America’s luddite summer: it’s not the technology people are saying no to

This summer, something happened in the US. In city after city, people showed up at council meetings to protest against data centres being built for AI. Camera companies that read licence plates for the police had to back down after public outcry. A man in Florida became a local folk hero by walking around with a sign on a long pole, simply blocking surveillance cameras. And country legend Willie Nelson, with eighty-three albums to his name, took a stand against a noisy, water-guzzling data centre near his hometown in Texas.

The Wall Street Journal has dubbed the phenomenon a "luddite summer," after the 19th-century weavers who smashed machines. And in the middle of it all, a meme is spreading, old pickup trucks, classic rock, and a simpler life, with the text: "This and never hearing about AI again."

It would be easy to dismiss this as technophobia. It would also be wrong, and that mistake is a lesson for every European organisation rolling out AI right now.

What the protests are really about

Look at what the people in the article are saying, not just the signs they’re holding. The factory supervisor who started the meme isn’t worried that the technology exists, but about what happens when you can no longer opt out of it, and that no one she’s met has the self-discipline to manage that on their own. The data centre protests are about water usage, electricity prices, and a nagging suspicion that local politicians sold them out to big corporations without asking. The resistance to cameras is about data on ordinary people’s car journeys being collected and misused, without anyone asking for permission.

A pattern runs through it all: the decisions were made over people’s heads. The technology came first, the question never did.

By the way, that’s historically accurate even for the original luddites. They didn’t hate looms, many were skilled textile workers themselves. They protested against change being forced on them without being allowed to shape it. The machines were the messenger, not the message.

The tide knows no borders

You might think this is an American issue, far away. It’s not. The journalist behind the article compares the movement to the Tea Party: a grassroots wave without a central leader, growing on social media until it redrew politics. Waves like that don’t care who thinks the technology is good for GDP. When people feel run over, they organise, and in November, the question will decide governor races and congressional seats.

For a European organisation, it’s worth pausing to think about this, because the same feeling exists in our workplaces, just quieter. Employees who’ve had Copilot rolled out without being asked. Staff wondering what AI tools are doing to their jobs and getting vague answers. People using AI daily, in private and in secret, while feeling uneasy about what it’s doing to their profession. It’s the same mix of use and unease that the factory supervisor in Nashville describes, someone who built her side business on algorithm platforms but still longs to escape them.

The unease doesn’t disappear with enthusiastic leadership speeches. It disappears when the core question behind the protests gets a yes for an answer.

The core question

The article ends with a single sentence: Do we get to have a say in the future that AI is unleashing?

At the societal level, that’s a tough question. But in a workplace, the place where most people actually encounter AI first, it’s possible to answer it today, in concrete terms. Here’s what that answer looks like when we’ve built it in EuroWork: leadership decides what the AI can be used for, and what’s turned off stays off. Everyone sees what each answer costs while the work is happening, and what happens to what you write is openly declared, with processing done within the EU. Every AI response is labelled as an AI response, and an AI agent shows its plan and waits for a human to approve it before doing anything. No one needs to cover a camera with a sign on a pole, because there’s nothing happening in secret to protect themselves from.

The luddite summer doesn’t teach us that people hate AI. It teaches us that people hate not being asked, and that lesson will catch up with every organisation that rolls out technology over the heads of its people, sooner or later.

Your employees are already using AI. Have they been allowed to have a say in how?

The source

The article was published in the Wall Street Journal on 15 August 2026 and sits behind a paywall: wsj.com/tech/ai/the-summer-that-america-became-a-nation-of-luddites