Movements to reclaim power over technology are springing up, from Neo-Luddism to Permacomputing to Rewilding the Internet. Alongside these approaches, we must discuss how tech has atrophied the exact civic muscle we’ll need to reclaim power over it.
Last month, I had the pleasure of attending the Summer of Ludd, organized by NYC Off Tech and dedicated to getting people "off big tech, into public space, and re-enchanting each other." Like the original Luddites rebelling against the machinery that stole their livelihoods, the Neo-Luddites are correct to rebel against today's tech, which threatens our livelihoods, our privacy, our living world, our creative joy, and our ability to think.
Despite the heaviness of the stakes, the event itself was light: plays, puppets, clown workshops—I put on a gnome hat. My favorite moment of the event, which I dipped in and out of all week, was when a yellow gnome asked me to put my iPhone away and “carry this instead,” then passed me a hand-painted cardboard apple attached to a popsicle stick. How silly; how reasonable.
By itself, the event was not a labor movement; it was a cultural one. I think often about the divide between Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden as depicted in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7. Abbie keeps insisting on the importance of cultural revolution through street demonstrations, theater, humor, and sexual liberation, while Tom dismisses it as a distraction from “actual revolution.” My favorite moment in the film comes when Abbie tells him, “We’re not going to jail because of what we did, we’re going to jail because of who we are. Think about that the next time you shrug off cultural revolution.”
I agree with Abbie: how people play, feel free, and come to see what’s possible matters just as much as formal politics. I also agree with Naomi Klein when she says surrealism expands our political imagination, and with David Graeber when he asks, What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? My coalition is big enough for whimsy, and it can't be effective without it.
I. The Great Tech Power Grab
The Summer of Ludd is one of many reactions in the broader backlash against Big Tech and AI hitting the mainstream. Resistance is undoubtedly picking up because the harms are becoming larger and more pervasive.
I’ll admit I feel both delighted and a little at a loss watching a position that once felt like my lane become a populist one. One thing I can offer as a civic tech/tech critic elder is a description of how I have seen tech take power. If we are going to unwind tech's great power grab, we have to understand how we got here.
Here are five ways we’ve seen tech—the tools, the industry, and the tricks of the trade—take power:
- Tech is a false substitute for political organizing. There has been much scholarship on so-called “clicktivism,” or how social media can create a feeling of political participation without building durable political power. While social media excels at rapid mobilization, it is much less effective at building the organizational capacity to develop demands, negotiate, and sustain pressure over time. The darker interpretation of “clicktivism” is “slacktivism”: the idea that digital participation can substitute for political action rather than lead to it. What’s worse, Silicon Valley has become especially adept at presenting itself in Washington as a bastion of democracy, even as its cyberlibertarianism concentrates private power and recasts it as freedom and participation.
- Tech evades democratic accountability. Silicon Valley has enjoyed a particular kind of regulatory exceptionalism, becoming unusually effective at redefining the terms of its own governance. Digital platforms have reshaped the legal and institutional frameworks around themselves rather than adapting to them, while data is too often governed as an abstract object rather than understood through the social contexts in which it operates. The result is an underregulated sector governed by manufactured consent, rubber-stamp impact assessments, and cost-of-doing-business fines rather than democratic mandates, enforceable rights, and meaningful avenues for redress.
- Tech fills the vacuum left by political failure, then entrenches it. Against a backdrop of austerity logic, neoliberalism, public disinvestment, and solutionism, dominant technology platforms have repeatedly backfilled for political failures. Uber expanded where public transit and taxi systems fell short, while disrupting not only the sector it entered but the regulatory regime governing it. TurboTax profits from a filing system that remains unnecessarily complicated, while Intuit has spent years lobbying against government efforts to make tax filing free and simple. These privatized stopgaps then become self-reinforcing, making it harder both to address the underlying political failure and to regulate the intermediary itself.
- Tech serves extractive and speculative capital, not people. Silicon Valley’s incentives have long been organized around growth, engagement, and speculation rather than helping people. Under surveillance capitalism, your behavior becomes raw material for products sold to someone else; in the familiar shorthand, "you are the product." Tech companies squeeze everyone interacting with their platforms in service of capital: users through “enshittification,” subscription models, and other rentier relationships; workers through gig-economy labor arbitrage; and business customers through an ad-tech market whose effectiveness is itself uncertain. Now AI hype and speculation have pushed this logic to another scale, with more and more of the economy reorganized around an “AI economy” whose promised value remains far ahead of its proven use cases.
- Tech seeks to replace democratic governance itself. Tech optimists once embraced “code is law” as an opportunity; the industry has increasingly taken it literally, taking over core functions of the state, including digital identity, payments and financial infrastructure, military and defense systems, and public administration. Some of the industry’s most influential leaders now openly imagine technological systems supplanting political ones, whether through an “everything app,” a technological republic, or private infrastructure embedded directly in government.
II. Reclaiming Power Over Our Tools
The Summer of Ludd is representative of a broader spectrum of technology resistance budding today. It feels not coincidental that so much of this trend's language is horticultural: “touching grass” to log off, permacomputing modeled on non-extractive permaculture, or “rewilding” the Internet. The hope that the earth, already strained by climate change from extractive capitalism, might somehow rise up against the machines resonates on many levels.
