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Computers and the older generation
It is not because she is a "Luddite" that my mother passionately hates the "cashless society" that means she cannot park her car, or the inability to book a doctors appointment while standing right in front of the doctor… it's because these are patently fucked-up, ass-backwards, stupid and regressive ideas that are symptoms of the failure of technological society.
What we face now is not so much that bad decisions are being made, but that decisions are failing to be made at all. We've lost a generation, perhaps two, of people capable of making decisions about technology because they've learned to completely defer thinking about anything at all. We endure a default and arbitrary course set by whims of the wealthy whose interests are served by gratuitous over-manufacture of hardware, software and attendant policy.
The cynical hope of neophyte cultists, technofascists and proponents of faux "progress" is that change will happen one funeral at a time. The hope is that resistance to insanity will simply die out. Based on what I've seen of the youngest Gen-Alpha I've some bad news for those hoping that. Radical revision and re-examination of the technological project is alive and vibrant within the youth. It is conspicuous how those voices are being muted. This time it is clear that reluctance is not coming from just the older generation. Once again we are united across ages in a shared interest in technology. This time it is not excitement, but a visceral unease around so-called "AI". Perhaps it is time for the older generation to once again step-up to help the younger ones to understand and navigate the technological world so that wisdom as well as enthusiasm will have some say in human development.