MTV Names Post-Millennial Generation

Baby boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials looking for a new group to blame the woes of the world on, rest easy: Whether we wanted them to or not, higher-ups at MTV—or, rather, "arrogant marketing dolts at the increasingly irrelevant basic cable channel," as Don Kaplan writes for the New York Daily News—have assumed the mantle of picking a moniker for the next generation. The network is expected to announce Wednesday that "Founders" is the label we should now be using for post-millennial kids, those 15 and under who've grown up fully immersed in the digital world and who are ready to rebuild a society that the previous generation "disrupted," MTV President Sean Atkins told Time ahead of the announcement.

The disruptions of which Atkins speaks, per Time, include ones to the Internet (e.g., Facebook, Google) and even legacy industries like hotels and taxis (Airbnb, Uber). "[This generation has] this self-awareness that systems have been broken," Atkins says. There were plenty of unofficial names—including Gen Z, iGen, Homeland Gen—already in circulation before MTV decided to poll more than 1,000 kids born after December 2000 (the kids of Gen Xers) on what they thought the ideal name for their generation would be. Founders won out over more than 500 other nominations, including the Navigators, the Builders, and the Bridge Generation. (Yeah, Kaplan really hates this idea.)