Anti-Tech "Extremism"
I have been writing about this stuff more and more lately, at least in theme. The MacBook Neo. Windows 11 being exhausting. The Wheel of Greed. I even vibe-coded a simple notepad app because of this very topic. Every one of those posts circled the same drain from a different angle, which is that the relationship between people and the technology-based products people live with has gotten worse, and that the people in charge of that technology mostly do not care, because the incentives no longer reward caring. So when I came across a new piece of language being used to describe people who push back on technology having its own FBI counter terrorism classification, I had to do a double take.
Said classification is termed "anti-tech extremism." As far as I can tell, this all came to light in a recent report from WIRED, drawn from internal law enforcement documents, as an emerging category for people skeptical of AI, opposed to data centers being built in their towns, or generally uneasy about the direction technology is heading. As someone who lives at the intersection of technology and education, and who thinks about culture for a living, I have some thoughts!
Who Actually Shapes Technology
I teach two frameworks regularly in courses I teach, one in my Video Games and Cultural Dynamics course, and one in my Technology and Society course. The first is technological determinism, the idea that technology has its own internal developmental logic and that society simply adapts to wherever that logic leads. You have heard this your whole life even if nobody named it for you. AI is coming whether you like it or not. Screens are everywhere now, that is just how it is. Get on board or get left behind. The trajectory is fixed, the machine is driving, and human beings are passengers. The only sensible response is acceptance. Simply put, this framework posits that technology actively shapes society, not the other way around. The second framework is the Social Construction of Technology, or SCOT, and it pushes back on that directly. The argument is that technologies do not develop according to some inevitable technical logic at all. They are shaped by the social groups that interact with them, the values those groups hold, the problems they are actually trying to solve, and the choices people make at every point along the way. There is nothing predetermined about the form any technology takes. If there was ever an argument in favor of SCOT over technological determinism, it's the selfie, ha. But I digress. Different groups read the same technology completely differently, and which reading wins out is a social negotiation, not a foregone conclusion.
What I See in My Own Classroom
I do not just study this from a distance. I live in it every day, because I am an instructional designer and an educator in higher education, and AI has detonated inside my domain over the last couple of years. I work with faculty trying to figure out what to do about it. I teach students who use it, and students who refuse to. And here is what I have seen and experienced over the past few years. My students, who are almost entirely Gen Z, hate AI. They loathe it. They reject it with fire and pitchforks. If I so much as generate a decorative image with AI in Blackboard, I am going to hear about it in the course reviews. But a good educator, and a well-rounded person, should want to dig deeper than that reaction, to sit with their experiences and uncover the "why." I am of the opinion that the "why" underneath my students' resistance is almost never a rejection of the technology itself. The ones who push back hardest are not people who fail to understand what AI can do. Plenty of them understand it better than the people writing the policies about it. What they are reacting to is something more specific, and far more reasonable. They are reacting to being told a tool is mandatory in one class and forbidden as cheating in the next, depending on whose syllabus they opened that morning. They are reacting to writing work they suspect will be graded by software. They are reacting to the dawning sense that the thing being sold to them as empowerment is also being used to replace the human attention they are paying tuition for, and eventually to compete with them for the jobs they are going into debt to qualify for.That is not anti-technology. That is a rational response to having no say. When a student tells me they do not want to use a particular AI tool, what they are objecting to is the lack of consent. Nobody asked them. The tool arrived, the institution adopted it, the terms were set far above their heads, and their only options were comply or fall behind. Strip away the specifics and that is the exact same dynamic as a homeowner at a town hall objecting to a data center being built in their town. The objection is not to the technology. The objection is to having no say or control over any of this. And when I actually talk to my students, past the fire and the brimstone reactions to AI, there is something deeply personal and deeply human driving these reactions. A lot of them are writers. A lot of them are artists. Almost all of them grew up making things, and they can feel that what is being automated is not their commute or their spreadsheet. It is the part of them that makes things.
What Is Actually Left of Us
Art is the most human thing a person can do. I mean that almost literally, not as a poster slogan. We have been making art so long that we are not even the only human species who did it. The Neanderthals painted. They made ornaments, they marked caves, they buried their dead with intention. Before written language, before agriculture, before cities, before any of the things we usually point to as the markers of who we are, there was the impulse to make something that did not need to exist. To tell a story. To leave a mark that said someone was here and someone felt something. Art is not a luxury layered on top of human life. It is one of the oldest pieces of evidence that human life was happening at all. It is the expression of the human experience, the record of what it has felt like to be one of us, passed hand to hand across tens of thousands of years.
