The Kids Are Not Alright With Big Tech

One of the more fascinating stories I read this week wasn’t about marketing, artificial intelligence, social media or the latest gadget.

It was about a group of (mostly) young people gathering in New York for something called the “Summer of Ludd” (more on that here: Inside the Luddite Festival Harnessing Gen Z’s Rage Against Big Tech). No phones… no social media posting… no influencer hyper cycle. Just people showing up… talking… making things… repairing things… flirting… watching films… printing zines… spending time together in their “protein forms” without turning every moment into content or any dead space into scroll time. At first blush, it seems like something nostalgic. But if you give it some pause, it’s something much more interesting. For years, we’ve used the word “Luddite” to describe someone who is anti-technology. That’s never really been true. The original Luddites weren’t afraid of machines. They were worried about how machines were being used… who benefited… who lost power… and what happened when technology became a tool for concentrating wealth instead of creating opportunity.

Is it just me or does that distinction suddenly feel very modern?

What’s striking about this movement isn’t that it’s being led by older people who miss the “good old days” (the digital immigrants), it’s being led by people who have never known anything else. This is a generation that didn’t adopt smartphones… they grew up inside them. They’re digital natives (or, as Don Tapscott used to say, “they are bathed in bits”) questioning the environment they inherited. They aren’t saying technology is bad. They’re asking whether technology is making life better. Does every friendship need a platform? Does every conversation need an algorithm? Does every creative act need to become content? Does every human interaction need to be ranked and monetized?

These are profoundly important questions.

If you strip away the festival itself, what remains is a generation that seems to be pushing back against capture. Not just attention capture… but emotional capture. Not just data capture… but identity capture. The idea that every meaningful part of life eventually becomes some Big Co’s business model.

So… this is not another story about going offline.

It is a story about a culture and agency. And it’s a strange one for me (and for millions of people like me). Being online used to feel liberating. It connected us to information, communities and opportunities that simply weren’t available before. Then, somewhere along the way, that freedom quietly became weird. Being online slowly stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like the default. The platforms weirdly became the place where life happened. And now, this younger generation is also leading much of the skepticism around artificial intelligence. Not because they reject technology, but because they’ve already lived through one technological revolution that promised connection while often delivering isolation and something “other.” They understand attention extraction. And maybe offline suddenly feels radical… because it’s voluntary. Because choosing when technology participates in your life is becoming a strange act of agency.

The future probably isn’t less technology… I don’t think that’s realistic… or even desirable.

But I do think the future may be more intentional technology. Technology that serves people instead of capturing them (and their data). Technology that creates more presence instead of performance. Technology that really helps us connect. That may be the most interesting signal hiding underneath this new generation of “Luddites.”

They’re not rejecting the digital world… they’re asking for the right to live inside it at their own cadence.

This (and some other topics) is what Elias Makos and I discussed on CJAD 800 AM.

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