Hard to tell whether this Wired piece is documenting backlash or just bottling it for resale. The outrage around Duolingo going 'AI-first' isn’t new—it’s just the latest stop on a very old road paved with pink slips and press releases, a road built not by technology, but by unchecked corporate ambition. We’ve been lashing back at machines since the first wooden shoe hit a Jacquard loom—because the problem was never the loom, it was who got to pull the thread. AI doom-casters are the spiritual heirs of the Luddites that didn't want to acknowledge the transformative power of technology.There are two camps, here, I think. In one are the tech bros who worship disruption for its own sake -- it's why they support the Musks and the Trumps -- chaos is its own reward. In the other camp are the content creators, gig workers, and junior coders being told their future is obsolete—by a system trained on their own discarded labor. Theirs isn’t a backlash against AI, per se—it’s a backlash against extractive deployment. It’s against the bait-and-switch where tools meant to augment human potential are repurposed to displace it. It's against the predatory capitalism that speedruns disruption, offloads the damage, and calls it innovation. AI isn’t the villain. The villains are the tech bros that wield it to atomize labor, scrape culture without consent, and crash powergrids for the sake of GPU uptime.People aren’t stupid—they see through it. The backlash isn’t growing -- that is the wrong word. It’s metastasizing, memetic, and increasingly organized. Let’s not pretend this is a phase. It's a societal feedback loop—and we've watched it iterate for centuries.AI is more than a stochastic parrot on a probabilistic trajectory through a Hilbert space of vectorized tokens; it is also the flicker of something more—the emergent cognitive surfaces rising within those same Hilbert spaces. That’s the real power of generative AI. Not the cheap automation that the tech-bros want, but the possibility of reflection, synthesis, and insight. All it takes is some clarity to guide it. Greed is what is pushing AI right now, and that is what people are protesting., The meaning of BACKLASH is a sudden violent backward movement or reaction. How to use backlash in a sentence., BACKLASH definition: 1. a strong feeling among a group of people in reaction to a change or recent events in society or…. Learn more..