Below are four broad ways I see this reclamation manifesting at this moment:
- Refusing Tech. One of the most tried and true methods to take back your power is to simply refuse the premise. In New York City, there have been many pop-up events dedicated to Break Up With Google or Break Up With Spotify, where you can log off together. That refusal has made its way into schools, too: parents, teachers, and students, alongside a diverse coalition of stakeholders, have organized for a two-year moratorium on the use of generative AI in New York City public schools. I even found myself hosting a Burner Phone 101 workshop at the library. In true pedagogical fashion, my main lesson of Burner Phone 101 is that it is virtually impossible to have an untraceable phone. Testing the limits of refusal reveals where choice still exists and where it doesn’t; that discovery can be radicalizing in its own right.
- Remaking Tech. This moment of resistance has also somehow reinvigorated the making culture of the early GeoCities web. Locally, we have the School for Poetic Computation, with classes like Tools for Creativity and workshops on consensual hacking, digital decay, and making zines for the web. There is also an emerging Permacomputing NYC chapter, spun off from the Berlin community, with meetups on jailbreaking old devices, solar-powered art, and community calendars that bypass Big Tech. Communities like these, alongside folk computing, the cozy web, and the cyberdeck girlies, carry something of the same ethos as the early web: smaller-scale technology that people can understand, alter, decorate, and make their own. They feel like a direct response to the monolith of Big Tech, monopolized platforms, black boxes, and walled gardens. People are looking for whatever openings they can find to tinker with the technology they already have or build their own alternatives altogether.
- Rewilding Tech. There have also been recent calls to rewild the Internet: to restore some of its diversity, resilience, openness, and capacity to evolve through many actors rather than a few powerful ones. That idea has also become the theme of this year’s Mozilla Festival, which I’m excited to attend in October. Tools and approaches that can help us rewild the Internet include decentralization, encryption, interoperable open standards, and the right to repair. These are supported by constituencies ranging from the Fediverse to farmers seeking to take back control over John Deere tractors. A quintessential example of rewilding is the migration away from Twitter after its change in ownership, as some people moved toward Bluesky, Mastodon, and other Fediverse options. We’re still seeing how the Fediverse and AT Protocol communities grow around these alternatives, including through gatherings like the ATmosphere conference, where people are exploring what a more open and diverse social web might look like.
- Regoverning Tech. Lastly, there continues to be space to challenge Big Tech’s implicit feudalism. Alongside efforts to refuse, remake, and rewild technology, cooperative governance structures are emerging within the tools and platforms people rely on. Platform co-ops like The Drivers Cooperative, Resonate, Up & Go, and EMMA give workers, artists, listeners, and service providers a stake in the platforms they depend on. Social.coop applies cooperative governance to a Fediverse community, while Polis and Loomio provide tools for large-scale deliberation and collaborative decision-making. Projects like DECODE and other experiments in alternative data governance explore ways for people and communities to govern the data generated about them. Other efforts are experimenting with collective governance for LLMs, choosing your own algorithms, and building locally owned digital infrastructure.
You can see a growing collection of examples across all four approaches on my Are.na board, Escaping Big Tech: Tools, Training, Theory.
These approaches can happen all at once, whenever an opening appears, and often reinforce one another. As Nathan Schneider argues in “Beyond Luddism,” resistance becomes more durable when saying no is paired with building alternatives that workers and users can actually control. The history he traces runs from Luddite refusal into cooperative stores, factories, and other institutions that allowed workers to gain power rather than simply reject the technologies transforming their lives.
III. Rebuilding Collective Power
While reclaiming the tools is necessary, poetic, and a little meta, it is not sufficient. Refusing, reclaiming, rewilding, and regoverning technology all help reclaim power over the tools themselves. But if the deeper problem is that technology has atrophied our civic muscle, then better technology alone won’t rebuild it. The imagination and community-building power of the cultural revolution can help us imagine another world; the next question is how to turn that community into political power.
If we want to shift from a world of Hyperpolitics—with lots of political opinion but few durable institutions—back toward mass politics, then we have to rebuild coalitions, unions, and other forms of organization capable of making demands together. Those demands need consequences: protests tied to specific demands, boycotts, strikes, votes, and other ways of making those in power respond.
For every way that tech has grabbed power, there is a collective power rebuttal:
- If tech is a false substitute for political organizing, then we need to form groups with negotiating power, not just our feeds, by organizing people at work, in our neighborhoods, and at other sites of action.
- If tech evades democratic accountability, then we need to find sites where people can put direct pressure on decision-makers. In New York, organizing against data centers offers one such opening: a fight over something happening in a particular community can become a way to organize around electricity costs, water, land use, subsidies, and the broader power of Big Tech.
- If tech fills the vacuum left by political failure and then entrenches it, then we have to reject stopgap solutions in lieu of ones that address the root cause. For example, we can come together and say that one less click for private healthcare is not an acceptable response to our call for care.
- If tech serves extractive and speculative capital rather than people, then we have to organize people to change those agendas. Collective ownership alone is not a solution when the technology itself is harmful to the people who supposedly own it; we also have to have a say in what gets built in the first place. That distinction is especially important in debates over collectively owning or nationalizing AI.
- And if tech seeks to replace democratic governance itself, then the response has to be more democracy, not less. As fascist politics gain ground and technology becomes part of the machinery of surveillance and concentrated power, we need democratic institutions strong enough to contest both.
Zohran Mamdani has gotten a lot of credit as a social media darling. But for me, the more useful lessons from his success are what he does well as an organizer: (1) his “yes, and” rhetoric brings people in rather than sorting them out; (2) he gets people physically involved at the site of action, from door knocking and a citywide scavenger hunt during the campaign to Talk to Tenants, which helps people organize where they actually live; and (3) he has been unusually good at demonstrating a kind of call-and-response government, where people ask for something, like a pothole repair, and he shows the government responding. That makes democracy feel tangible. The grassroots organizing is the substance; the TikToks are just gravy.