(Remarks as prepared for delivery September 30 at the 2026 NC Digital Opportunity Gathering: Collaborating for the Future)

Good afternoon. It has been an incredible day listening to your work. Congratulations to the organizers for putting together such a strong gathering. This will sound like shameless pandering, but I have a real soft spot for North Carolina. You have the best people. I consider myself fortunate to work with some of them, including our colleague Zoë Walker. 

I’ll do my best to close the gathering at the same high standard, although that won’t be easy.

I want to start with something I’ve been grappling with myself.

Our goal at Benton is universal, meaningful connectivity. Under our logo, we say that broadband builds opportunities and strengthens communities.

But we haven’t been living under a rock. We know technology does not always build opportunity or strengthen communities. And right now, a real bleakness surrounds technology and what it is doing to us—or might do to us.

If you work in digital inclusion, that can give you pause. What exactly are we working to include people in?

Writing this talk became an exercise in thinking through that question. And I hope some of that reflection will be useful to you.

So: What would the Luddites make of digital opportunity?

Who Were the Luddites?

When I first encountered the word Luddite, I understood it as a dismissive sneer. A Luddite was someone who was afraid of technology, incompetent with it, or simply opposed to progress.

Historians of technology have spent a lot of time trying to correct that story. More recently, Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine has brought a version of that history to a broader audience.

So who were the Luddites?

They were part of a labor movement that emerged in the textile districts of central and northern England in the early nineteenth century. Many were skilled workers—craftsmen and artisans with considerable technical expertise in textile production.

As industrialization changed that production process, new machinery allowed factory owners to reorganize work, reduce their reliance on skilled labor, and put downward pressure on wages and working conditions.

The Luddites resisted.

They organized. They petitioned. They protested. And, eventually, in hundreds of incidents, they destroyed industrial machinery.

And that became the enduring image by which they’re remembered: The Machine Breakers.

The British government responded brutally. Parliament made some forms of machine breaking a capital offense. Luddites were executed; others were transported to penal colonies. The movement was defeated.

And because history is written by the victors, what remained was the caricature. Luddite eventually became a synonym for someone who simply hates new technology.

But that misses what makes them interesting.

The Luddites were not ignorant of these machines. In many cases, they understood the technology intimately. Their objection was to how the machines were deployed: to change the terms of their work, undermine their bargaining power, reduce their wages, and threaten the dignity and independence that came with their craft.

They were not saying:  “We don't want the machines.”

They were saying:  “Not on these terms.”

That is a very different proposition.

This context reframes Luddite history, changing it from a story about resisting technological progress into a cautionary tale about who controls the terms.

And that, I think, is where the Luddites start to have something interesting to say to those of us who work to create digital opportunity.

Technological Imaginaries

We understand that technology is material. The internet is fiber and chips and servers and routers and enormous data centers. Those things are real. They have physical properties and technical constraints.

But technology is also discursive.

Technologies come surrounded by ideas about what they are, what they're for, what they will make possible—and what kind of future they might create.

Sheila Jasanoff has a useful concept for thinking about this. She coined the term “sociotechnical imaginaries”  to mean “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures.”

There's a lot packed into that definition. But two things are especially useful for me.

First, these aren't airy science-fiction fantasies about flying cars. They are visions of a desirable future that acquire a constituency. People buy into them. Institutions organize around them.

And that's how they become consequential. They can orient research, investment and public policy—and ultimately influence what gets built.
A sociotechnical imaginary can help organize the material world around a vision of the future.

But there's a second point, one that comes through in Jasanoff's work and in the work of historians like Fred Turner:

These visions come from somewhere.

Particular people produce them in particular places, in particular places, at particular moments, with particular ideas about how society should work.

And you can see both of those things very clearly in one particularly powerful technological imaginary: the internet of the 1990s.

In the Bay Area, the countercultural ethos of the 60s became intertwined with the emerging technology industry and Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial capitalism.
 

Wired helped consolidate that worldview: digital technology, individual freedom, decentralized networks, and entrepreneurial capitalism weren't competing ideas. They were mutually reinforcing parts of the same future.

And that produced an extraordinarily powerful vision of what the internet would be. Liberating. Democratizing. 

The Many Manifestos of Mark Zuckerberg

Think about how long that imaginary endured. I like to see it through the many manifestos of Mark Zuckerberg.

In 2012, he wrote a letter to investors as Facebook prepared to go public. This is the letter where he lays out “The Hacker Way”—including “move fast and break things.” His social network is changing the world by bringing people together—and that connectivity will transform society.

In 2017, his ambition expands dramatically. Facebook becomes the “social infrastructure” for constructing a global community. He wears a suit! “This is serious, people.”

This year, Zuckerberg publishes another manifesto, this time about personal superintelligence: AI putting extraordinary new capabilities in individuals' hands. AI will help people achieve their goals, create what they want to create, experience the world differently, and become the people they want to be. Zuckerberg explicitly contrasts that vision with one in which AI primarily automates work and humanity lives off its output. His sales pitch is still individual agency.

The technology is completely different. The language has evolved. There is more acknowledgment of risk and privacy. But the underlying imaginary is remarkably durable: give individuals powerful new technologies, empower them, and human flourishing will follow.

Technology as the solution. Technology as liberation.

And for much of the internet's history, that was an extraordinarily powerful story.

Techlash Comes to UNC

People are onto it now. The vibe shift is real.

The proposition that technological innovation is synonymous with social progress doesn't ring quite as true anymore.

