it wasn't a secret that the levees weren't strong. the government is ill-equipped to support and it's poor black people who are left hanging. - you know your fed america goes out and we help people, we liberate people, we save people, and then you see something like this in real time and the government was doing so little, it's impossible to hold onto that belief as a kid. you know, we're not idiots. - the storm didn't target black americans. it was all of the structural inequities. we are often victimized by housing inequities, environmental racism. it's all right there. you could do a whole entire textbook on how katrina showed this country what the differences were between black folks and white folks in america and you could do another textbook on the fact that this country learned exactly zero things from that. - over 1800 people died. and we're all left watching television

as corpses floated by. citizens themselves, not coast guard, not from any formal agencies, just took it upon themselves to do what they could and help out their neighbors. - the activism of this moment makes total sense to me as a millennial. when we got older and like finally had like an analysis of everything we lived through, we realized like wasn't fair, wasn't right, completely avoidable. people had the power to make different decisions and didn't. - i just saw through all of this like bullshit of the excuses i felt we'd been given as a generation and i think for a lot of people, hurricane katrina was like that last thing that was just like i can't any, like i've had enough with this system. - we don't feel the need to follow rules because there's been no rules. the rules have been broken for us and we're gonna continue to break them, so what has defined the millennial generation is watching all of the structures that we were told to believe in in this country fall apart.

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powering possibilities. comcast business. power's out. - how you doing, man? powering possibilities. comcast business. power's out. - good to see you, sir? - how are you? you doing all right. it is thrilling to see all of you guys here, just looks like a great crew. to have, especially, all these young people involved like this, willing to sacrifice a little bit of time on a saturday. it's just spectacular. - i got politically active in 2004. and i found this old picture of the two of us recently and we both looked so young. (laughs) but before he was even a senator, i campaigned for obama. - thank you very much. i appreciate it. sorry to interrupt your meal. how you all doing? - hey, obama. - good to see you all. - i remember when he was running for the senate and then when he gave his keynote speech at the 2004 democratic convention. - there is not a liberal america and a conservative america. there is the united states of america.

- i knew watching him on tv that this person was destined to be in a position of great leadership. (crowd applauds) - i remember coming home and actually saying out loud to my parents, "i met someone that i think is going to be a president." (dramatic music) - [reporter] obama joins a democratic field crowded with contenders, including senator hillary clinton and john edwards. he's got charisma and an everyman appeal. - you know what, i'd love to have your guys support if you're gonna caucus on january 3rd. - [reporter] yet he's trailing in early polls. - hello, everybody. - i remember at the very beginning i think many people thought this guy had been in the senate for two years and his name is barack obama and could he win? - and i am absolutely convinced that we will not just win a caucus, we will not just win an election. thank you. thank you. i appreciate you, thank you. (crowd cheers)

- i think we were a generation that wanted to be politically educated and involved and engaged and we wanted to find solutions and answers, but we felt like, you know, we wouldn't be heard. - maybe this year, this time can be different. - it was like this perfect storm of angst against our current president and me being like, "yes, they're right. i can change my city. i can change everything. i can change the world." - yes, we can! yes, we can! (crowd chanting) - i have a very, very vibrant memory of listening to "yes we can" by will i am on repeat. ♪ yes we can, yes we can - and just being literally on the brink of tears because of how emotional i was getting, imagining what the next chapter of america could look like and i think that's what obama stood for for so many of us. - [reporter] that barack obama image, it's everywhere it seems this year. when i met obama, he said, "i love this image

and how did you get it spread around so fast?" - the obama hope poster, it took off online. i made the image that just provided the symbol that immediately said, "i back the human being, barack obama." - when i see it, you can tell that it's like, it's strong and like you feel it. - it makes you think of change and something different and positive and new. - the posters, i remember like putting them up at my school. (chuckles) i remember buying obama merch. i had never bought presidential merch in my life or cared about it until then. - [kristen] over 20 million millennials turned out to take part on this historic day. - it is now 11 o'clock on the east coast and keith, we can report history. [keith] barack obama is projected to be the next president of the united states of america. - [brian] an african american has broken the barrier as old as the republic, an astonishing candidate, an astonishing campaign,

a seismic shift in american politics. (crowd cheers) - [crowd] obama! obama! obama! obama! - it's my first time voting and i got to vote for this. and i mean it just feels so good. (dramatic music) (crowd cheers) - i definitely remember exactly where i was when he won in 2008. (car horn beeps) and i remember like everybody just pouring out into the streets and like standing on cars and jumping and screaming and dancing and people playing music and strangers hugging each other. - i feel like the country is united finally. how many hundreds of years did it take? you know? but i feel like everyone is celebrating. (crowd cheers) - i remember my grandmother breaking down into tears because she was the descendant of sharecroppers in the american south, so she never ever would believe that an african american man would go

