They Made Technology Scary and Taught Us That It's Innocent, Friendly, Even "Social"
Technology used to be "offline". What does that mean? Well, in simple terms, if you or I used some gadget it was not connected to anything. It was not exchanging messages with some other appliance in the house, some distant person you or I knew and - heck! - it never contacted its own manufacturer either.
We're nowadays being told - even lectured or swayed by peer shaming tactics - that in order to get work done or to find work or to do useful things we must interact with the entire world instead of focusing on the task at hand. Compare the act of reading a book (at home, at the beach, even at the train) to scrolling up and down some "Facebook wall". Are we better off with the latter? Are we going to learn more? What is the value of the material there?
To make matters more spooky, a lot of today's devices, modern so-called "apps" and actively-encouraged "fashionable" pastime habits are designed to occupy the mind and influence the behaviour of the so-called "users", who would be better described as "subjects".
There's nothing inherently innocent, benign, neutral or banal about the typical "Smart" gadget one purchases at the store these days. They're preconfigured and designed not to enable and/or emancipate the buyer. They're like impending land mines with plastic, glass, and metal in them. Some are designed so sloppily that they can literally explode at any time because they require massive and powerful batteries (staying connected all day long and spewing out messages to surveillance companies means those devices can barely remain powered on - sans charging - with a battery of 1990s standards).
Rejection of all this "apps" and "gadgets" and "Smart" (whatever that means!) status quo isn't a rejection of society*. It's rational recognition that something is wrong and one is unwilling to participate in it for perfectly valid reasons. Preposterous ridicule of people who "opt out" is sometimes an interjection of envy. Addicts wish they could get off the wagon. They refuse to believe that's even possible. █
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* Companies like GAFAM aren't "society" and aren't social. They're a force working against society, looking for a way to "monetise" their interference against societies worldwide.