I always have trouble seeing millenials born in the 80s as such. I feel that as a cultural block, you need to bisect the definition between 80s millenials, and

I always have trouble seeing millenials born in the 80s as such. I feel that as a cultural block, you need to bisect the definition between 80s millenials, and 90s millenials. 80s millenials (personally I call them Gen Y or Michael Moore Millenials) came of age in the 90s, could remember the Soviet Union (if only hazily), experienced its unique cultural excesses on a more conscious level, and directly shaped the technology that would later form the digital substrate of new millenium. They participated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from their onset, and were also old enough to viscerally experience 9/11. Their generation helped develop activist-consumerism when it was still counter-culture, tend to embrace the idea of a more global society, and came of college age just as the internet began to gain ubiquity. Even though they had to directly weather the financial crisis, they seem to have a more optimistic view of the future, and human potential in general, even if they often see progress as being stymied by bad people. The second group, (90s millenials or just millenials) have no collective memory of the Soviet Union, and entered the world as consumers of the digital transition, even if they were too old to truly be considered digital natives as their successors in Gen Z are. By the tine they were of age to join the military, the US had been at war for nearly a decade, and no one was quite sure why it still continued. The economy took a dive, and they were too young to experience it the same way as Gen Y did. Their early experiences of the internet were when it was still heavily decentralized, but had also become accessible to the technically illiterate. They were culture producers more than they were developers in the oughties, and they grew up alongside surveillance capitalism. Their view of the world is a bit more mixed, and they're also who the author is referring to, I think. I count myself among the latter group, if that offers some context to my perception.