The “American Century” has been built on high technology, whether in images of material progress, technological fixes for problems of the environment, health, technology itself or the volatility of tech stocks and e-commerce at the turn of the millennium. Nonetheless, technology has also met with resistance and rejection.

Motivated by values of a simpler life, for example, groups as diverse as hippies and the Amish have publicly rejected some technologies; extreme survivalists have also sought to escape dependency on technology and its global connections. More often, resistance seems embodied in everyday ignorance of how technology works: standard American humor about people’s inability to control a computer, VCR or electronic device. This is sometimes contrasted with the seemingly more comprehensible and remediable automobiles and machines of the 1950s, which evoked their own technological specters at the time. Resistance also pits images of high tech fashion and design against history and comfort, or highlights relations of gender and technology (where men are expected to be fixers) and differences of age, as generations raised on computers and video games replace skills valued by their elders.