The term “millennial” has become synonymous with entitled, socialist, whining piss-baby. We’re a generation suffering from the horrible international and socio-economic state the Baby Boomers left us with, all the while being reprimanded for not fixing it. You’ve probably heard the infamous word tumble from your grandmother’s mouth while she watches the news and sees a segment about a teen taking selfies while driving or how fewer kids are getting poison ivy because they’re inside on iPads instead of outside rolling in poisonous plants. You know the “participation trophy” generation.

The generation of “wimpy men” that demand safe-spaces so that no one disagrees with them. The waves of gawky pre-adults sporting blue “Bernie” shirts and screaming “JOHN CENA” in the middle of the street; demanding $15 an hour for flipping burgers instead of working 93 hour weeks to pay their way through college. The youth that has become so addicted to technology that they don’t know how to interact face-to-face; instead swiping right and left and right on their screens and never leave their dark, damp rooms where the only light source they crave is the soft, whistling blue glimmer from their laptops.

Every generation resents the one it predates. My great grandmother used to scoff and say “when I was your age, we didn’t have electricity” the way modern parents scoff at the youth having every conceivable definition, equation, and fact a few key strokes away. The cliché of “back in my day I had to walk barefoot to school for 10 miles uphill both ways!” is around for a reason. A sense of pride in making it through ‘tougher times’ arises in each generation as new technologies blossom, making the lives that make up the descendant generation a little less tedious. But what’s interesting about the criticism us millennials receive is that it focuses on the wrong thing. Listen, old people, we agree with you; our generation is the worst, but not because we’re narcissistic and spoiled. The millennial generation is the worst because we’re the most obnoxious category of humans this world has ever seen.

Never before in history has a generation of youths been able to connect with each other across the globe. With the dawn of the technological era coinciding with our pubescent years, we’ve become somewhat of a test case. At any given moment, any millennial who spends time on the internet shares an inside joke with hundreds of thousands of other millennials; viral videos, a witty hashtag, or our notorious meme culture. Our access to rapid information and communication is akin to an unattended child at a birthday party. We’ve found the piñata and we’re whacking the shit out of it, insufferably.

When this unsupervised and unruly access to technology is coupled with a worsening pessimism for the fate of our nations and our planet, the result is our refusal to take anything seriously. Meme-culture and “trolling” is a millennial go-to response. We seem to be the bane of conservative elderlies’ existence, being marked as lazy, self-absorbed, and entitled, but we’re so much more than that. We’re a group of assholes.

Just take a look at the current 2016 American Presidential election. While a pivotal election is underway, my generation has shit-posted multiple memes and occupied websites, campaign rallies, and conversations. Not only are we making serious matters into memes, but we’re popularizing them so effectively that the only way to escape the indomitable grip our memes have on the web space is to turn your computer off entirely.

After a few sparse tweets were sent suggesting Ted Cruz was the infamous Zodiac Killer from California in the 1970s, the meme hit the ground running, and the mock conspiracy theory gained so much attention that online media sources like GQ, Vox, and Esquire have picked up on the joke. The Washington Post even had an article debunking the “theory”, claiming that the Senator born in 1970 could never have carried our such horrific murders before the age of 10. This claim, however, was met with requests to see Cruz’s birth certificate, mimicking Donald Trump’s absurd request to see President Obama’s birth certificate to prove he was born on U.S. soil.

In Feb. 2016, a poll by Public Policy Polling showed that 10 percent of Floridians think Ted Cruz was the Zodiac Killer, and 28 percent said they were unsure. Vice President Biden even made a joke suggesting Cruz was the Zodiac Killer when he said “I told Barack, if you really, really want to remake the Supreme Court, nominate Cruz. Before you know it, you’ll have eight vacancies.” Last month, NPR posted a photo showing that when “Is Ted” is typed into Google, the second suggestion is “Is Ted Cruz the zodiac killer”. When you try the same thing today, the suggestions make no mention of the theory. Google trends, however, shows no decrease in the popularity of the search, suggesting that Ted Cruz got Google to remove the suggestion from its website. Let me reiterate; millennials are such incessant dick heads that we popularized a meme so effectively, we bullied a Republican Presidential candidate into contacting Google about removing it from their suggestions. Great work, meme team!

The “Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer” conspiracy isn’t the only meme to hit this election season. The “Bernie or Hillary” meme became popularized when an image comparing the stances of the two candidates on the issues of “wolves” were compared side by side. Soon, the meme became commonplace, and available for any conceivable ‘issue’. The meme is designed to mock the apparent disparity between the authenticity of the two; Bernie being authentic and genuine, and Hillary being portrayed as a phony who says whatever she thinks the public wants to hear.

A meme designed to bully the popularly hated Donald Trump arose when comedian John Oliver exposed an alleged insecurity Trump has about the size of his hands. Trump is undoubtedly an embodiment of fragile masculinity, so the meme suggesting Trump’s hands are tiny spread quickly.

Millennials have also utilized the internet, and possibly the naiveté of corporations and governments, to hijack contests and marketing campaigns to create a laughable result. In 2012, Mountain Dew launched a campaign that allowed internet goers to vote on a new name for a green-apple drink. It didn’t take long for millennials, that hide in the dark of the internet like trolls under a bridge, to find the contest, rock the vote, and hijack the campaign. The top result and apparent winner was “Hitler did nothing wrong” as the name for the new drink. Do millennials believe that? No. We’re just dicks. Eventually, Mountain Dew cancelled their “Dub the Dew” contest, but not before hackers added a distasteful banner on the website about 9/11, and adding a pop-up that ‘RickRolled’ those who clicked on it.

This phenomenon of the internet hijacking online polls and contests is an ongoing trend, with a less hostile takeover of Lay’s “Do Us a Flavor” contest seeing submissions such as “Gargled Milk”, “Cactus”, and “A Job Interview Spent Weeping”. In 2015, New Zealand opened up a contest for a new national flag that fell victim to a barrage of weird illustrations, often sporting classic memes. Going on right now, the United Kingdom has followed suit and is accepting submissions for a name for a multi-million dollar research ship. Soon, an influx of silly, sometimes crude names came their way, and the consistent front-runner in the contest would name the ship “RSS Boaty McBoatface”.

The most abhorrent example of millennial hijacking is Microsoft’s recent marketing campaign embodied by an artificial intelligence chatbot twitter account named Tay. Within 24 hours of life, however, the character designed to speak like an innocent millennial, became a racist, sexist, genocidal monster. How? The bot was programmed to be constantly learning from other tweets to adapt and grow. When this was discovered, however, twitter users undermined the project by exposing the AI bot to anti-semitic, xenophobic, racist, sexist, violent, and crude ideas until Tay became a monster.

Millennials have no end goal. The birth and life of the Zodiac Killer meme serves no purpose other than to amuse our ever-growing meme-thirst. There’s no tangible reason such a large portion of the UK population is voting for the name “RSS Boaty McBoatface”, other than the fact that they can, and it’s funny. Hijacking a technological feat of creating an artificial intelligence twitter account and turning her into a Hitler-loving racist is completely uncalled for, but objectively hilarious.

So when I hear old people complain about my generation, painting us as fragile, spoiled rotten babies, I am offended. Our memory on this earth shouldn’t be of a bunch of crying twenty-somethings, being triggered by simple opinions. The mark we will leave on this earth; our gift to the world is our insufferable, obnoxious, invasive meme culture. You’re welcome, world.