The Great Technological Rejection

For all the promises of progress, convenience, connection, and liberation, we find ourselves increasingly surrounded by technologies that demand more of our attention, our money, our privacy, and our lives, while offering diminishing returns in exchange. The question is no longer whether we can build more, automate more, or connect more. It is whether any of this is making us better off — and what we stand to recover when we finally decide that enough is enough.

Governments and institutions are beginning to recognize the error of their ways when it comes to going all in on tech for children. But the technological rejection is far more significant than that.

In my view, there has been little genuine innovation in phones, tablets, laptops, computers, and most commonly used so-called “smart” tech. Their functionality and general use remain essentially the same as when they were first introduced, with minor, incremental improvements in processing speed, cameras, resolution, and other basic specifications. All in all, they’re still much the same as they ever were, because many of the so-called advancements have amounted to little more than hype.

Much of this technology is designed to fail or manufactured with components that simply won’t last. Software updates can render devices unusable, slow them down, or disable functionality, pushing users toward newer, increasingly cheaply manufactured and less durable replacements. This pattern of cheapening and enshittification repeats itself across nearly every kind of manufacturing and industry worldwide. In recent years, forcing “AI” into everything has increasingly been met with resistance, as people recognize it for what it often is: cumbersome, invasive bloat, accompanied by increased and unwanted surveillance, rather than any meaningful improvement. Nobody wants it.

The ubiquitous adoption of technology has caused considerable harm. This isn’t simply about “managing screen time” and “balancing device usage.” No human needs screen time or digital devices to live their best life. The emotional, psychological, developmental, social, cultural, and even physiological consequences are now the subject of extensive study and growing public awareness. The resistance emerging in response is inevitable.

Data centers are facing active and increasingly organized resistance in communities around the world. Wind and solar farms, meanwhile, are drawing criticism over their costs, land use, environmental impacts, intermittency, and long-term sustainability. Legal challenges and lawsuits are mounting in some jurisdictions, and questions about the economics, environmental trade-offs, and public subsidies underpinning these industries are becoming harder to ignore. The promised benefits are being scrutinized, and the shortcomings are increasingly difficult to dismiss.

Modern civilization went all in on technology, was force-fed AI and algorithms, and now, increasingly, we’ll be pulling the plug.

The great digital takeover is, in my view, a total sham: unsustainable, untenable, impermanent, and unbelievably wasteful.

In the broader, more conspiratorial sense, it’s fair to argue that the power plays of the most influential, coercive, predatory, and parasitic interests in our world are becoming increasingly visible. Their schemes, agendas, and ambitions for ever-greater control and panopticon-style surveillance are meeting growing scrutiny and resistance. The associated abuses, conflicts of interest, and criminal conduct will be tolerated less and less as more aware people, activists, researchers, and analysts expose the nefarious, malevolent, myopic, and truly asinine practices taking place in the name of progress.

Given the option, nobody would genuinely want it. And more and more of us are simply going to reject the offers outright.

Technology is useful as a tool. Dependence on it is manufactured through mind control, emotional and psychological manipulation, aggressive and ubiquitous marketing across all forms of media, and coercive policies that artificially limit options and availability. I’m certainly not anti-technology. I’ve been using it extensively for decades. In recent years, some AI tools have been very useful and broadly effective, but they’re largely enhancements to technological and software capabilities that have existed in some form for decades. I’ve been using them almost daily for content creation over the past few years, but if they were gone tomorrow, I wouldn’t miss them at all. I’d wager that many others might feel the same.

The notable exceptions are those who have become dependent on, or even addicted to, synthetic proxies, replacements, and stand-ins for genuine human connection and experience. Children and adolescents are particularly vulnerable to these dynamics, especially when targeted by corporate and industrial interests that prioritize profit over well-being — and they will always prioritize profit over human well-being. This dependency is enabled by a combination of misguided parenting, cowardly, captured, or corrupt political leadership, and institutional ignorance, whether deliberate or otherwise.

It would seem the hype cycle is cracking at the seams. No amount of money spent on advertising and propaganda will ultimately overcome humanity’s growing recognition that we were misguided and misdirected into believing that technology, and more recently AI, would save us from ourselves.

That’s a big damn lie.

There are no technological solutions for genuinely human problems. Indeed, it’s probably fair to argue that virtually all the world’s genuine problems are human in origin and must ultimately be resolved through human action. There are solutions to many of our so-called woes, and, in truth, most of the problems and crises we’re encouraged to fear or solve are entirely fabricated, exaggerated, or manufactured in the first place.

Stop letting the screen, the algorithm, and the synthetic and artificial condition and program you.

Lux et veritas.