Nick Potkalitsky writes: “If 2023 was the year of artificial intelligence’s awakening and 2024 was the year of frantic adoption, then 2025 was the year the backlash crystallized into something real. And 2026 is shaping up to be the year when that backlash becomes a political force. The waning of techno-futurism is not the arrival of techno-pessimism. It is something more interesting and more difficult: the slow, uneven emergence of a critical posture, one that refuses both uncritical adoption and reflexive rejection in favor of harder questions about what this technology actually does, who it serves, and what it costs.”