There’s a groundswell of negative public sentiment towards digital technologies at the moment. It seems to be driven by a number of social, political and economic discourses, and GenAI has turned up amidst these narratives to add fuel to the fire. In some ways the technology is dominating the discourse; in others it’s more of a through line in a more general discontent towards big tech. In this article I’ll look at where GenAI sits in the current techlash, and suggest that the real target of the techlash isn’t the technology at all; it’s the system that produced it.
What is the techlash?
Techlash, is a portmanteau of technological backlash, but when I hear it there are always connotations of whiplash. This is perhaps fitting, considering how much of the current attitude to tech was driven by the sudden switch into digital technologies during COVID and remote learning. I know we don’t talk about COVID anymore, but bear with me, because it’s well documented that in the period of late 2019 to early 2022, where many countries and regions were forced into lockdown, the biggest profits were made by the technology companies. Amazon cloud services; Microsoft and Google with their enterprise and education workspace platforms; Zoom and others who facilitated online meetings and video classrooms… COVID might have been bad for society, bad for both mental and physical health, and bad for the economy, but it was great for big tech.
In the immediate years following Covid, we have certainly seen both a backlash and a whiplash, as many organisations, including in education, pushed back aggressively against digital technologies. This is the environment into which GenAI emerged, crawling out of OpenAI’s blog half formed, a sleek and slippery, larval form of the chatbot that it would become over the next four years.
AI is Big Tech
Let’s not forget the ties that bind GenAI to all of those aforementioned big tech and social media companies. One of the biggest research labs in the world, Meta AI, is of course also Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman cut his teeth as venture capitalist co-founder and president of Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley investor that has funded countless social media platforms. Google is not only the biggest search engine in the world and the biggest advertising platform in the world; it owns one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, YouTube, though they’d be loath to admit that YouTube is a social network.
With the gift of 20/20 hindsight, it’s perhaps not surprising that the wealthiest companies in the world who got wealthier during the COVID years have all immediately, ubiquitously pivoted into AI. They have the money, they have the data, they have the audience and the reach. But the techlash is showing us that people are increasingly disenfranchised by the incursions of big tech into their lives.
Screen time, phone bans and cognitive decline
Outside of AI, the most prominent public discourses in the techlash centre around topics like screen time. Books like Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation point to the correlation between the release of smartphones and other digital devices and the decline of attention spans. Other research, like that proffered by cognitive scientist Jared Cooney Horvath, points to the links between screens, devices and so-called cognitive decline as measured by things like IQ tests.
In this article I’m not going to weigh in with my opinions about these issues. I’m more interested in the public discourse surrounding them and why it’s gaining such popularity. Haidt’s book, for example, has been widely adopted by parenting groups in the US and used as a rationale for lobbying schools for reduced screen time. His research was also used as a cornerstone of the decision in Australia to block under-16s from social media. Haidt himself spoke at a roundtable discussion in Adelaide as part of that decision.
It’s worth saying that the science underneath the book is far from settled. Candice Odgers’ review in Nature concluded that the suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness “is not supported by science,” and researchers like Andrew Przybylski, Amy Orben and Pete Etchells have argued the evidence base is too thin and too correlational to justify the policy conclusions drawn from it.
That hasn’t slowed the policy momentum. Australia’s under-16 social media ban came into force on 10 December 2025, and by mid-January 2026 platforms had removed several million under-16 accounts; six months in, the regulator has opened compliance investigations into the major platforms while parent surveys suggest a large share of children are still finding their way around it. Globally, UNESCO now counts phone bans in schools across the majority of the world’s education systems, up sharply in just a couple of years.
The GenAI version of this conversation is focused on the apparently imminent risk of cognitive decline, and it has moved quickly from research circles into the mainstream press. When Learning First released its survey of NSW teachers, the coverage leaned hard on the language of crisis, with the report’s authors warning that the dangers posed by AI in schools are “real and urgent” and one teacher quoted describing students who expect to offload close to 100 percent of their cognitive effort to a chatbot. Around the same time, the Brookings Institution warned of a “great unwiring” of young people’s brains. The framing is almost identical to the screen time discourse, with the chatbot simply slotted into the role previously occupied by the smartphone.
Whether or not the claims that digital technologies lead to cognitive decline are valid, the public sentiment surrounding digital technologies has certainly been whipped into a frenzy on these topics. As with most issues, I think it’s more complex than the surface-level concern about device addiction and young people’s cognition. Part of what is happening, I think, is a correction and an acknowledgement of over a decade and a half of poor policy and poor governance in regulating technology companies. I believe a lot of the backlash is more of a response to individual figureheads like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, and to the companies like Microsoft and Google that control our digital lives.
