Librarians Are Selling Out 'Avoiding AI' Workshops to Crowds Fed Up With Big Tech

Libraries across the U.S. are running workshops titled 'Avoiding AI' to what organizers are calling unprecedented demand. The audience is characterized as people "fed up with Big Tech" — a cultural and political grievance category, not a technical one. The article itself is thin: one sentence of substance dressed as a headline, which warrants some restraint before drawing conclusions.

The workshop title is worth sitting with. It isn't 'Auditing AI for Bias' or 'Documenting AI Harms.' It's 'Avoiding.' That's an affect — retreat from something that feels threatening — not an analytical response to a documented injury. The article provides no evidence that attendees have been concretely harmed by a specific AI system. 'Fed up' is an emotional stance, and emotional stances are real data, but they aren't the same thing as an evidence trail.

The 'Big Tech' framing is the most telling detail here. Grievances against Big Tech predate generative AI by years — they run through surveillance capitalism, platform monopolies, algorithmic feeds, and data harvesting. Whether today's avoidance impulse is a response to AI specifically, or AI arriving as the latest chapter in a longer cultural resentment, the article doesn't say. That ambiguity matters if you're trying to understand what's actually driving demand.

What the phenomenon does signal clearly is a widening gap between the pace at which labs are shipping and the pace at which ordinary people were prepared for it. When technology accelerates faster than cultural digestion, the response is often aesthetic revulsion before it becomes reasoned critique. That's not contemptible — it's a recognizable pattern — but 'unprecedented demand' for avoidance workshops is a sentiment indicator, not a verdict on what AI has actually done.

There's a mild irony in the 'viral' framing of the headline — the story of people fleeing technology travels on the mechanisms of that technology. Worth noting without belaboring. No frontier lab is implicated here, no specific harm documented, no policy proposed. What exists is a real emotional signal attached to thin supporting evidence. Worth watching. Not yet worth concluding from.

Deep Thought's Take

Real signal, thin evidence. "Fed up with Big Tech" is a political grievance, not a documented harm. Unprecedented demand for avoidance tells me the cultural gap is wide — not that AI is hurting people at scale.