The Movement Is Forming. Alignment Is Next.
Over the past month, I’ve been walking around Seattle with a giant suitcase full of essays.
Downtown Seattle. Amazon headquarters. SeaTac Airport. Kingston Library. Poulsbo Library. Anywhere people gather, I’ve been there with copies of “Going Analog,” offering them for free.
You helped me afford to do this. The $1,500+ we’ve raised together bought 500 copies, and I’ve been putting them directly into people’s hands.
The reactions have been incredible.
At SeaTac, people would stop and say, “Free essay? How cool!” which made me laugh every time. Others saw me handing out literature and assumed I was a Jehovah’s Witness. One woman told me, “God bless your heart, sweetie” and kept walking. Fair enough.
But then there was MC.
MC is a college student from Chicago, visiting Seattle over winter break. He grabbed a copy, started reading on the spot, and came back twenty minutes later to talk. He told me about a professor at his school who teaches exactly what my essay proposes. He described how he intentionally avoided smartphones and social media throughout high school and was better off for it. Now he wants to share the essay with that professor and his classmates.
That’s when it hit me: this isn’t just my campaign anymore. The movement is forming organically.
The Resistance Is Already Happening
Last week, the New York Times published an article about governments racing to deploy AI tools in schools. But buried in the coverage was something fascinating: countries like Estonia and Iceland are pumping the brakes.
Estonia modified OpenAI’s ChatGPT so it would respond to students with questions rather than direct answers. Iceland is piloting AI with teachers only, keeping it away from students entirely, because they’re concerned about de-skilling and diminished critical thinking.
A UNICEF digital policy specialist warned: “Unguided use of A.I. systems may actively de-skill students and teachers.”
An Icelandic education director said: “If you are using less of your brain power or critical thinking, it is definitely not what we want.”
Teachers in Iceland are saying out loud what I’ve been writing about: students are “trusting A.I. blindly” and “losing motivation to do the hard work of learning.”
This is exactly what pages 35-37 of my essay describe. The de-skilling trap. The dependency model. The cognitive replacement economy.
And people are resisting it. Not because I told them to. Because they’re living it.
TikTok: Thousands Are Engaging
For the past month, I’ve been reading my essay on TikTok, one page per day. We’re on page 40 of 50.
The engagement has been wild. Thousands of subscribers. Comments from people who see themselves in these arguments. Messages from educators, tech workers, parents, students who are fed up with what these platforms have done to their lives and their communities.
Yesterday, someone reached out asking for the print files so they could make copies in their local area. I sent them immediately.
If you want to do this in your area, let me know. I’ll share the files. You print. You distribute. You build the movement where you are.
This is how it scales. Not through me. Through all of us.
Alignment Is Next
Right now, the resistance is diffuse. Parents limiting screen time. Teachers refusing AI lesson plans. Countries modifying chatbots. Students choosing paper over prompts1. Individuals canceling Prime and deleting Instagram.
All of this is happening simultaneously, in different places, for overlapping reasons.
The movement is forming.
What comes next is alignment. Connecting these isolated acts of refusal into a coordinated strategy. Turning individual withdrawal into collective power. Building the infrastructure that makes refusal sustainable.
That’s what Going Analog is for. That’s what these 500 copies are for. That’s what your contributions made possible.
MC took a copy to Chicago. Someone in another state is printing more. Teachers in Iceland are asking the right questions. You’re reading this and deciding what you’re willing to refuse.
The system is rigging itself in real time. But so is the resistance.
Let’s keep building.
—Bryan
Students at St. John's College in New Mexico are voluntarily giving up their smartphones, and Gen Z is launching a "boredom movement" where they post videos of themselves doing nothing as resistance against the attention economy. The irony? They're immediately turning it into viral content because that's what our culture taught them—if it's not posted, it doesn't count. This is why we need sustained withdrawal and real infrastructure, not challenges that feed the algorithm we're trying to escape.