The European Union offers a good example of these broader concerns. The techlash there is less concerned with “cognitive decline” and more concerned with privacy and digital sovereignty; countries like Germany are abandoning US-based technology platforms in favour of homegrown and open source applications. It’s not at all the same topic as Haidt’s and Horvath’s research, but in terms of public sentiment and the techlash, it’s adjacent to and part of the same ecosystem.
The next apple up the tree
And into that ecosystem comes GenAI. It would be wrong to say that we couldn’t have predicted it. GPT-1 and GPT-2 were simplistic, but they weren’t a million miles away from GPT-3.5, which developed swiftly alongside other modes like image generation platform Midjourney. OpenAI’s DALL-E image generator was novel, but it was built on the back of a long lineage of technologies leading up to that point, and the flaws with those technologies were widely acknowledged: flaws like the acquisition of data, the use of copyrighted materials and intellectual property, the use of human labour in data classification, long pre-date the release of GPT.
If you go online now in 2026, you’re likely to be met with much more anti-AI sentiment than when OpenAI first released their chatbot. The technology hasn’t fundamentally changed in the last four years, other than seeing general improvements in the quality of the output. So why has the negative sentiment around AI risen so much? Again, zooming out, it seems to me that AI is just another part of this discourse of discontent. The major news outlets are catching on to the issues that academics have been reporting for over a decade.
One of the clearest examples of how quickly this sentiment travels from smartphones to the classroom is Jared Cooney Horvath’s The Digital Delusion. As NBC News reported in May 2026, the book took off after Horvath testified about screen time in schools before the US Senate. He told NBC there was “no way in hell” his book should have had this big an impact, and that the sentiment “was there, it was fomenting, it was always about to happen. It’s just people needed the arguments.” He’s also clear-eyed about the trajectory: “the next apple up the tree was always going to be ed tech,” he said, because once parents realise they can push back against cellphones in schools, they realise they can push back against Chromebooks too. AI in education is the next apple after that, or maybe on a parallel branch of the tree.
But we should take a broad perspective on how we got here. GenAI and all of its associated horrors are a symptom of an industry that has been left unchecked; a wildly out-of-control byproduct of an economic and political environment that has allowed individual billionaires to shape the lives of a decent portion of the entire world. Tech critic and author Cory Doctorow makes this case better than most: in his book Enshittification he argues that platform decay “is caused by an ‘enshittogenic’ environment that originates in the policy sphere, not in the moral failings of tech bosses or even in the structural problems of capitalism itself.”
I saw a post doing the rounds recently which pointed out that billionaires aren’t a byproduct of hard work. You can’t work your way to being a billionaire. You can’t “earn” a billion dollars: the number is so large that it’s practically meaningless. The only way to become a billionaire, or a multi-billionaire, or a trillionaire, is through exploitation, and the only way to exploit is to work in the conditions that make exploitation possible. Like Doctorow, I don’t think we’ll get anywhere by challenging the technologies that are a part of the system; we get somewhere by challenging the system itself.
And I think that gets to the core of the techlash. When parents read The Anxious Generation and become concerned that their children are spending too much time on phones and social media applications that are making them deeply unhappy, it is a systemic flaw that has led to that point. Not a platform, not an ad, not even an algorithm specifically designed, it seems, to cause anxiety, depression and loneliness. When education systems start to push back against digital devices in classrooms, it’s not laptops that are the problem; it’s the Googles and Microsofts. And even broader than that, it’s not the individuals working in these companies making decisions. I know plenty of people who work at technology companies, and I don’t think they wake up in the morning and think, “Hey, how can we turn all of these young people into depressed units of interesting data that we can capitalise on and turn into revenue for the next 20 years?” These are systemic byproducts of the way the technology industry works and the economy in which it is situated.
The dark algorithm, the young child whose behaviour is shaped by half-seen things on somebody’s Facebook feed, and the chatbot that coerces users into self-harm; these things exist because they have been allowed to exist. It’s an uncomfortable thing to be honest about, but it seems to me that the way to deal with these technologies is not to police the devices, the apps or the platforms, but to create a regulatory environment in which they simply cannot exist in their current form.
That, I’d argue, is what the techlash is really about. We’ve had enough of a world that has been designed for us.
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