Earlier this month, some of the most powerful people in technology gathered at UNC-Chapel Hill for the G20 Innovation Ministerial. Inside were government officials and people like Sam Altman and Jensen Huang, talking about AI, innovation, economic growth, and the enormous possibilities of emerging technologies.

Outside, hundreds of students and community members protested. They raised concerns about jobs. Surveillance. Data centers and their demands on energy and water. The environment. Corporate power. The speed with which AI is being introduced into their lives.

Call them Luddites. Call it a techlash. Either way, what you're seeing is a loss of confidence in the particular technological future we've been offered. 

Embedded in this clash about AI is something bigger about how we understand technology. 

There is technological determinism. The printing press gives us the Reformation. The automobile gives us the suburbs. Twitter ushers in the Arab Spring. AI takes all our jobs. Technology is the actor. Technology has main-character energy, you might say.

Another tempting answer is instrumentalism. Technology is just a tool. A hammer can build a house or break a window. AI can create bioweapons or cure cancer. It’s what WE do with it.

There's truth in both. But neither is quite enough. Technology really does change the possibilities available to us. And human beings really do make choices about how technologies are used.

The historian of technology Melvin Kranzberg put it better:

“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

Technology isn't neutral because it interacts with the society that builds and uses it. The consequences depend on institutions, values, circumstances, design choices, and power.

We shape our technologies. And our technologies, in turn, shape us.

Perhaps that gives us an inkling of what those of us who work in digital opportunity need to do. Our work is built around participation—making sure everyone has the connection, the devices, the skills, and the opportunities necessary to participate in a technological society.

But maybe we also need to think harder about what kind of technological society we're asking people to participate in.

More Things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio...

(...than are dreamt of in your philosophy.)

That can be surprisingly hard to do. The Silicon Valley imaginary is so familiar that it feels inevitable.

But we've already established that it wasn't inevitable.

It was constructed.

So what else have people constructed?

Two examples tend to get trotted out whenever people have this conversation.

The first is Project Cybersyn in Chile in the early 1970s.

Under Salvador Allende, Chile tried to use a network of computers, telex machines, and cybernetic ideas to help manage its nationalized industries.

And the imaginary here was profoundly different.

The network wasn't imagined primarily as a marketplace or a tool for individual consumers. The network was imagined as infrastructure for collective economic coordination—a way to use information and computation to organize a different kind of economy.

Then there is NSFNET.

The National Science Foundation built a network to connect researchers around the country to federally supported supercomputing centers. NSFNET grew into a backbone of the early internet.

The network's purpose was shared knowledge and scientific collaboration: public resources building infrastructure so researchers and universities could connect, share scarce computing resources, and produce knowledge together. A very different organizing purpose from the commercial internet we live with now.

But I can't stand here in North Carolina talking about alternative technological imaginaries without mentioning this one.

Research Triangle Park.

In the 1950s, North Carolina faced an economic future people here didn't particularly want. So people imagined a different one.

They imagined a place organized around research and science, drawing on Duke, UNC and NC State, bringing government, universities, and private industry together to create a different kind of regional economy.

And importantly, the original aspiration wasn't to “create unicorns.” The intent was to create knowledge-based employment, keep educated North Carolinians in the state, raise incomes, and improve quality of life. Scholars of regional innovation describe it as having been conceived before it existed—a deliberately planned effort involving government, universities and industry.

The Triangle story is not technology changing everything. It's people deciding what they want technology to change—and building institutions around that vision.

Cybersyn. NSFNET. Research Triangle Park.

I am not holding any of these up as the answer. They too emerged from a particular place and particular time, reflected particular interests and assumptions. But they are instructive, are they not? 

Our Challenge and Opportunity

Digital equity or opportunity is the condition in which people and communities have the capacity needed for “full participation” in society and the economy.

I believe deeply in that project. People need affordable connections. They need devices. They need skills. They need the ability to navigate a world in which more and more of life happens through technology. For most people, a genuine refusal to engage with technology is an immense, unthinkable privilege.

There’s no more going online. Online comes for you. 

But after everything I've talked about today, I think we need to ask a harder question about what “full participation” means.

Because our answer can't simply be: Fine. Technology is bad. Let's take to the woods.

For one, I don’t like the woods. I like flat whites and Japanese stationery. So what do we do?

The Luddites understood that technological change had terms. Their fight was over who would set those terms. I think what I am trying to say is—that sign from the G-20 protest that says  “We deserve a say in our AI future.” That's a digital-opportunity claim too.

I started today by asking what the Luddites would make of digital opportunity. They looked at the technological future being built around them and said, in effect:
Not on these terms.

Of course that begs the question: then which terms? 

I don’t know. I don’t have a real answer to that. (I hope you weren’t really expecting me to. Keynotes are about rhetorical questions) 

But I think that’s something we need to figure out, all of us. I think that’s the real next big challenge for those of us working on digital opportunity. 

It is bigger than making sure everyone can participate in the technological world that is being built, with or without them, for or against them. 

No, our challenge is making sure everyone has a say in the world being built, that we all get to participate in the building, and on our terms. 

Just like the Luddites would have wanted. 

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Dr. Revati Prasad is the Executive Director of the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that all people in the U.S. have access to competitive, High-Performance Broadband regardless of where they live or who they are. We believe communication policy - rooted in the values of access, equity, and diversity - has the power to deliver new opportunities and strengthen communities.

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