Inviting people to refuse a technology requires both models and support for alternatives. Instead of cars, protected bike lanes and a community of cyclists; instead of social media, third spaces and communal practices; instead of AI, work that is autonomous and dignified, etc., etc.
Agree with the point about offering alternatives here, but will add: much “popular” tech is terrible for people and society. Guns, cars, Facebook, AI—all very popular, all diabolical. Popular tech is routinely a horror. https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/
Bob Black’s Abolition of Work has hit hard every time I’ve read it, but it hits a little harder every year. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work
“Work is usually imagined in terms of the ego and his muscles….But the dream-work and the work on dreams returns work to the invisible earth, from literal reality to imaginative reality.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/psychology-of-craft
“AI is an agreement machine, which is anathema to learning and critical thinking.” https://www.404media.co/ai-is-supercharging-the-war-on-libraries-education-and-human-knowledge
“I have good news for you, though: assholes are a minority. People of conscience, people with good will and good intentions have always outnumbered psychopaths and sycophants.” https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html
I want to posit that one of the things we mean when we say we’re “procrastinating” is that our own sense of what matters has diverged from what our boss or company is concerned with. That is, procrastination is often a political conflict, not a personal failing.
“To be a Luddite today is to refuse the fatalism of techno-inevitability & to demand that technology serve the many, not the few. It is to assert that questions of labor, agency & justice must come before speed, efficiency & scale.” https://www.brookings.edu/articles/we-should-all-be-luddites/
I’ll be opening a winter cohort of the sf writing work/shop soon, get on the waitlist if you want to be the first to find out! Space will again be very limited so that everyone can fully participate. https://everythingchanges.us/workshop/sf
Whatever your company’s rating systems, you and your colleagues are all five out of fives at being human. Act like it: https://everythingchanges.us/blog/re-views/
Digging for the kind of knowledge that you feel in your bones, that gets under your fingernails, that can’t be lifted away and perverted by a thieving bot. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/undersense
Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium is subtitled “A Health Resort Horror Story,” but somehow that undersells it. The book is smart, fun, and subversive, exactly as all horror stories should be. https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/empusium
“It is about a world that positively blooms around us because we are committing to the quiet and constant and careful work of tending to it.” https://terminal.ahumanfuture.co/posts/2025-10-17/the-world-is-something-that-we-make
After a few days with time spent in a car (unusual for me!), I’m noticing how being in a car makes the rest of the world seem insubstantial, lacking solidity. Everything moves out of the way for you. Nothing is reliably there except you and your companions.
“We should dissociate ‘work’ from the Herculean labor and return the idea of work to the example of the dream, where work is an imaginative activity, a work of the imagination such as takes place in painters and writers.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/an-imaginative-activity
“We were angry. Our anger was old, atavistic. We were angry as all civilized men who have ever been sent to make murder in the name of virtue were angry.” https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/we-were-angry
Coming around to the notion that the Venn diagram between workers’ rights and civil rights is nearly a perfect circle. Owners can buy their rights; workers cannot.
Semi-regular reminder that wherever you’re reading this, it’s likely not where I wrote it. https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/coming-home
Once you see RTO as one part of an anti-labor movement, it makes other things clear: in-office attendance requirements are designed to force tech workers to remain in expensive cities. Because a tech salary + a rural mortgage = a whole lot of power to say no.
A word about annual review season and being human. https://everythingchanges.us/blog/re-views/