The Gen-Z Luddite

Thoughts and reflections on the digital from a Gen-Z Luddite.

The more I learn about technology the modern ardent my belief in the maxim that technology is not inherently good or bad becomes. Paradoxically, I find myself quite a lot more negative about technology than my peers at the same time as I am more interested and up to date on it as well. It is exactly this knowledge and familiarity which makes me so negative compared with my friends. Those who share my distrust is often older and also woefully out of date on their technological knowledge. I seem to be of a rare breed: the Gen-Z Luddite.

Of the themes of the blog, the one I find myself the most consistently frustrated with is technology. Aside from the specific details and the root of all online evil that is advertising I find myself increasingly frustrated with the constant changes that things being online enables. As much as I am proud of the blog, the fact is that many posts have plenty of room of improvement; I have adopted the strategy of a deadline and a constant stream of new deadlines on the horizon to battle the perfectionism that any creative work can engender in its creator. But digitising things make them easy and quick to update, which is not always a good thing.

George Lucas is infamous for his post publication meddling in the details of the original trilogy of Star Wars movies, but the trend of creators changing their works post hoc is here to stay. The most extreme example of digital distribution changing a creative work which I have personal experience with is Kanye West/Ye’s 2016 album The Life of Pablo. West made changes to all the tracks on the album, split off Frank Ocean’s coda on Wolves to its own track and added a new final track Saint Pablo. To be clear, the album is better for these changes but it is an example of how what used to be fixed quantities have become fungible in the digital age.

These possibilities empower creators which can be good, but often times the best work is achieved under constraints, the most famous example being that the mechanical shark in Jaws was so unwieldly to shoot that it was used less than originally intended. That story may be apocryphal, but it illustrates how constraints can add rather than subtract to a work. The digital revolution then, is a mixed bag for culture, but the picture is less complex when it comes to products.

As most office workers will know, IT updates are a Sisyphean struggle. My work laptop needs an update at least once a week – often more frequently – and that is not mentioning the bigger updates which needs the IT department involved which happen once or twice a year. After returning from summer vacation I found that the Copilot app was installed on my machine, and as an AI-opponent I promptly uninstalled it. The next day it was back. So for about a week I had a daily ritual of uninstalling bloatware mandated to be installed on my computer not by my employer or the company IT team but higher powers in Redmond. It’s a great example of how the digital shifts the balance of power in favour of creators and against consumers. In the cultural works context it is a complex phenomenon but in the world of what would have once been products it is often a clear downgrade.

The business model of removing features from a piece of software only to later resell it to consumers should be familiar to practically everyone in 2025. Enshittification as a business model too would be impractical to the point of impossibility for physical products, but for a digital product it is both easy and profitable, a dangerous combination.

All of this to say that my number one bugbear in not just corporate life but modern society is the cult of digitisation. It is rare to hear anyone express scepticism towards the idea that things being digital is inherently better, except in the rare case of defenders of physical media. If the goal is to improve society then it is imperative to question deeply held collective views like digital > physical. The term Luddite has had a real resurgence as society has entered the computer age. Mostly to refer to older people who are often unwilling rather than unable to adapt to the new reality. However, I am not a digital Luddite because of not wanting to engage with the digital, I am a gen Z Luddite because I know enough about the digital to see the flaws, to see what we lose, to dare to say what Luddites throughout history have always known: that technology is not inherently good.

If you liked this post you can read a previous post about the AI build-out here or the rest of my writings here. I also have a section for longer reads I call essays here, I particularly recommend my essay on Silicon Valley and AI called 'No Acoustic Guitars in Silicon Valley'. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!

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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.

Written by Karl Johansson

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Cover photo by Jeremy Bishop from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson