Many of us are making individual efforts to use our phones less, or to avoid A.I. But we will need to work together.Illustration by George WylesolYou’re reading Fault Lines, Jay Caspian Kang’s weekly column on politics and the media.At noon, at six-thirty, and at ten at night, before I shuffle off to bed, my phone automatically shuts off access to all social-media sites. If I want to restore my ability to mindlessly scroll, I have to walk sheepishly to my kitchen and press my phone up against a little plastic square that sits on a high shelf. This humiliation device, called the Brick, limits my screen time to the apps that, in an earlier moment of clarity, I deemed essential: text messages and Apple Books, which, during these Bricked hours, I have been using to dutifully reread “The Brothers Karamazov,” prompted more by a sense of shame than by a sincere interest in revisiting the great novels. (If I’m still going to be on my phone, it should be for something ostensibly edifying.) In the past year, the Brick has represented the only real resistance I’ve mustered against the continual creep of the online world into my daily life. My screen time hasn’t decreased, but it’s better, I suppose, to read Ivan Fyodorovich’s rants about God than to watch endless reels about the latest revolution in shin-guard technology or whatever.I have been thinking and writing about resistance to technology for a while, spurred by an unresolved alarm that Americans have not put up much of a fight against the sense of alienation caused by our growing dependence on screens. It’s increasingly clear to me that we will not survive as a society without some seismic intervention that separates us from our screens, our algorithms, and our little simulacra of social life. I believe that such a rupture will come—but what will it look like? Will it resemble the dropout movement of the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, with waves of young people refusing to abide by convention? Or will we eventually see a government anti-screen initiative, one that “raises awareness” and issues stiff penalties against tech companies, similar to the ones levelled against tobacco companies in the nineties? Perhaps we will shed our phone addiction the way we have gradually shed cigarettes.Whatever the solution may be, it feels, at the moment, impossibly far away. In the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had glued us all more tightly than ever to our phones, many people, I’m sure, crafted some limp armistice like mine, buying a Brick or muting notifications or stashing their phones in other rooms at bedtime, or even just leaving them on “Do Not Disturb” throughout the day. But, in most cases, that was about the extent of their protests. If there is a local initiative to ban the use of devices in their children’s schools, they will support it, but they will probably not do much to rip the phones out of their children’s hands. Most of us have settled into a persistent but passive discontent.During the next few weeks, I’ll be exploring, in a series of columns, whether this malaise is finally breaking. There is some evidence that it is. For example: the American public has coalesced into what the election forecaster Nate Silver calls a “super-majority” against data centers. That opposition began in raucous protests at town halls and building sites, but it has metastasized into something of a national movement. (According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, there have been more than three hundred protests against data centers in the U.S. this year.) Data centers now feature in the electoral platforms of numerous officeholders and candidates, including the Democratic Presidential hopeful Ruben Gallego, who recently announced a tax plan that would shift the construction and energy costs of data centers away from the public and onto the tech companies that benefit from them. Gallego is a relatively moderate and somewhat heterodox candidate, and although his plan isn’t exactly a Luddite call to smash the robots, he might be seen as a bellwether for what the left side of the aisle will be thinking in the coming years. People in the streets and politicians in Congress aren’t the only ones demonstrating a tech backlash: the courts have handed down a set of billion-dollar rulings against tech giants, including in a recent case in New Mexico in which Meta was found guilty of forty-three million violations of the state’s laws.These days, resistance to tech is typically framed in terms of individual choices: if we buy the Brick, limit our children’s screen time, delete the worst apps from our phones, stop doomscrolling, and refuse to use ChatGPT for anything other than the most mundane searches, we will be released from the grasp of Big Tech. Freedom becomes a question of your own will power. In 2022, the Times published a charming story about “Luddite” teens in Brooklyn who met up in Prospect Park once a week to draw, whittle, and read “The Consolation of Philosophy.” The teens, many of them inspired by the D.I.Y. punk scene and Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild,” had decided to drop out of digitized life and start noticing the world outside their phones. Like these kids, I usually think about tech resistance in terms of my own attention and that of my family. I worry constantly about whether the iPad is rotting my children’s brains; I celebrate every reduction in my weekly screen-time reports. But I think this individual focus has a lot to do with why we feel so helpless against Big Tech, and I wonder whether those of us who want to free ourselves from our phones might be better off thinking more collectively.One of the longest-running and most significant ongoing political actions against A.I. has come from nurses, who, since at least the spring of 2024, have been protesting the technology’s incursion into their profession. Their concerns are numerous and rooted in both present practices and future possibilities. This