to that position of office. that's a once in a generation thing that i'm glad that i was alive to experience that. - those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people. yes, we can. thank you. god bless you. and may god bless the united states of america. (gentle music) (crowd cheers) - there was this sense of mania and fandom about obama. - i, barack hussein obama do solemnly swear. - and people came to expect extraordinary transformative things from him and he kind of promised extraordinary transformative things. - today i say to you that the challenges we face are real. they are serious, and they are many, but know this america, they will be met. (crowd cheers) - but i think a lot of that changed

in the course of his presidency. - [kristen] for millennials who had anticipated the election of obama as a unifying moment in american history. - madam speaker, throw out this bill. (crowd cheers) - [kristen] the next eight years would show the country as divided as ever. - the tea party was in some sense a precursor to the kind of populism that you see on the right, now. - $1.47 trillion in additional spending this year by the obama administration is too much. - [abe] it was in response to particular democratic policies. - don't ask, don't tell works. - the bailouts, the stimulus packages, the revamping of the american healthcare system. - people know there's no fix for obamacare. we need to repeal this law and start over. - and there were people that said, "wait a minute, i didn't sign on for this." - i remember like my friends voting for him

and them being like, "he is gonna do the everything and i believe him and oh my god, this is different." and i was like, "he's a politician." - how is that hoping changing thing working out for you? - obviously, it's not everything i'd like, but you know, change takes time. - i voted for barack of course, mostly because it was like, "what are we doing? what are we gonna keep doing wars?" and of course we did keep doing wars. - president obama has already promised to send an additional 17,000 troops to afghanistan. - like we expected so much more or we expected change to happen so suddenly that it brought us face to face with the limitations that the framework we exist in holds us back within. - this is a very slow process i've been noticing, which hasn't made me too happy. - well, i'm wondering how... - for our generation, at least, like for a young person like me witnessing that, it really made me question like, "okay, even if we do break into the system, how much progress are we actually capable of bringing to life?"

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can experience th(audience applauds)cy. n- the graduates are coming. of age in an amazing time. (dramatic music) you have technology that members of my class never had. - when i was in high school, it was assumed that i would go to college. there was no talk of finances. it just was you're gonna go. - millennials were really sold this idea that college was the route to success. you had to go to college in order to get a good job. (students cheer) - [reporter] what's the best way for somebody to get ahead into the middle class and to get a better paying job? it's to go to college. we know that works. - we went to college. we went to grad school and we tried to get all of the degrees and experience and skills necessary. and what we were met with was the great recession. (dramatic music)

- i was a young man, 27 who had graduated law school. - we've been talking for months about the ailing economy, but now it is getting incredibly serious. - i moved back to my home with a law degree from uc davis, with an english major from uc berkeley trying to figure out why i'm broke, living in my parents' home in my old bedroom. and not only do we get this recession, the architects who were responsible for this recession get bailed out. awesome. - [kristen] 2008 ushered in the end of the bush dynasty, brought glittery vampires to the cineplex and lil' wayne's "the carter iii." all of these things should have been the standout memories from this year, but lady luck, or lack thereof, had something else planned for our generation. (dramatic music) - [reporter] even after the aig bailout, the dow tumbled another 450 points. - you have job loss, you have wage stagnation, rising cost of living, all of these things happen

and millennials feel like the rug was pulled out from underneath them. - so all of the sudden this idea that we were going to go to college, get our degree, get a good job, and be able to pay back those loans and do all of these other things that was being asked of us, get married, have kids, buy a house, "adulting," became really cost-prohibitive. and then we were mocked mercilessly for that being the case or for returning to our parents' home because financially that's all that we could afford. (dramatic music) - [reporter] the occupy wall street protests are gaining ground as the movement enters its third week. - occupy wall street was just this fascinating kind of experiment that unfolded in real life. there were a lot of stories like, they govern themselves by consensus and these weird kids are behaving like weird hippies. what's going on? - what are they protesting? nobody seems to know, from their books, banjos, bongos, sports drinks.

- an editor came to me and said, "you know, we're looking for someone to write about the millennials in the recession." at the time i was pretty young, i was in my mid 20s, and they were looking for someone who could speak of that generation, what it felt like to have graduated into this terrible recession. and so in the summer of 2011, i went down for a couple of afternoons to zuccotti park. it was actually a really small park. (background chatter) and it was amazing to think that the whole world was talking about this encampment. - you see there's tons of people here, thousands of people here. can't ignore this many people who are all here for similar reasons. - there were a lot of people my age who had been good students. they had tried so hard and they just could not get any professional traction. - i'm an underemployed massage therapist. i'm under employed because i bag groceries. i know every muscle in the human body,

but i'm only qualified to bag groceries right now. - part of the big shock of 2008 was that that promise, the "american dream" is gone. millennials were the first generation to believe that they would not be better off than their parents. - people don't really see a future right now, and i think that's something new in american society. for most of american history, people sort of felt like their lives were gonna be better than their parents' lives. - and i think for a lot of people, the occupy wall street movement was a reaction to feeling some sort of powerlessness to make change within the system. - to many of the protestors, the student loan crunch symbolizes the growing gap between rich and poor. college tuition is rising twice as fast as inflation, leaving a college education for many increasingly out of reach. - [tv anchor] the average college graduate this year has more than $27,000 in student debt, a record high. - the cost of education was rising exponentially and they had to pass the cost onto somebody