So let me run a thought experiment, the kind I love to throw at my students. Pretend it is the year 2400 and we are living in a post-scarcity world, the Star Trek dream made real. People no longer need anything. At all. Money is useless, because the accumulation of needs and wants has become so effortless that it lost all its value. Technology is so advanced that no one labors out of necessity. Hunger is solved. Shelter is solved. Every material want a person could name simply appears. In that world, what is left? What do human beings actually do with themselves once survival is no longer the organizing principle of existence? The answer is the arts. That is really it. The arts. The story of us. The story of humans. Our expressions, our songs, our writing, our paintings, our films, our creations. In a world where machines can do everything, the thing that remains irreducibly ours is the act of making meaning. Star Trek understood this. The Federation is not a story about people optimizing their portfolios. It is a story about people who, freed from need, devote themselves to exploration, to music, to literature, to becoming more fully human. The whole utopian premise rests on the idea that when you take away scarcity, what blooms in the empty space is creativity and culture. That is the prize at the end of the technological road. That is supposedly what all of this is for.
Which is exactly why the current moment is so backwards it makes me want to scream. We built machines and pointed them straight at the one thing that was supposed to be the reward. AI is not coming for the drudgery first. It is not liberating us from the assembly line so we can go home and write our novels. It is coming for the novels. It is assaulting the arts and the humanities more potently and more directly than any other field, the most deeply personal and cherished components of our humanity, being strip-mined out from under us by slop machines trained on the very work they are now replacing. The painters, the writers, the musicians, the illustrators, the voice actors, the people who do the most human thing a person can do, are being kicked to the curb so that a model can produce a cheaper, faster, hollow imitation of what they made. We took the Star Trek future and ran it in reverse. We automated the soul and left the drudgery in place. That is a huge part of the resistance, and it is the part the "anti-tech" label is ignoring. When my students recoil at an AI-generated image, they are not being pretentious or backwards. They are reacting to watching the thing that makes them human get fed into a machine and sold back to them as a feature. They understand, at a level deeper than policy, that something is being taken. Not a job. Not a workflow. A piece of what it means to be a person. The artist who objects to having their life's work scraped without consent to train the model that will undercut them is not standing against progress. They are standing up for the single most human thing we have ever done, against a system that has decided that thing is just another input to be extracted. Call that extremism if you want. I call it the most natural and dignified response imaginable.
This Was Never Really About Technology
I keep coming back to the word enshittification in my blog posts lately, Cory Doctorow's term for the way platforms and products decay over time as they prioritize extraction over the experience of the person actually using them. I have applied it to Microsoft Windows, to the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), to streaming, to video games, to the slow death of owning the things you pay for. But I have come to believe that enshittification is not the root cause of anything. It is a symptom. The disease underneath it is unregulated capitalism. Follow this rabbit far enough down the hole, past every branch this topic splits off into, and you end up in the same place every time. Value flows up. Power consolidates. The everyman gets less and pays more, while corporations and the asset-owning class capture an ever larger share of everything. We do not own our software, we rent it. We do not own our movies or our music, we subscribe to access that can be revoked the moment a licensing deal lapses. Our cars lock features behind subscriptions. Our printers want a monthly ink plan. Our TVs sell ads on the home screen of the device we already paid for. Back in 2016, the World Economic Forum published a now-infamous prediction for the year 2030, distilled into one chillingly cheerful sentence. "You will own nothing, and you will be happy." It came out of an essay by Danish politician Ida Auken, framed as an optimistic vision of a future where everything you need is a service you rent rather than a thing you own. How on earth is that optimistic? That future sounds an awful lot like today, and that lack of ownership keeps extracting value from anything and everything it can in the pursuit of capital gain.
Ownership is one of the most basic relationships a person can have with the material world. It is the difference between a thing being yours and a thing being licensed to you at the pleasure of a company that can change the terms whenever it wants. That relationship is being dismantled on purpose, because recurring revenue is worth more to a shareholder than a customer who buys a useful thing once and keeps it. And notice what happens when you point that same logic at art. The artist does not even get to be the renter anymore. Their work becomes the raw material, harvested for free, to build the machine that replaces them. It is the most aggressive version of the same extraction. First they came for what you own, then they came for what you make. The people objecting are not objecting to computation. They are objecting to a build-out happening at enormous scale, on terms set entirely by capital, with the costs dumped on their communities and the benefits flowing somewhere else. They are objecting to having their jobs automated out from under them by companies that will pocket the savings. They are objecting to being turned, once again, from owners and citizens into subscribers and inputs. That is not a rejection of technology. It is a rejection of consumerism, of the erosion of consumer rights, of the hollowing out of the middle class, and of what happens when capitalism flies off the handle with nothing to rein it in.
Ownership is one of the most basic relationships a person can have with the material world. It is the difference between a thing being yours and a thing being licensed to you at the pleasure of a company that can change the terms whenever it wants. That relationship is being dismantled on purpose, because recurring revenue is worth more to a shareholder than a customer who buys a useful thing once and keeps it. And notice what happens when you point that same logic at art. The artist does not even get to be the renter anymore. Their work becomes the raw material, harvested for free, to build the machine that replaces them. It is the most aggressive version of the same extraction. First they came for what you own, then they came for what you make. The people objecting are not objecting to computation. They are objecting to a build-out happening at enormous scale, on terms set entirely by capital, with the costs dumped on their communities and the benefits flowing somewhere else. They are objecting to having their jobs automated out from under them by companies that will pocket the savings. They are objecting to being turned, once again, from owners and citizens into subscribers and inputs. That is not a rejection of technology. It is a rejection of consumerism, of the erosion of consumer rights, of the hollowing out of the middle class, and of what happens when capitalism flies off the handle with nothing to rein it in.
