Today I shared a lightning talk over Zoom at the Civics of Technology Conference, whose theme this year was “Against Tech Hype.” I opened with the same question the conference organizers opened with: “How are you resisting tech hype?” The chat filled up fast with answers, everything from writing without AI assistance to migrating off Google to reading Cory Doctorow. If you’d like to follow along, my LINKED and shared Google Presentation slides are available, and I’ve sharing the full, linked list of everything mentioned, by me and by attendees in chat, on the webpage I created on my presentations site. The recorded video of my presentation is included at the top of this post, and it’s also available on YouTube and Facebook.
A disclaimer, a definition, and a story
I teach middle school media literacy and computer science, so the way I frame these ideas for my students is gentler than the way I framed them for this room of adults. Here, I said it plainly: I believe we need to resist techno-fascism.
I define it this way, and you can find the full definition on my site:
“Techno-fascism is an authoritarian system where technological elites, often engineers and corporate leaders, consolidate power by merging state authority with industrial and technological infrastructure. It emphasizes efficiency, surveillance, and control through digital means, undermining democratic norms while advancing corporate and governmental agendas.” — resistandheal.com/what-is-techno-facism
Before getting to the story, I also wanted to flag something about AI specifically: I think we need to resist binary thinking about it. AI isn’t simply good or simply bad, any more than reading is. Both can radicalize you down a rabbit hole, and both can change your life for the better, depending on what you engage with and whose voices you trust. What I demoed in this session is, I think, a genuinely constructive use of AI-assisted coding, sometimes called “vibe coding.”
Here’s the story. Earlier this week I opened a website I’d built myself and found a podcast episode featuring Charlie Warzel: The Bulwark Daily’s conversation on “The Tech Overlords’ Anti-Humanity Is Catching Up to Them.” I hadn’t known Warzel’s work before. He’s a columnist at The Atlantic, writing about Silicon Valley and AI hype, exactly the kind of trusted voice I want to be following. And the important part: I didn’t discover him through LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. I found him through a website I coded myself, with AI’s help.
Three arguments
I built the rest of the session around three claims:
1. Open idea sharing on the open web is valuable. I’ve experienced the powerful, constructive effects of open idea sharing online since I helped organize the first K12 Online Conference in 2006. I’ve also shared techniques for finding and filtering “channels” of innovative ideas through a long-running presentation series called “Discovering Useful Ideas”. I’m not on Twitter anymore, and I miss #OklaEd Chat and eduTwitter, genuinely. But the open web is not dead, and tools like curated Mastodon lists let me keep doing the same kind of trusted-voice curation I used to do there. Podcasts have been part of that for me too. My friend Jason Neiffer and I have been recording the EdTech Situation Room together for over a decade now, and we were originally brought together through the power of open web idea sharing.
2. Techno-fascism demands control over our attention and our feeds. I asked the Zoom room why they thought Elon Musk bought Twitter. The answers came fast: power and vanity, information control, wanting to dominate the narrative, wanting to stop news circulation. Whatever the reason, the effect is the same: A platform I helped build community on for years now serves someone else’s agenda. The question isn’t whether to feel upset about that. It’s what you’re going to do about it.
3. Vibe coding can help us reclaim our feeds. This is the part I’m most excited about. I’m not a computer science major. I’m a middle school teacher who has used Scratch for 19 years and have engaged in “light” coding applications throughout my 30+ year career in education. This past year, AI-assisted coding tools let me build things that I NEVER would have been able to create by myself, unassisted. Two projects came out of that:
PodCommons (source, MIT licensed): an open podcast index that currently ingests over 400 podcasts and 4,000+ episodes, refreshing every four hours, so anyone can browse by topic (AI and technology, media literacy, democracy and civic engagement) instead of waiting for an algorithm to surface something.
News with Wes (source): a chronological, algorithm-free feed of every newsletter I subscribe to, pulled straight out of email and reformatted, updating every 30 minutes.
I’ve also set up a Mastodon bot, Federated Reader, which has posted over 67,000 times now, checking my newsletter subscriptions every 30 minutes and posting them with graphics, links, and hashtags. All of this code lives openly on my GitHub.
The Fediverse, briefly
A lot of people in the room hadn’t spent much time with the term “fediverse” before, so here’s the short version I gave: Think about email. You can be on Gmail, Outlook, or a small independent provider, and it all still interoperates, because email runs on open standards rather than one company’s proprietary rules. The Fediverse works the same way for social media. When I left Twitter, I moved to Mastodon, which means if I ever want to change servers, I can take my followers and content with me. You can’t do that on most proprietary platforms.
Local news, and keeping humans in the loop
I asked participants today about their local newspapers. My dad grew up in Powell, Wyoming, a town of a few thousand people whose newspaper (“The Powell Tribune”) still supports five local journalists. That’s rare. We’ve lost roughly three-quarters of local journalists over the past couple of decades, largely to corporate consolidation, and I think that loss is genuinely dangerous for democracy. Local news is how we hold power accountable and how we find what we actually have in common with our neighbors.
I closed with a caution I want to keep repeating: Keep humans in the loop. I hosted a webinar this summer for the Media Education Lab on “AI and Human Dignity,” where we discussed Pope Leo’s recent Encyclical on AI. And just this past week, Jason Neiffer laid out four ways to look at AI, offload, advise, extend, and center, with “what must stay human” sitting right at the middle of that framework. That’s the piece I don’t want anyone to lose sight of.
Join me
If any of this resonates, I’d genuinely love company. I write about these issues at Resist and Heal and Heal Our Culture, and I keep a running page of trusted voices, newsletters, podcasts, and books I’d recommend if you’re looking for a place to start.
Full resource list
My projects and pages: Session slides · PodCommons (code) · News with Wes (code) · Federated Reader on Mastodon · All my repos · Trusted Voices · Discovering Useful Ideas · Shared Mastodon lists · EdTech Situation Room · wesfryer.com · Resist and Heal · Heal Our Culture
Background reading: What is techno-fascism? · Fediverse (Wikipedia) · Acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk (Wikipedia) · Charlie Warzel’s Bulwark Daily episode · Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic · AI and Human Dignity webinar · Four Ways to Look at AI
Shared by attendees in the session chat: refusal.blog (writing studies) · Firefox extension to hide Google AI Overviews · Elon Musk, unmasked (Tech Won’t Save Us) · password manager recommendations: Bitwarden, Vaultwarden, 1Password, Keeper · podcast recommendations: Code Switch, Bender and Hannah’s, Instant Classics, Tech Won’t Save Us, NPR Throughline, Scene on Radio, Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, Hardcore History, 404 Media, Techlore, Le Show with Harry Shearer, Organized Money
For the complete, chronological list with attribution, see the companion webpage for this session.
