Unwinding the Great Tech Power Grab

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Unwinding the Great Tech Power Grab

Rebecca Williams

Aug 12, 2026

Becchi Ayumi Bessho,５月📚, 2026.

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.<br>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.<br>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.”<br>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.<br>I. The Great Tech Power Grab<br>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.<br>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.<br>Here are five ways we’ve seen tech—the tools, the industry, and the tricks of the trade—take power:<br>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.<br>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.<br>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,...