So What Is It, Really?
What gets labeled "anti-tech extremism" is, overwhelmingly, ordinary people who have simply had enough. They have watched ownership erode, wages stagnate, and every product they used to buy turn into a service they now rent. They have correctly figured out that AI and the data center boom are just the next chapter of that same book. They are artists and writers and musicians watching the most human thing we do get automated first, while the drudgery they actually wanted help with stays exactly where it was. They are not against technology. Most of them, like me, love technology. They just do not want to be steamrolled by it on terms they had no say in.
I have said before that I do not want a relationship with my text editor. I just want to type. The same instinct is underneath all of this. People do not want to fight their tools, fight their institutions, and fight their economy just to live an ordinary life and make their ordinary, beautiful, human things. They want technology that serves them instead of mining them, and they want a say in how it shows up in their towns, their classrooms, their jobs, and their art. Wanting that is not extremism. It is the most reasonable thing in the world. If the year 2400 ever does arrive, and need really does fall away, the arts will be the last fully human thing we have.
I have said before that I do not want a relationship with my text editor. I just want to type. The same instinct is underneath all of this. People do not want to fight their tools, fight their institutions, and fight their economy just to live an ordinary life and make their ordinary, beautiful, human things. They want technology that serves them instead of mining them, and they want a say in how it shows up in their towns, their classrooms, their jobs, and their art. Wanting that is not extremism. It is the most reasonable thing in the world. If the year 2400 ever does arrive, and need really does fall away, the arts will be the last fully human thing we have.
Where I Land, Sort Of
Here is the part that probably surprises no one who made it this far, given that I mentioned vibe-coding four apps back in the first paragraph. I love AI. I use it constantly. It is a tool, an assistant, a sounding board, the thing I throw half-formed ideas at eleven o'clock at night. It cleans up my grammar. It tells me when a sentence is not landing. I have built four apps now, real things that solve real problems I had no other way to solve, because I am not a coder and AI handed me a door I never had a key to. I use it to pull the pictures in my head into the world, because my canvas has never been a visual one, and for the first time I can actually show people what I see. In a hundred small daily ways, I am deeply pro-AI.But I still cannot give you a clean answer. I have tried. I keep trying to fold it into something tidy and it keeps refusing. The closest I have gotten is this. When I look at the uses that bring me joy and the uses that turn my stomach, the thing separating them does not seem to be AI at all. It seems to be power. The stuff I love tends to put a capability in the hands of someone who was locked out of it. A nonprofit that can barely keep the lights on making a fundraising graphic it could never have afforded to commission. Me building an app that did not exist yesterday. The stuff that horrifies me tends to run the other way. Someone with power using the tool to extract from someone without it, usually without asking, usually to cut the human out of the loop entirely. An artist's life's work scraped to train the machine that will undercut them. A company feeding its storytelling to a model so it does not have to pay the writers who made it worth watching.
If I had generated an image for this very blog post, would I be taking food off some illustrator's plate? I genuinely do not know. But scale that same little decision up across millions of people making it every day and something is being hollowed out, even if I cannot point to the one person it happened to. Is using AI a kind of plagiarism, since it has basically digested everything humans ever put online and hands it back to us reshaped? Sometimes it sure feels like it. Other times I remember that every human artist is also a compression of everyone who ever moved them, and I lose the thread again. I can hold "this specific thing I did hurt no one" and "the system I just took part in is doing real harm" in the same hand at the same time, and not be able to make them cancel out. I can only take things as they come and say that one is beautiful, or that one is theft, and sit with the dozen cases in between that are neither. What I can say with my whole chest is where the worst of it lives. When AI is used to erode trust, to replace human beings at scale, to strip-mine the arts and send the spoils upward, the aversion people feel is not irrational and it is not extremism. It is the most human reaction in the world. And when it is used carefully, with consent, to open a door for someone who was shut out, I will defend that just as hard.
The trouble is that we are not the ones being allowed to choose between those two. That is the part I am actually sure of, maybe the only part. Capitalism is hijacking this tool and bending it into a profit engine, and the everyman is paying for it with their voice, their opportunities, and their ownership, with no say in the matter and no real recourse when it goes wrong. That is the problem under the problem. It was never the technology, and it was never the people resisting it. It is what happens when something this powerful gets handed to the people least interested in asking the rest of us what we think. So I am going to keep loving this tool with one hand and defending the people fighting it with the other.
