#neoluddites — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #neoluddites, aggregated by home.social.
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Critical thinking has left the building. Is everyone in the U.S. going mad? It seems to me, judging by this whole hysteria anti-AI and pro-AI. I'm just tired of it. Just use the tools that you think work best for you but just don't be judgemental. Human output is also full of slop. Just because it was created by a human being, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be reviewed in the sense of improving it. The exact same thing is valid for any AI output!! Just don't use lame excuses to justify a reactionary and conservative position towards technology. Being anti-AI is not progressive nor emancipatory if you just avoid all the time getting your feet wet by using the tools and experimenting a lot. It just shows you lack the exact same critical thinking you accuse pro-AI people of lacking.
"Having heard an increasing number of anecdotal stories over the last year or so of people finding weird, wild and defiant ways to avoid using AI in their professional lives, tales I've seen told in fragments across social media and platforms like Linkedin, I decided to speak directly with as many workers as I could to hear their stories in full.
What I found particularly interesting was that while some employees are able to duck out from using the technology altogether, a surprising number of people without that luxury are still finding ways to minimise, misdirect or even sabotage their company's AI mandates by using the technology against itself.
Given everyone I spoke to was still employed at the place they're talking about, they've requested their names and employers be withheld. And while (since this is a video games website) there are some video game industry workers featured below, I also ended up speaking with many affected employees across a range of other industries, from utilities to finance to cloud hosting."
https://aftermath.site/ai-resistance-tips-workforce-llm-workers/
#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Automation #Productivity #Neoluddites #ReactionaryThought #Conservatism #Neoluddism
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"Around the world, governments are going hard to present themselves as AI leaders willing to do whatever the industry wants to attract investment.
Last month, I spoke to Will Dunn on Tech Won’t Save Us about how this is playing out in the UK, where the government has gone so far as to use chatbots to drafts laws. France has gone all in too, presenting itself as the third pole of AI leadership between the United States and China. Now, my own country is making its bid to join the fray.
Canadian prime minister Mark Carney rolled out his government’s AI strategy earlier this month, annoyingly titled “AI for All.” But in it, I saw something novel: not just the aggressive pursuit of AI dollars by giving industry what it wants, but also reframing opposition to AI and hyperscale data centers as the product of a lack of AI “literacy.” If only the Canadian public was taught to use AI tools, the strategy suggests, they’ll come around to backing them.
As you won’t be surprised to hear, I think that’s a poor judgement that misunderstands why people have turned against AI so aggressively. I wrote up my thoughts recently for The Tyee, a fantastic progressive publication based in British Columbia. They’ve been kind enough to let me share them with Disconnect subscribers."
https://disconnect.blog/ai-opposition-isnt-the-product-of-a-lack-of-literacy/
#Canada #AI #GenerativeAI #BigTech #AntiAI #Neoluddism #Neoluddites
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Student #ReadingAbility Spikes After Removing Tech From Class
"Remove all the #distractions and we can get our kids back."
By Frank Landymore
Published Jun 15, 2026"Would you believe it: a teacher and her students say their reading ability soared after banning tech in the classroom.
"Maureen Mulvaney, an AP Literature and English teacher at Washburn High School in Minneapolis, started the low tech experiment last year after becoming frustrated with plagiarism, distracted students, and plunging literacy rates.
"And so, with the enthusiastic support of parents, she banned phones and laptops, requiring all coursework to be done with pencil and paper. The turnaround was quick and resounding, and despite some initial resistance from students, they quickly fell in love with the old, analog ways of doing things.
"In September, before the experiment started, just 46 percent of Mulvaney’s students said they felt confident about their reading ability. By February, that share shot up to 95 percent.
" 'We’re having a lot of trouble in education and I think what my kids told us was that there is a solution and the solution is to go #LowTech. Go back to the old ways of doing things,' Mulvaney told local TV news station KARE 11. 'Remove all the distractions and we can get our kids back.'
"Mulvaney let her students ease into a tech free environment. First, they started with just ten minutes of silent reading and writing by hand. Still, the first day was 'rough,' she wrote in an essay in The Minnesota Star Tribune. Most students quit after just half a page of longhand composition.
" 'I told the kids this is like lifting weights,' she told KARE 11. 'You don’t go in and you don’t start with 80 pounds.' "
Read more:
https://futurism.com/future-society/students-reading-improves-no-tech-class#LudditeClub #NoTech #NoPhones #NoAI #Reading #Writing #Humans
#Smartphones are #DumbingUsDown #SolarPunkSunday #Handwriting #NeoLuddites #SmartphoneBan #Longhand -
"Digital technology may be harnessed by forces on the political right, but there is nothing inherently right-wing about digital technologies, right? Right?!?!?
Wrong.
At least, that is the response given by David Golumbia in his vital and provocative book Cyberlibertairnism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology. It is a book in which Golumbia argues that the core politics coded into digital technologies are overwhelmingly right-wing, and in which he further argues that—knowingly or not—by defending and idealizing digital technologies many left-leaning groups and individuals have wound up disseminating and entrenching the very right-wing politics they oppose. In Golumbia’s estimation, and argumentation, the issue is not only that the way we talk about digital technologies tends to advance right-wing politics, but that these technologies themselves continually advance right-wing politics, with this advancement often occurring under a veneer of appeals to freedom and liberation.
In contrast to the numerous works by left-wing, and left-leaning, academics and activists arguing that the liberatory potential of digital technologies has been warped by right-wing billionaires and by business interests, Golumbia’s Cyberlitertarianism argues that the problem is not only with the billionaires or the business interests but with the technology itself. At the core of Cyberlibertianism is the argument that not only is digital technology not neutral, but that by this point we are fooling ourselves by refusing to admit what its politics actually are."
#Cyberlibertarianism #Neoluddism #DigitalTechnology #Neoluddites
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#Neoluddism #Neoluddites #AI #GenerativeAI: "Edward Ongweso Jr, a writer and broadcaster, and Molly Crabapple, an artist, both based in New York, define themselves as luddites in this way, too. Ongweso talks to me on the phone while he runs errands around town. We first made contact over social media. We set a date via email. Now we let Google Meet handle the mechanics of a seamless transatlantic call. Neo-luddism isn’t about forgoing such innovations, Ongweso explains. Instead, it asks that each new innovation be considered for its merit, its social fairness and its potential for hidden malignity. “To me, luddism is about this idea that just because a technology exists, doesn’t mean it gets to sit around unquestioned. Just because we’ve rolled out some tech doesn’t mean we’ve rolled out some advancement. We should be continually sceptical, especially when technology is being applied in work spaces and elsewhere to order social life.”
Crabapple, the artist luddite, broadly agrees. “For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.”"