About & Contribution Details

This site is created and operated by Dylan Orchard - I'm a PhD Researcher at King's College London and my area of focus is Everyday Resistance to AI. While my academic work is, well, academic, I'm also deeply interested on a more general level in how minor forms of resistance can help enable individual and communal agency and drive wider change.

If you want to see something up on this site - a news story, example of resistance, comment piece, practical guide - then feel free to drop me a line here. I'm happy to consider everything but obviously not everything will fit.

Should go without saying but just in case - nothing on this site is created using Generative AI, nothing on it ever will be.

There have always been options in how we react to power, how we find spaces and instances to resist it and the reaction to techno-inevitability is no different. It's a broad battle field, some people de-technologise completely as far as they can, others try to curate and reject those implementations of it that they find most odious, others still try to revive the Luddite memory and smash the machines that are imposed on us. There are endless debates to be had on the merits and failures of every approach, this site isn't for that, it's to encourage us all to start thinking about what tactics will fit us, our context and our hope for a future reclaimed from the fetishes, fantasies and failures of capitalism driven technologies that try to deny us the right to consider alternatives, never mind enact them.

This isn't a big project, I'm not looking to do everything, but I'll share what I come across and I'm more than happy to take contributions from other people if they're interested.

For clarity on what the focus is though here are a few key points driving this site and minor project:

Stay safe. I won't be publishing any resistance tactics that bring undue exposure to those practicing them. It's important to share, important to help inspire and inform other people but if there's something you do in a potentially sensitive area of life - at work or under the attentions of the state for example, things which might place people at risk if they're highlighted - there's no obligation to share. And I certainly won't encourage it. Where that boundary lays is on ongoing discussion.
Grifters need not apply. Adding another product, another technological imposition or another layer of hype isn't useful, no matter how great you imagine your startup effort may be. If your fix to something like AI extractivism or dataveillance involves more of either then it wouldn't fit here.
Different contexts, different forms. Tactics of resistance are by necessity agile. Not every suggestion will work for every person, some will be more tech focused, others more grounded in the world - there are very few, if any, universal fixes.
It's resistance, dummy. I've very little interest in negotiations with power. I know policy and lobbying towards government and big tech appeal to some people but this isn't the venue for that. The starting point here is that broken systems produce broken outcomes.

Hopefully this could become a useful resource for those interested and if not that a useful resource for me to chart the manifestations of tech resistance. This is an independent project by me, it has no affiliations, no funding and no long term plan - hopefully it's a starting point but only time will tell.