniquely adept at reverse engineering them and intuiting their inputs, making the algorithms easier to manipulate. When these skills are put to use against the Trump campaign, climate deniers, the gun lobby and racists, the result is exhilaration for all but the far right.

But there’s no reason to believe these tactics belong exclusively to one ideology. Or even one nation. Especially as we look toward the 2020 election, it is crucial not to oversimplify complex narratives or to assume a tactical advantage in an information war. Lest we forget one of the lessons of the last presidential cycle: One group’s online activism is another’s “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

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