past March, more than two thousand mental-health professionals at the health-care consortium Kaiser Permanente went on a one-day strike over concerns that they would eventually be replaced by artificial intelligence. Four months later, a story in CalMatters detailed new surveillance layers that had been placed on nurses at Kaiser, including an A.I. program that allegedly assessed their empathy and the tone of their voices when they answered calls from patients. Last year, HCA Healthcare, one of the largest hospital providers in the country, released a joint program with Palantir called Timpani, which promised to streamline the scheduling of nurses by using A.I. to spot inefficiencies. This past August, the National Nurses United (N.N.U.) union led a day of nationwide demonstrations against Palantir.Americans, in general, like nurses and don’t trust A.I. companies, much less Palantir, to make potentially life-saving decisions. And although hospital efficiency measures are nothing new—almost every labor fight in the health-care sector arises out of issues around head count and hours—A.I. represents a different type of invasion. The N.N.U. is not demanding a full removal of A.I. technology from workplaces, or suggesting a return to a time when all scheduling was done by hand and all consultations were aided only by a nurse’s hard-earned experience. Rather, the union is drawing a line at A.I. supremacy in staffing, decision-making, and clinical assessments. “What makes A.I. even more dangerous is the insistence of health-care companies and these billionaires to use it as a technology to override the judgment of nurses, and to override their clinical decision-making,” Puneet Maharaj, the executive director of the N.N.U., told me.Maharaj said that A.I. has infiltrated many parts of a nurse’s workday. In the past, nurses’ schedules were partly automated but overseen by a human manager, who could be aware of, and responsive to, personal issues. Now schedules are run entirely by A.I., which, according to Maharaj, will always understaff nurses’ posts. When nurses arrive at their shifts, they may be asked to use A.I. tools that listen to their interactions with patients, and A.I. may also be used to evaluate medical records. These programs have been known to make mistakes in their automated assessments. For example, Maharaj said, in the course of describing the details of their day, a patient might mention battling pine needles in yardwork, and an A.I. might mislabel the patient as having an opioid problem. The listening machines also raise real questions about patient privacy. “With A.I., we don’t always know where that information is going and whether it will be protected or not,” Maharaj said. (A.I. phone-monitoring is of particular concern among mental-health professionals. This was another reason for the Kaiser Permanente strike in March.)The ultimate concern, though, is that A.I. will replace the relationship between nurse and patient and turn medical professionals into meat puppets who do the machine’s bidding. “Maybe you can look at efficiency when you’re looking at widgets,” Maharaj said. “But when you’re talking about patients, and you’re talking about the relationship between a nurse and her patient—that is extremely important, and that is reserved for the judgment of the nurse, and not some technology that is going to override their judgment.”The nurses’ protests are intriguing in part because organized labor has the capacity, the experience, and the public approval necessary to secure support outside of a single industry. And the N.N.U. protests go beyond the direct workplace concerns of nurses. Palantir was chosen specifically as a target of protest not just for its incursion into health care but for its role in surveillance and military technology. “A corporation that is invested in killing people should have no space in health care, where the goal is to keep people healthy and alive,” Maharaj said. She pointed out that Palantir was making inroads into a wide range of industries, and that this, in turn, presented a “great opportunity for allies, labor and non-labor alike.” The playbook, then, seems to be high-profile strikes and demonstrations that not only spotlight nuts-and-bolts questions about staffing but also address the more existential and perhaps still somewhat abstract fear that A.I. will become a replacement for nurses everywhere. A confrontation with Palantir, the mere name of which causes many Americans to recoil, can bring in other labor unions and also political activists who opposed Palantir’s more notorious work. Solidarity is easier when there’s a common enemy; there are few better ones than Palantir.Is this a more productive path to resisting technology than our individual efforts? The sentimental lefty in me would say that the answer, obviously, is yes: rallying together against a powerful villain to address material and workplace harms offers both the clarity and the social support that we’ll need to beat back some of the most pernicious and anti-human excesses of the tech industry. Still, I’m not sure that such actions will entirely satisfy the Luddite teens who desire a separation from the digital world rather than worker control over inevitable technological change. Of course, that has no bearing on the merits of the nurses’ union’s actions—I only want to point out that the dissatisfaction with our screen lives is uniquely personal, for the simple reason that we mostly look at our devices alone, and whatever we bury inside them is generally accessed only by us. In the past decade, nobody, not even my parents or my kids or my wife, has looked upon my face more than has my phone’s camera, which, without comment, scans my features a hundred times a day. If that camera were always on, and someone were watching the feeds, what range of emotions would they witness passing through its narrow frame? Next week, I will write about this modern narcissism and what we might be able to do about it. ?