New York Times/One Piece Flag as Symbol of the Gen Z protest across countries Two billion strong: a quarter of humanity, the largest generation in history. Born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, they are the first true digital natives—raised in the glare of screens, fluent in simultaneity, living in many places at once. Heterogeneous and scattered, concentrated in Asia and Africa yet increasingly global in voice, they are redrawing language, consumption, politics—and, m