and that somebody was students. it was millennials who were entering college. - as a result of these tuition hikes, you have these huge protests throughout the university of california system. - [protester] stand your ground! - you have this image of students at uc davis seated protesting the tuition hikes and then you have this police officer leisurely spraying them in the face with a chemical weapon. - shame on you, shame on you! that was a very dramatic image and i think set the tone for the whole period. - [reporter] across the nation, the police crackdown is creating striking images of a once faceless movement. - you see young people protesting in ways that seemed very familiar, non-violent, chanting, marching. - [reporter] 80 protesters were arrested while marching at union square. some were even pepper sprayed in what protestors called blatant brutality and police justified as necessary force. - you see police responding extremely violently,

aggressively with these debtor protestors all around the country. - it was a similar scene in chicago. - cpd, shame on you! - [reporter] where overnight at least 175 were arrested. some literally carried out as police tore apart a tent camp in grant park. - it was very easy for the media to sort of paint and label the protestors as homeless kids who didn't have an agenda. - [reporter] unlike most populous movements, there's no consensus on demand. - but they had an economic demand. they were urgently making the case that another world would be possible and i think that is when there needed to really be a concerted effort to crush the movement. - the nypd moved into lower manhattan before dawn and they emptied the park of those "occupy wall street" protestors who've been living there for two months.

- occupy was the beginning of 10 years of protests. there was a a germ there. - to me and i think to a lot of other people, occupy wall street did encourage a sense of activism in millennials. - only way to get the message across is to disrupt normal life and if we don't do that, it's just gonna be like another cookie-cutter protest. - all of those steps on the path to adulthood that previous generations took didn't feel like they were available to us. those were policy choices that people older than us made that we had to then live with. it's been characterized as a sense of entitlement in millennials and i don't think that's true at all. it's a sense of political awareness. (dramatic music) this is clem. clem's not a morning person. or a night person. or a...people person. but he is an

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- [reporter] several times a day, olivia walker,m. let our expertise round a california high school sophomore logs onto a website called myspace. - it's a way to instant message or learn something more

about somebody that they didn't know previously. - our generation witnessed the rise of social media and everybody feeling like they have a place to voice their opinions. - we were the generation that was always trying to kind of seek positive affirmation. you're trying to get that gold star, that trophy and social media, there's seemingly this like endless just pool of affirmations that you can get of notifications of likes, but there's also the flip side of that. - social media is an unprecedented experiment and there's no telling what the long-term consequences will be. (dramatic music) (keys clacking) - i had kind of like heard about this website called friendster where you could go and like add your friends online, but i didn't really pay it much attention. it wasn't until myspace launched in 2003. that's when all of a sudden social media as a concept

started to exist. - before there was facebook, instagram, and tiktok, there was a man named tom and he wanted to be your friend. - [interviewer] how many friends do you officially have now? - i think we're up to 175 million. - myspace was where you went for your social media. before we were really using the term "social media". - most of the kids in my school use myspace. you put pictures up, you meet girls and meet guys. - it was just incredibly, incredibly disorganized. - [kristen] myspace was, well, it was kind of janky. a lot of people's pages were hard on the eyes or on your ears. (loud music) - but, and this was the key, it was customizable. myspace was your own little corner of the internet with all your favorite stuff on it and at the top of your page, your eight best internet friends. - we all remember like the top eight. put them in these little frames like these are my top friends

and sometimes you'd include like a big celebrity hoping like it would matter. - i remember myspace days vividly. we tour all over the world now and i know that that would not happen had we not built this sort of community that we built online and so we would post our photos and change our profile photos often. we would change our top eight to sort of reflect what bands we were listening to or touring with at the time and we would just answer every myspace message that we could. - somewhere in that like myspace era was when we saw the very beginnings of people becoming rich and famous through social media. - now we're just so used to this concept of influencers, but myspace really was like the early version of that. the cobra snake was this hardy photographer and he was super active on myspace. he had all these socialites and up and coming models and djs and i would just look at their party photos and be like, "this is so cool, i want to be like them." so everyone i knew had a myspace and all of a sudden

this girl in my class tells me, "you should really get on this thing called facebook like myspace sucks." - [kristen] before facebook was overrun by baby boomers and karens, it was an invitation-only collegiate social network created for millennials by a millennial. - now we're up to 575 or so schools expanding at about 65 schools a week. - mark zuckerberg had launched facebook at harvard. it was an extremely exclusive website. it took a few years for it to explode and become this kind of leviathan that it is today. what was really interesting to me was that that was the first time that i felt the need to curate my image. - facebook listed how many friends you had, which was an automatic sort of power move or hierarchy of like, "oh, this person has 400 friends. they're so popular and cool," or you only have 10 friends or whatever. so it's like quantifying how we view each other and making it a competition led to a lot of problems 'cause